At one of my companies we were working through the challenges of building a startup, all of us on one team, but in another sense each of us were on an island. We were bound together by a shared vision of what we could accomplish but each team was oriented around what was best for them locally. We hadn’t built a strong shared sense of what we were trying to do together, but in spite of that the teams were able to come together on their own local priorities and make headway.
This is an example of what I call “Tribal Teams”. The teams each locally have a sense of what they want to do, but they aren’t connected as much to the overall goal of the company. This sort of arrangement can lead to pain and with a little work it can be alleviated by producing a more effective and engaged organization. The pain here is caused by lack of clarity, alignment and empathy for each other.
When trying to improve how a team operates, there are a few basics I like to focus on:
The state of the team
Stakeholder voice + team objective
Team culture
Landscape
I’ll touch on each of these critical components as we explore how to shift from tribal teams that aren’t effective to tribal teams that are high functioning.
The state of the team
Creating a common understanding of the state of the team is a critical piece of the team orienting itself in the world. If this isn’t clear and shared, then it is going to be very difficult for the team to be properly seen or to engage in high quality conversations around what to do as the group moves forward. A few tools which I have found to be helpful here are retrospectives, post-mortems, engineering metrics and open and honest 1:1s with the team. After doing the discovery it’s important to reflect back on the team what has been gathered to make sure there is a shared understanding, or for areas where there isn’t that there is a discussion around the various contentious points to make sure they are acknowledged and understood by the group. In this process the team should get a clear readout on how they are performing. What has been their high points and where have there been some misses. This should be surfaced by the team and by stakeholders and management.
Stakeholder voice + team objective
To build a great team, it needs to know who or what it is serving. Making sure that stakeholders are engaged and have an open dialog with the team goes a long to giving feedback to what might be working well for the team. Work with the team to make it explicit who the stakeholders are and set up recurring checkpoints to ensure that they have a voice at the table and feedback is getting to the team. I strongly encourage that this isn’t a status meeting talking about where things are, instead focus on getting a more visceral sense of how the stakeholders are doing. What are their longer term objectives? What has and hasn’t been working? What is something that the team might see that the stakeholders don’t? Building a strong partnership here will significantly impact the ability for the team to be effective.
Paired with investing in the relationship with stakeholders, you also need to make sure the team objective is crystal clear. I encourage setting this up very publicly with feedback from stakeholders, management and other teams. This serves as the team’s north star and should be widely understood and allow the appropriate prioritization and resourcing decisions. Without a clear team objective it will be difficult for there to be a shared understanding of what the team is trying to accomplish and how it might go about doing that.
Team culture
The underlying rituals and behaviors of a team helps to establish what the values and how they choose to operate. Making these explicit reduces the amount of guessing the team needs to do. Does the team do retros? How does the team celebrate? How does the team track progress on it’s projects? Make these things clear and write them down. What might seem obvious isn’t obvious to everyone and it will help establish expectations and also make it easier for the team to change its practices if they aren’t serving it well.
Landscape
With multiple teams trying to work together, there is a need for people to understand how the overall group is doing and what role each team plays in that. If this doesn’t happen teams end up being effective in their area but the gaps between teams can become wider and they become less effective as an overall organization. To combat this, it is critical for the teams to share how they are doing with the wider team and for the overall health of the engineering org to be talked about as well. I prefer to do this with all hands meetings and also mix in the state of the business with the overall engineering strategy. This connects together the work individual engineers are doing to the product development org and to the company strategy. Keeping this link alive and understood enables people to make better decisions in their day to day work. Find ways to reinforce this and it will also help with finding and handling disconnects between the teams and org fairly rapidly.
By implementing and addressing these points you should have a solid foundation for improving how tribal teams work together and create a stronger more unified organization.