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.
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Alexis Monville worked in multicultural and distributed environments for years, coming back from the US and now based in the southwest of France. When asked if he misses the work in the office, he usually answers that he spent half of his 30 years of management experience in diverse sectors outside of the office and a lot of that working from home.
Alexis is Chief of Staff to the CTO at Red Hat, a long-time hybrid open-source software company with more than 100 office locations in 40 countries, where half of the 20,000 people work remotely.
Alexis is a firm believer that change starts with the self. He is the author of two books: Changing Your Team From The Inside and I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge.
Alexis facilitates successful playful collaborations. He designs and builds sustainable and high-impact teams and organizations.
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One reply on “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.