Keep Teams Together

Teams need time to learn how to work together. Many technical practices and interpersonal practices help teams learn how to work together. And this learning takes time.

People learn together by working together. Don’t waste time on fake team-building activities such as anything physical. Those activities might be fun for some people, but they don’t help people learn how to work together at work.

You might be familiar with Bruce Tuckman’s forming–storming–norming–performing model of group development from Stages of Small-Group Development Revisited [TJ77] and illustrated by the following diagram.

The team forms, whether the members select each other or someone decides they should work together. They are polite to each other and attempt to work together.

As they try to work together, they storm. One person doesn’t like the way another person makes decisions. Or they disagree on the outcome. Whatever the issue, the team members learn how to work together.

After a while, they start to normalize. When developers work together, they often decide on a particular way of commenting code or how long a class or routine of some sort should be. When testers work together, they often decide how much to automate when. When the entire team works together, it learns who makes which kinds of mistakes—and how to look for those problems. The team learns who must have the last word. The team learns how to provide each other feedback and support.

Performing is where team members can learn to excel as a team. The team can be in flow together. They—almost instinctively—know who will react in which way. They can manage problems as a team, regardless of the kind of problems they have.

You want your teams to at least get to norming, and preferably to performing. It takes time for a team to learn how to norm and then perform. There is no substitute for working together on their work to move to norming and performing. That means it takes time for teams to learn how to be effective together. The more the team can work together, the faster they will norm and then perform. Your managers might be focused on utilization. See ​Managers Move from Resource-Efficiency to Flow-Efficiency Thinking​, to see how to help your managers create cross-functional feature teams.

Because teams take a while to learn to work together, keep the team together. In fact, consider making the team a product team, where the organization flows work through the team. (See ​Managers Move from Resource-Efficiency to Flow-Efficiency Thinking​, and Manage Your Project Portfolio [Rot16a] for more details.)