Heidi Helfand

 TRANSCRIPT

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:38

So Heidi, how do you define a team? You know, a lot of times people ask question like, what is it team? What is the work group or you know, just everything in between? So how do you define a team?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  00:49

Yeah, so I define a team as people that come together and they have joint work, like a shared compelling purpose, it could be as little as two people or it could be larger than that. And then there’s also this concentric notion of teams. In English, at least people might call something that might be like a work group where people are working in parallel, really, with different teams, they might call that a team. So it’s a word that’s quite ambiguous, but in general, the smallest unit is two, their thought partners doing work together. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:23

Okay. So I’ve been thinking, you know, you and I, I think you came to the Agile mean, two or three years ago now, that a keynote, and it wasn’t until recently that like, just a light bulb kind of went in my head and I thought of you and I was like, I got to bring Heidi and I want to talk to her. And really, the whole concept of reteaming and the book that you’ve wrote, is just like, it’s almost like now in the future of teams, is seems to go in that direction that you talked about. And I think I was aware of that you know, before you coming too and talking about that, like I was familiar with your work. But maybe let’s explore a little bit the evolution of teams first. How do you see, you know, how have teams evolved and where does maybe talk about what is reteaming and where does that reteaming fit into that evolution of teams?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  02:27

Sure. Let’s see. Yes, I wrote a book called dynamic reteaming, the second edition was published by O’Reilly in 2020. And yeah, so I have the basic philosophy that teams evolve and change. You know, we have this thing called time that happens and things just change just inherently. If you think about yesterday to today, and all the different things that you did, and all of the different things you were exposed to, what you had thought about, how you felt, it’s a lot of change. Change is just an inherently natural and normal thing. So a team might start and begin and they will pass through time, they’ll work on this joint work together and then maybe things will happen, maybe things will happen that are outside the control of the team and then things will change, right? We look at COVID-19, definite impact to our teams, our companies, our lives that many of us weren’t expecting and it really kind of changed maybe how some teams operated. Some teams that were always inside an office suddenly we’re all distributed and working from home. And so we had to adapt to these situations. Team change is just natural. Sometimes teams will grow bigger, team members will be added, sometimes people leave teams. And maybe sometimes this is the choice of the team, the team creates this change and other times like we talked about with COVID or it could be any kind of outside force changes the team composition. So the book is called dynamic reteaming. It talks about five different patterns that exist out in the world for how teams might change.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:22

So maybe let’s, I was actually thinking about you know, a couple of those patterns. So let’s explore some of those patterns. So what is one by one pattern in…?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  04:33

So one by one pattern is just someone might join your team or someone might leave your team. It’s as simple as that. And we might not even really notice this a lot if it’s very normal in our context. It becomes amplified if your company is going through hyper growth for example, doubling or tripling in size.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:53

And like it seems like also like you know, I’ve been talking to top leaders in the Agile industry and outside. And we’ve been like, so addicted to prescriptive frameworks to prescriptive way of doing things. One of those ways is also like, Hey, this is what your team is, the team should be stable, the team should be this, this team should be that. Again, it’s great but the reality is that it’s a lot more dynamic than that. And I think that’s kind of like, you know, I was thinking and the reality and especially the future now is our world is becoming more and more complex, that we have to use our heads a little bit more, rather than, hey, the scrum says you should have stable teams. Like the environment is a lot more dynamic than just, you know, following things blindly. And is that really the essence and the message that you wanted to send with the book or is there something else to it?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  06:02

Yeah, I think that the main message I want to send with a book that team change is inevitable, you might as well get good at it and lean into it. The book describes and has stories from companies all over the world and how they grow and change. I’m a practitioner, I’m someone that works inside and helps companies grow bigger. I’ve worked at multiple startups. As the 10th employee of a company, I left that company when there were 650 people, we had a lot of re-teaming, a lot of growing and changing. And it wasn’t just us, the people that I interviewed all over the world shared their stories. So the book really proves the point that team change is real. And it has lots of different examples of it, that fall into the five patterns. I derived the five patterns from all of these different, true real life industry stories. I’m not trying to sell a framework, I’m not trying to sell consulting services to convert a company into some different thing. This is more of an, it’s like an anthropological study. I used a format of grounded theory that I heard about from Rene Brown interview people coded for teams right about, it’s a descriptive book. And then it has tactics for it, hey, if you’re working in one of these companies, and you notice a lot of changes, and you will, you should plan for it and here are some things to do that make it easier. So like chapter 13 of the second edition has a lot of practical activities that agile coaches, engineering managers, team members can do to you know, kind of master change instead of trying to fight it. Let me grab the book, it’s over here. This is what it looks like.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  07:55

