The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming)
Heidi Helfand, author of Dynamic Reteaming, discusses how to effectively manage team reorganizations and change, emphasizing transparency and employee involvement. She shares five reteaming patterns, anti-patterns to avoid, and strategies to reduce attrition and stagnation.
Deep Dive Analysis
14 Topic Outline
Heidi's Background and Reteaming Fascination
Transparency and Employee Involvement in Reorgs
The RIDE Framework for Decision-Making Clarity
Overview of the Five Reteaming Patterns
Isolation Pattern: Catalyzing Innovation and Emergencies
Strategies for Successful Isolated Teams
One-by-One Pattern: Onboarding and Belonging
Grow and Split Pattern: Signals and Challenges
Merging Pattern: Consolidation and Shared History
Switching Pattern: Learning, Fulfillment, and Redundancy
Anti-Patterns to Avoid in Reteaming
Embracing Inevitable Change and Growth
Secrets to Becoming a Better Listener
Creating Joy and Community through Hack Days
8 Key Concepts
Reteaming
Reteaming describes the dynamic process of how teams and organizational structures change, encompassing five distinct patterns. It offers a more fluid and potentially bottom-up perspective compared to traditional 'reorgs,' aiming to adapt to growth or shrinkage while fostering innovation and learning.
Whiteboard Reteaming
This is a transparent method for organizational change where leaders visualize proposed future team structures on whiteboards, including employee names and open roles. It allows employees to provide input, identify potential issues, and express interest in new opportunities, fostering involvement rather than secrecy.
RIDE Framework
A framework for clarifying decision-making roles during organizational changes, standing for Request, Input, Decider, and Execute. It helps ensure everyone understands who is initiating the change, who provides input, who makes the final decision, and who is responsible for implementation.
Isolation Pattern (Beneficial Silo)
A reteaming pattern where a small, new team is set apart from the main organization, often physically, and granted process freedom. This beneficial silo is protected from distractions to rapidly innovate, catalyze new product lines, or effectively address emergencies without being bogged down by existing processes.
Panarchy
A concept that describes how changes occur at various levels within an organization—from individuals and teams to departments and the entire company. It suggests that organizational evolution is a continuous cycle of growth, consolidation, and renewal, rather than a static state.
Percentage Anti-Pattern
A common mistake in reteaming where individuals are allocated to multiple projects with specific percentage commitments. This approach often leads to significant context switching, multitasking difficulties, and reduced efficiency, making it hard for people to focus and deliver effectively.
Spreading High Performers Anti-Pattern
The ineffective strategy of distributing members of a high-performing team across other teams with the expectation that their success will automatically transfer. This often backfires by destroying the original team's unique chemistry and dynamic without necessarily improving the performance of the recipient teams.
Co-Active Coaching Listening Levels
A framework for developing active listening skills, distinguishing three levels: Level 1 (Internal) is self-focused, Level 2 (Focused) is directed entirely at the speaker, and Level 3 (Global/Environmental) involves awareness of the broader context, non-verbal cues, and the overall 'vibe' of the interaction.
8 Questions Answered
Embracing reteaming, or dynamic team changes, can lead to significant career opportunities, reduce attrition, prevent stagnation, break down knowledge silos, and allow companies to adapt and innovate more effectively in fast-growing or shrinking environments.
Leaders can use 'whiteboard reteaming' to visualize proposed team structures with names and open roles, soliciting feedback from employees and allowing them to express interest in new opportunities, rather than planning changes in secret.
To succeed, isolate the team physically, grant them process freedom, ensure they report directly to a decision-maker who protects them from distractions, and foster shared ownership and redundancy in other teams to facilitate transitions.
Signals that a team might benefit from splitting include meetings taking longer, difficulty in making decisions due to increased size (e.g., 13 people vs. 5), and work becoming divergent where members are no longer paying attention in standups.
Merging teams can create a shared sense of history and vision by conducting an activity called 'story of our team,' where each team creates a timeline of their milestones, achievements, and significant events, sharing them with the newly merged group to foster understanding and look towards a common future.
