Today I had the chance to sit with Valentin Yonchev and Matt Takane from the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs. Wanting to benefit from their vast experience of building cross-functional teams, I asked them a question: How to form a team?
This episode of the podcast is their answers to that question. You will find a lot of practical things to apply in your context whether you need to assemble a group of people only for a meeting, for a short engagement, or longer term.
During the discussion, Matt mentioned the Open Practice Library as a place to find the practices. We also used “pulling the Andon cord,” without really defining what it was, you can find out more details here.
Where to listen:
Le Podcast – Season Two
- The Gift of Play with Portia Tung
- Delivering Delight with Avi Liran
- Build a Product with Gojko Adzic
- Hiring and Diversity with Lucinda Duncalfe
- Leadership and Teamwork with Jeremy Brown
- Community and Leadership with Scott Amenta
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
- Can Software Teams learn from Sporting Teams?
- Agile and Open Innovation with Mary Provinciatto
- Radical Focus with Christina Wodtke
- Human-Centric Agility Coaching
- The Job of an Open Leader – Preethi Thomas
Le Podcast – Season One
- Grow your Software Engineering Career with Emilien
- Jason’s Thirteen Rules of a Team
- All about OKRs with Bart
- Do you want 10x Engineers?
- The Anatomy of Peace
- Psychological Safety
- When your team is distributed
- Changing Your Team with John Poelstra
- Coming to terms with terms – Michael DeLanzo
- How (not) to provide feedback – John Poelstra
- How to deal with your stars – Frank Jansen
- Do cultural differences influence the adoption of agile?
- How to create great goals?
- Celebrating the audiobook with Michael Reid
- How to form a team?
Comments
One response to “How to form a team?”
Great podcast, thank you Alexis.
Here’s 7 things I learned:
1. Ask ‘Why are we forming a team?” to understand your outcome.
2. Create a ‘Social Contract’ (and update it when necessary) so the team can hold itself accountable.
3. Use ‘mood of the room’ and ‘team sentiment’ as mechanisms to monitor ‘health’ of the team.
4. The subtle use of self organisation e.g. going out for a team picnic.
5. Using a team name as a banner or identity for the team.
6. Stopping the team when something’s not right and being honest about it.
7. A team succeeds or fails as a team, there are no individual successes or failures.