Yeah. By the way, I really like that cover.

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  07:58

Some of the things that I wrote about.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:02

I like the cover, I really. I like the first one but I like this one. I think the second cover I like better. 

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  08:09

Yeah, this is a really nice treatment and one of the partners at O’Reilly came up with the cover, and I liked it immediately, they gave me some different options and this one was just really just kind of spoke to me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:26

Yeah. Awesome. Well, congrats again. And I think it’s great and I tried to bring up the topics from your book in a lot of trainings I do and also teams that are struggling to understand this, you know that hey, especially like you said, if you’re growing or just in general, like, you know, there’s not one size fits all. So maybe coming back to the reteaming topic and like who’s responsible for to understand these patterns and reteaming? Because a lot of times we think it’s the managers. Is it really the managers or is it everyone or from your perspective who’s responsible for reteaming?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  09:07

Who’s responsible for it, I think really depends on how the companies operate. What I’ve noticed is that typically, people that make decisions about team composition have been managers, directors, VPS CTOs. However, I always encourage team members during retrospectives to reflect on their team compositions, because maybe there’s a change that they feel they would like to try as an experiment to help them become more effective. So I think it’s anyone who makes decisions about team changes. It could be people that bring in people to the company like a hiring manager, very common. You hire five people, let’s say you have 10 teams, where are these 5 people going to go? You usually have an idea before you bring the people in. So we typically have a lot of reteaming that’s driven by new work. And so who creates that new work in the country is part of the conversation. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:03

Okay so maybe to pick another pattern here, the merging pattern. I’m assuming that’s when you’re merging two teams or merging team members. Is that what…?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  10:18

Yeah. So for sometimes what happens is that in order to get some work goals accomplished, two teams will come together, they will merge together and become one team and maybe they’ll stay like that. There’s a story in the book about a company in New Zealand, engineering manager, William from a company called trade me, how he had two teams that merged together and one of the reasons that they did was that they pair programmed. And they when they paired and switched pairs, they wanted more variety and knowledge amongst this larger group of people. So merging was a tactic for them. You’ll also find merging very common at the company level. Companies acquire other companies. And so there’s a, you know, there’s a lot that happens when companies merge. But this kind of notion of reteaming and I think why it’s so interesting is that it happens at multiple levels and if you’re at a company that’s changing quite dynamically, you might notice that huh, I have a new team member, oh, we acquired a company. Oh, I see, there’s a new team that sprouted up over there to work on a brand new product. You might notice all of these things going on and it can feel different than being in a company where the pace of change or the variety of change is slower. So sometimes it’s faster, sometimes it’s slower. I think it depends on the lifecycle of the company. Is it a startup? Is it a very mature company that’s been around for many, many years, that’s really starting to retire things and maybe even itself? There’s different paces.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:00

Yeah, I mean, but it also seems like it’s something that’s more natural than stable teams in the sense like that, you know, things change all the time in nature. You know, the way that we form teams, the way that we form groups is dynamic, right? So it’s almost like we’ve been conditioned in order to kind of create certainty and to create stability to just think of teams and teaming is, you know, maybe one or two ways, but it is general in nature. And I think, if you think about traditional silos and where you have, that was another way to also constrain people, because you had, like, you know, hey, developers go on this project, analysts go on that project, you’d come back, but it was controlled. And I think what resonated and part of the aha moment is, I think it had to do a little bit with when I spoke with Dave Snowden and he was talking about like scaling and like how the Agile community get the whole scaling idea wrong, that you want to, you know, just create some boundaries, and that let people self-organize or self-direct. And in this instance, like when I’m talking to you and when I was thinking about reteaming, it’s really like, we have to get people that are on the teams decide how they reteam, rather than people that are so disconnected from them to tell them how they need to organize. And that might be challenging. And I don’t know if you see it that way, and maybe this is goes to how maybe organizations need to adapt for reteaming but what are your thoughts on that? Do you see any truth in that or is Miljan just talking nonsense?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  13:48