Switching teams can provide employees with learning and development opportunities, fresh experiences, and renewed fulfillment, effectively acting as a 'new job' within the same company, while also building knowledge redundancy and fault tolerance across the organization.
Common anti-patterns include the 'percentage anti-pattern' (allocating people to multiple projects with percentages), 'poof, you're gone' (sudden, uncommunicated departures or arrivals), and 'spreading high performers' (distributing top performers across teams, which often destroys the original team's chemistry without improving others).
Becoming a better listener involves building it as a muscle, focusing attention outward on the other person (Level 2 listening), being aware of the global environment (Level 3 listening), and noticing non-verbal cues like body language or sudden physical reactions.
21 Actionable Insights
1. Embrace Natural Team Evolution
In fast-growing or shrinking companies, accept that teams will naturally morph and change. Instead of trying to maintain static team structures, embrace this evolution as it is often inevitable.
2. Prioritize the People Layer
Recognize that successful company building involves more than just product market fit; actively focus on the ‘people layer’ to create an environment where employees are delighted and included in organizational decisions.
3. Cultivate Inclusive Leadership
As a leader, reflect on the kind of environment you want to cultivate and how you want to involve your team. Strive to include employees in work decisions that impact their daily lives, recognizing their ability to solve complex problems.
4. Clarify Decisions with RIDE Framework
When undergoing change, use the RIDE framework to clearly define who is Requesting the change, who can provide Input, who is the Decider, and who will Execute the change. This brings crucial clarity to decision-making processes.
5. Visualize Reorgs for Transparency
When planning reorganizations, visualize future team structures on whiteboards and invite employees to provide input on the design. This transparency allows people to identify opportunities and discuss potential roles, fostering engagement and better outcomes.
6. Enable Open Self-Selection Reteaming
For strategic changes, allow teams to pitch their focus areas and enable employees to self-select into teams based on interest. This open approach provides choice, leading to greater fulfillment and engagement, as people are often delighted by unexpected opportunities.
7. Timebox Reteaming Discussions
When involving teams in reorg planning, timebox the discussions to be shorter rather than longer. This prevents prolonged deliberation and distraction, ensuring the process proceeds expediently.
8. Isolate Teams for Innovation
To catalyze new products or address emergencies, create an ‘isolated’ team in a separate area and grant them process freedom. Crucially, a senior leader must protect this team from distractions and bureaucracy, ensuring they report to someone with clear decision-making authority.
9. Build Redundancy for Team Mobility
Implement practices like pairing and shared ownership to build knowledge redundancy within teams. This frees individuals from being single owners of systems, making it easier for them to switch to isolated innovation teams or other roles without creating knowledge silos.
10. Encourage Team Switching for Growth
Promote team switching to foster learning, development, and fulfillment, allowing employees to experience new systems or colleagues. This practice can refresh individuals, extend their tenure, and build critical knowledge redundancy and fault tolerance across the company.
11. Foster Belonging for New Hires
For one-by-one changes (new hires), help them build a sense of belonging by pairing them with someone on their first day and encouraging them to talk about themselves. Also, inform existing employees about new joiners and coach them through the change, especially if new leaders are brought in.
12. Recognize Grow-and-Split Signals
Identify signals like longer meetings, harder decision-making, and divergent work as indicators that a team may benefit from splitting. Normalize the idea that teams can provide input into their future structures and decide to split for greater effectiveness.
13. Create Shared History for Merging Teams
When merging teams, facilitate a ‘story of our team’ activity where each team creates a timeline of their milestones and achievements. Sharing these histories helps build a shared sense of identity, fosters mutual learning, and aligns the newly merged entity towards a common future vision.
14. Don’t Disperse High-Performing Teams
Resist the temptation to dismantle high-performing teams by spreading their members across other groups. This anti-pattern often destroys the unique chemistry and energy that contributes to their success, rather than replicating it elsewhere.
