Comfortable Teams

Sometimes it is too comfortable to have a team.

A lot of tech organisations get built around static teams that do the same thing day-in and day-out. Over time these teams can end up building invisible walls around themselves, which leads to ineffective tech departments that have a surprising number of people and are producing surprisingly little.

As leaders, we promote these problems, unintentionally, by thinking that once the static team structures are decided we’ve addressed most of the issues.

What we get instead is:

• You build it you run it – increases focus on products or services that just don’t matter anymore.
• Each team decides the approach right for them – produces an “us versus them” mentality.
• Every team has their own OKR or KPI – reduces the willingness to collaborate across boundaries because it might endanger their metrics

None of these side effects has to happen. But it does take a different, more collaborative approach to build and run teams as well as to choose and communicate goals.