I think Miljan, you’re making some really important points and I think it can be a superpower for a company to include people in reteaming decisions. Because the people are closest to the work. It’s like having respect for people is including them in the conversation. It doesn’t mean they always make the decisions about the organizational structure and where it’s going. But to be part of the conversation, I think is really important. And I think companies could be missing out if they don’t include the people in the decisions. And in the book, there’s a story about from Christian Lanois from Spotify, which we also applied at a company that I work at called Procore technologies. And it was a reteaming that was done in an open space with whiteboards. In both stories, really the case was there was a larger kind of team of teams, Spotify, they were calling them tribes, divisions, in this context. And that division, the tribe group kind of big and it was clear that it needed to split and it split into three. And people were included in these plans and the design before it was finalized and identified shortcomings in the plans that the, you know, very caring managers came up with. It’s just kind of like getting diverse opinions about reteaming, I think can help yield solutions maybe that you haven’t thought of. And so it’s kind of like you come up with, you know, you have a challenge and there’s many different ways that you could go about solving the challenge. And so getting the input is important.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:31

It is and like, you know, and then the opposite side of that, or the completely opposite example of the one that you just described as Spotify, is like work with a client where they actually, it was an IT department of about, I don’t know, 400 people, and they divided teams into, you know, Scrum and Kanban teams. And the managers just put people in, they had to, like, you know, HR was involved, but HR didn’t understand a lot of this stuff, where people were just put based on their positions or the job positions, and you will have somebody that was promoted, or has evolved to like a manager or team lead, that hasn’t developed or written a code in 2, 3, 5 years for whatever reasons. And now they were put, like, when they were, you know, restructured, they were put as developers on a team. And that created like, such a toxic environment on the team. And that was just because nobody listened to these people, it was just more like, let’s put, you know, let’s quickly match their roles and so, you know, we also legally so we don’t get in trouble. And reflecting back, that created so much issue for the organization without listening to people and just putting people based on, you know, what they thought, you know, who should go where. It trickled down for a couple of years. And I can only imagine how much that cost the company because later on, people quit, they jumped to another team, you know, they applied, and essentially, that whole thing self-regulated, but it took the company about two years for people to go and get on the teams that they actually want it to be on and felt like they belonged or at least they felt welcomed because it’s one of these instances people don’t feel like they were welcomed. So that’s the side, you know, example, I saw some of the stuff that you’re talking about too. So what are the consequences, maybe anti patterns of reteaming?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  17:49