15. Avoid Percentage Resource Allocation
Do not assign individuals to multiple projects with percentage allocations, as this approach is ineffective. Multitasking across many efforts leads to context switching and makes it difficult for people to focus and deliver effectively.
16. Communicate All Team Changes
Avoid sudden, unannounced team changes where people unexpectedly join or leave without prior communication. Lack of transparency around personnel changes is an anti-pattern that can cause confusion and anxiety.
17. Appreciate Current Team Dynamics
Recognize that team dynamics and company stages are constantly evolving, and nothing lasts forever. Cultivate gratitude and appreciate positive team experiences while they happen, as change is an inevitable part of organizational life cycles.
18. Value Company Success & Growth
Remember that being part of a successful, growing company, even with its inherent changes, is generally a positive scenario. Appreciate the broader context of company health, as growth often necessitates change and is preferable to stagnation.
19. Practice Co-Active Listening
Develop listening as a muscle by consciously shifting from internal thoughts (level one) to fully focusing on the other person (level two). Expand to global listening (level three) by observing body language, environmental cues, and subtle physical reactions as additional sources of information.
20. Prioritize Self-Kindness
Regularly ask yourself, ‘How can I be kind to myself?’ This encourages self-care, helps manage high expectations, and reminds you that it’s okay to slow down and decompress, rather than constantly pushing yourself.
21. Organize Community-Building Hack Days
Implement regular hack days where employees can self-select into teams and work on any project they choose. This fosters cross-functional relationships and community, making future reteaming efforts smoother as colleagues are no longer strangers.
6 Key Quotes
Reteaming is hard. Reorgs are hard. You can't lump them all into one thing with, oh, it's all great all the time. No, it's not.
Heidi Helfand
If we could just build the software, deliver to the customer, get the product market fit. Hey, have we delighted them or not? If only it could be that easy. No, we have the people layer. So let's focus there too.
Heidi Helfand
Sometimes it feels like we're in a team for too long. We're tired of working with these people. We want a little variety. We want to work with that person over there. Or maybe we want to work on a new system.
Heidi Helfand
There's no perfect org structure. There's only the best idea you have at the time for what the org could be.
Lenny Rachitsky
Listening is a muscle to build and to always work on. You got to put your attention out, focus on the other person.
Heidi Helfand
It's always great to be at a successful company, Heidi.
John Walker
4 Protocols
Whiteboard Reteaming
Heidi Helfand (inspired by Christian Linwall at Spotify)- Visualize the future team structure on whiteboards.
- Include everyone's names, team names, team missions, and open hiring slots.
- Invite people to look at the design and give feedback.
- Allow employees to identify mistakes and suggest improvements (e.g., 'this team might be better over here').
- Provide opportunities for employees to express interest in new roles or teams.
Successful Isolated Team (Startup within a Company)
Heidi Helfand- Isolate the team physically (e.g., different area, garage).
- Communicate to other people not to disturb this team, with support from a leader.
- Ensure a senior leader sponsors and protects the team from distractions.
- Build redundancy and shared ownership in other teams to free up individuals for such opportunities.
- Grant the isolated team process freedom to work differently (e.g., faster iteration loops).
- Ensure the team reports to a decision-maker with clear authority to prevent reversals or bureaucratic delays.
Story of Our Team
Heidi Helfand- Each team stands in order of when they joined their team.
- Create a timeline with milestones: when people joined, when people left, significant events, and proud creations.
- Share these timelines and stories with the newly merged team.
- Discuss learnings and foster a shared sense of history.
- Look out to the future together to establish a shared vision.
Building Better Listening Skills
Heidi Helfand (based on Co-Active Coaching)- Practice Level 1 (Internal) Listening: Be aware of self-talk and redirect focus outward.
- Practice Level 2 (Focused) Listening: Put full attention on the other person, anchoring towards them.
- Practice Level 3 (Global/Environmental) Listening: Pay attention to the broader environment, vibe, and non-verbal cues (e.g., body language, facial expressions).
- Notice and inquire about non-verbal signals (e.g., a sudden pain gesture or change in demeanor).