Well, before moving on to that, just like that story that you just told right there, like, that would delight their competitors. I mean, imagine having a competitor who reorganize like that without the inclusion of the people, it created this big disruption, it didn’t feel like they were so effective. But then this startup is coming up in their industry next to them. Wow! You could really see how they could be disruptive into this. And that’s, you know, why we need to prepare for reteaming and do it well, because if we don’t, our competitors are going to do it. And nobody can kind of sit tight. You know, not to mention all the human factors that you talked about, too. I mean, these are people’s lives. To be reteamed by abstraction like this. And believe me, I’ve been through it myself in my career, my 20 plus year career in industry, it can be very, very upsetting. And it’s hard to become productive once, it’s like a Jenga that’s knocked over, it takes a while to put the pieces back up. So I think people are doing the best that they can. When companies get really big and you’re managing hundreds of teams, it’s a huge challenge that can’t be underestimated. People are trying to do the right thing. Like the people that were in charge of that reteaming, I’m sure you know, they’re trying to do the best job that they can. This is not easy. Which is another, you know, one of the reasons I wrote the book is just to try to understand the concept myself because I’ve just seen things play out not only with first person experience, but also you know, with colleagues around the world so. So yeah, so anti-patterns are things not to do with reteaming like. There’s a variety of stories in the book. Like you know, one of them like sometimes I hear people try to change the composition of their teams. They have like one team and they view them as superstars, and they want all their teams to be viewed as what they perceive as superstars so they try to break up that team and to spread the high performance. That does not usually work. You kind of ruin the dynamic and it’s not so easy to regain that or to create it in teams of other people. Sometimes, I think there’s something very magical about teams that really gel and have this sense of chemistry that helps them really achieve things and it could be in a very short amount of time. Time is not the factor that creates a high performing team, which is that fallacy of forming, storming, norming, performing. We’re so easy that we could just really try to keep these teams together and then get people to perform however you define that and you need to in your companies, but if it were only that easy, you know, you’re dealing with humans, sometimes they stagnate. Keeping them together for this whole time isn’t necessarily the answer. I do say though, you don’t want to break up a team that is delivering value at an acceptable or maybe awesome cadence to your customers, the customers are delighted with what they build. Team members feel like it’s an enjoyable experience. You want to try to keep those teams together. So I’m not saying bust up all your teams immediately, that’s gonna cause problems for you. This is very nuanced. And this is why we all need to study this topic, in my opinion. So one of them is like the anti-pattern of spreading high performance.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:18

Yeah, I mean, like you mentioned, like, you know, pair programming or mobbing like, you know, that’s, you know, that’s without splitting, how you can help people get exposure. If you have a, you know, high performing team, get some people to, you know, pair program, or, you know, the mobbing and using more programming, to do that to actually learn and develop their skills without breaking up the teams right. So that could be one way, or at least that’s what I’ve seen that, you know, works. Without breaking things apart, how can we get others exposed to what they’re doing?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  21:51

Yeah. So you know, it’s kind of like we were talking about before; you’re faced with challenges, and there are multiple solutions to consider, the pros and cons of each, right. So maybe doing some mob programming can help share skills, maybe someone can join the team, mob with that team, get a few tips and tricks to bring back to their other teams. There’s research that shows I think I cited in the book actually that if you nomad on a team for a short amount of time, then go back to your team, it’s beneficial for your original team, the one that you were in first. I think it’s also beneficial for the other team because they get to share and talk about, you know, what they’re doing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:36

Well, that too and like we get so used to seeing things the way that they are right. Like, you know, and just getting exposure to see oh so you guys do this different, I never thought about it. And that’s what I love about like co-training. I have co-trained with a lot of people and I always welcome that idea because you know, even though we might even teach same stuff, the way that somebody else does, it’s like oh I know now, I can take this and that and I can. So it’s always for me interesting learning experience, because I learned and I adopt I change what I do, because you know, I work with somebody else and they may be do it slightly differently. 

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  23:14

Yeah, and I think that feeling is key, that feeling of I’m learning. And we learn from other people just as much as we learn from, you know, listening to talks, listening to podcasts, reading books, experimenting on our own, but that feeling, I love to cultivate that inside companies, that feeling of I can learn and grow and reteaming is one way that I can do it. You know, Procore has a nomadding program where people can go to a team for a short period of time and then go back to their host team. They talk to their managers where there’s a whole program around it. And I think it’s a really wonderful idea because it might energize someone. Or what happens also is that someone might learn that, hey, I’d really love to stay on that team that I nomaded with. And it gives people a low risk way to experiment with a new reality for themselves. I mean, who we’re with on a day to day basis in our companies and our teams, I think is very much tied to how we feel and our well being. So we can do a safe, kind of like a safe experiment, what would it be like if I was on this other team? And with a program like nodaming, I think it gives people kind of a safe way to test ideas like that before committing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:31

Exactly. And I mean, that goes also maybe a couple of topics. I also want to explore the role of HR in this, but also what you just said reminded me about Menlo innovations, I’m sure you’re familiar with and how you know, their hiring process of just, you know, bringing somebody on. So how does, you know what, you know, maybe if you want you can describe what they do there and how is that related to reteaming and teaming and also just making sure that you know, before you really start working with this group of people that you get a chance to understand what is it to work with them?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  25:08

Yeah, yeah. So there’s a lot of stories from Rich Sheridan in the book. He was one of the people I interviewed in the book, Menlo innovations, love the company… 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:17

Joy Daink, right, is there. oh Joy ink.

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  25:21

Yeah, yeah, Joy Ink. And I think he wrote another Joy related book as well about leadership. And one of the things that I really love about Menlo as Rich described to me was that there’s great parity in the interviewing experience with the actual working experience. So they pair program and switch pairs, and sometimes switch out complete pairs to solve problems that they might encounter. And then people beyond just software engineers work in pairs which is a really fascinating to me. But when you’re interviewing, you’re pairing and you’re working with people. And so you really kind of get a taste of what it’s like when you get there. So I think, you know, that’s one thing that we need to do it, at all of our companies, I think is like having an interviewing experience, that really gives people an idea of what it might be like to join. And to be able to talk to the team members before you join is really key, if at all possible. It’s an investment when you bring someone in and it’s an investment for that person to decide to go to that company. So yeah, so we have to be really thoughtful about this and really put those programs under continuous improvement. So retrospectives are a wonderful tool to use for programs like recruiting, onboarding, you know, getting productive in your teams, you know, just using it at the team level is insufficient, we need to have feedback loops for all these different programs that we have at our companies

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:00

Well that too and I was recently, I interviewed Joe Justice, and he worked for Tesla. And he was saying to like, you know, the way that he was describing essentially is describing reteaming. And I’m like, oh, here’s another reason I need to reach out. But like, just the way that he’s like, you know, there are certain things that he could talk about, there are certain things that he can’t talk about but some one thing that he was describing, it was absolutely, you know, where it’s continuous reteaming.

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  27:32

Yeah. And you know, reteaming is a thing. You know, it’s one of the other reasons I wrote the book is I was tired of hearing like, or feeling like we’re doing it wrong. You know, in fast growing companies that grow and change double in size, you’re not doing it wrong if your teams change. So some of that outdated literature about teams that insist a stable team together forever is just inappropriate when you’re at a fast growing company, or a fast growing…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:01

And sometimes it’s great, right. I just think being dogmatic and thinking that’s always the right answer. I think that’s what I, at least see as the biggest issue. Like this is, you know, you shouldn’t, you know, change the teams. And people don’t really understand that the core like, what is the benefit, even if you do, and then also like, how do you build trust, right? And how do you help and create an environment for people to build trust? You can’t just say, Hey, guys, go build trust, and, you know, and start getting stuff done. And it’s just that goes back to what I said earlier, there’s so much desire for simple ways of solving problems. And there really isn’t just the simple way, you have to contextualize each context is different. And your approach needs to be adjusted to your context. 

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  29:00

Yeah, we’re in these complex systems, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:03

And well, but you know, a lot of times people say, yeah, we’re complex and people, you know, talk about that they understand complexity, yet, their mindset and their approaches don’t align with what they’re saying. Because if they truly believe that they were complex in dealing with complex systems, then their actions and what they do would probably be adjusted to that, how you deal with complexities. What about the, I want to bring in HR, there’s lot of talk about agile HR, you know, obviously finance a lot of times organizations are, those two departments, HR and finance are the last ones to see how they can help the organization and adopt. Specifically how does HR help with reteaming or help supporting teams from your perspective and what ways can they help?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  29:59

Yeah, I think HR, business partners play a really important role in employee engagement and programs to support it. So I’ve seen wonderful HR business partners who will help bring clarity to programs inside a company about changing teams, for example. So it’s, you know, it’s important to always feel like you’re contributing, you’re excited to go to work each day, you’re engaged in your work, you feel supported. And if you feel like you need to change, there needs to be internal programs that you can turn to, to kind of, to get some help. So this nomadic program I spoke of, you know, you can talk to HR about it, or HR business partner who sits, you know, with a technology organization or other organizations, HR is there to support people usually highly involved in engagement as I said. So to help depending on the size of your company and the formality and kind of this is all really context dependent. So how can you support the people who might want to change? How can you also support the people that are entering the company, that are onboarding? HR plays a pivotal role in supporting people that are joining the company, people that are leaving the company, so that one by one pattern, they’re supporting people in teams who join from an acquired company. Two companies merge together, the HR, business partners help with that kind of change, they help with the switching pattern, which we’ve been talking about not named. I really need to get refreshed when I switch to this other team. They’re pivotal in helping with that. Yeah, so you know, the goal isn’t adopt agile in the context that I’m coming from, that the goal is, help the company grow, change, and thrive to meet its business objectives. And so we partner with a variety of people. Recruiters help, our HR business partners help, we can partner with our friends in the sales department to learn of new information that we might choose to use in our teams. There’s a lot of partnerships that are possible.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:15

Yeah. What about middle management? I mean, like, a lot of times people usually, you know, maybe functional managers, you know, in the more traditional companies that have people reporting up to them. When you work and coach those individuals, what are some of the things that you do to help them understand? Because I find them struggling the most.

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  32:39

So you know, a manager’s job is to support the people and to help amplify the information related to teams outside of their teams, right? We sometimes reporting out on information, also supporting the people and their growth. So your managers can, you know, help people come up with development plans, so they can chart their careers, and they could come from a coach approach where they’re really helping develop people. I think managers can play a pivotal role in helping people find the work situation that excites them now. And I think being aware of reteaming and how to support people, and to give people in teams, the ability to reflect on their compositions, is another important role that managers can play. So I think, yeah, I mean, definitely one of the targets for my book, you know, there’s ideas that managers can apply with how to best support the teams. So managers support teams and they support individuals. And so both of those entities change. And then also, let’s say, we have all this reteaming that’s happening due to external forces, maybe we’re in a company that gets acquired by another company and suddenly, it’s almost like, you know, that Jenga, which is that game I was talking about is knocked over. Managers are key people to help us make sense of what’s going on and what’s happening. So they’re our first route of, you know, managers are in this position where they can help us. So when organizations are changing really fast, I always tell people, talk to your manager, accept your manager thinks, your manager is there to support you. And, you know, there’s a lot of great ways that companies provide manager training, you know, talking with HR and learning and development departments, and learning is, you know, having learning programs is super important. So, managers can really be these key connectors to support materials and information for people when things change.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:49

Yeah, and I think it’s getting better but absolutely. And you know, you touched on a couple of things, you know, from you know, coaching to understanding how to help them. I think another thing that when I’m working with managers too, is like, helping them understand, you know, that’s something that’s related to coaching but like how to better understand people and people on the teams. Like how, you know, something that motivates Heidi might be different than what motivates Miljan. So how do I read through that understanding that, you know, not everybody is motivated the same way, not everything is important and just being able through coaching and mentoring to help people understand that way? And this is not what managers were taught to do, you know, in traditional. So this is also new skill for many managers, a new skill or new skills to develop. And that’s at least what I’ve seen as a challenge, if the company is not investing in managers that you know, what I call the backbone of the organization, because they’re influencing, you know, up and influencing down.

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  36:00

Yeah, I think, you know, partnering with learning and development, having programs inside the companies that support manager growth are key. And you don’t have to have a lot of money to do this. I mean, just having book clubs where you get managers together, and talk about what it means to be a manager in our company, and aligning on that and getting buy in for that definition, you can do it with just organizing together as managers. You know, larger companies that maybe have more formal programs, maybe they have philosophies that they promote. Like for example, Gallup has some wonderful tools for manager training, or like Strengths Finder, for example. So with Strengths Finder, people take a short assessment and they get an idea of what their natural talents are based on Gallup research. Managers can use tools like that to help amplify someone’s talent and turn it into a strength. I like a lot of Gallup’s ideas for employee engagement. There’s a wonderful book that they wrote, Clifton, I believe wrote it, called it’s the manager, it came out a year or two ago which has a lot of interesting suggestions for how to manage today. And the other thing I was going to mention is like in, like Strengths Finder for example is a tool for self-awareness. So managers could leverage different tools to help people develop self-awareness so they are able to maybe even articulate if they don’t know, what do I want to be doing. Some people know, but some people don’t. So then you can maybe access different tools to help people develop a certain sense of self-awareness. But there’s, you know, it’s kind of knowing people, caring about them and directing them is important as a manager. So Gallup has a I think they call it a q12 employee engagement questionnaire. Looking at the 12 questions, can be very enlightening as well. Are you familiar with that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  38:01

No, I’m not too familiar besides like that I’ve heard and like I may have looked at it. But I don’t think I’ve ever actually either conducted or help somebody else conduct it.

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  38:12

You know, they make the questions public, you know, so like, some of the questions are, and managers can work with people on this, like, I know what is expected of me at work, very important thing. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. It talks about recognition or praise, it talks about people caring about me as a person. And then it goes on and on. And, you know, I had a colleague that I worked with a couple companies ago, and he went through this list of Q12, you can just google Gallup Q12 to look at the questions and he felt so unsupported in his previous job that just going through the questions himself and felt like he should quit and pursue a different job. [cross-talking 39:03]. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:04

It’s crazy, I mean like…yeah and like if you think about it, too, like, you know, you’ve seen the stats, but like, if 70 or so percent of people are disengaged at work, like what is that telling us? Like, you know, it’s insane and like, I could relate to that. I’ve worked both you know, inside the companies, outside as a consultant. And it’s like, you know, you can see that when you talk to people you probably felt it that way too where it’s like, I’m just going like, I’ll rather do something else I’m not even getting paid for but like it fills my cup in a sense of like, intrinsically, rather than you know, when I go to work and I think you know, just a couple of those questions that you brought up are so key just to kind of start that conversation and make sure that you know, there’s a lining and that people are actually you know, engaged and that they have everything.

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  40:06

Yeah, I think, you know, how can we cultivate an environment where people are excited to come to work each day? I’d rather focus there than spreading a particular agile methodology. You have to do a lot of different things. Learning new techniques is also important. But just the heart of our teams are the people, and they’re not excited to work with us, they’re going to be looking to work with someone else. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  40:35

Exactly. That’s you know, something else you know, I think, you know, what you just said, the heart of what we do is people and we understand the people the least, you know, when it comes to, you know, just how our needs are different. So, it is interesting, I think, you know, talking to some people, like I think that’s, it’s been kind of brewing and it’s been discussed by think the next five years will be really about understanding the people and understanding like how do we actually contextualize and understand, you know, people inside going back to, you know, individuals interactions a little bit more? Maybe, you know, it’s kind of like and we’re closing here, like, what other tips, topics do you have for companies, for managers, for teams on reteaming? What are some of the things that we didn’t discuss that maybe I didn’t know to ask you, but you feel are important to discuss?

Speaker: Heidi Helfand  41:49

Yeah, so we talked about some of the patterns, we talked about the one by one pattern, we talked about the switching pattern, the merging pattern, there’s two other ones. One of them is when teams grow bigger and split. Sometimes our teams grow big, we add people to our teams, and then we feel less effective, meetings take longer, the work becomes unrelated. Typically, when engaging with a team and encouraging them that, hey, they can change their composition to be more effective, most of these teams will choose to split into smaller teams. And so you know, it’s one of the most common reteaming patterns is growing and splitting. Sometimes teams can go back together as well. None of this has to be permanent. And then the other pattern is the isolation pattern. So if you’re working in a company, let’s say you have one product that’s out there in the market, people are buying it, you’re maintaining it, you’re adding to it, but you want to start something completely different. It helps to start a team off to the side. I call it the isolation pattern. Empower that team to work differently so they can move at a different cadence. It’s a different type of work to invent something new than it is to maintain and work on a cycle of an existing product. You need faster feedback loops, so isolating the team and empowering them to have process freedom is really key. So I wanted to say that because there are those five patterns. Also, what I’ve noticed is that companies when they get to a certain size want to do some type of reorg. So there’s some tips in here about planning, executing and reflecting on larger reteamings. And so one of the punchline of all of this to remember is team change is inevitable, you might as well get good at it, and I would add include the people.