Shifting team gears
During our weekly meeting I literally felt something happen to our pirate team that I can only describe as “shifting team gears”
In essence: shifting team gears is that magical moment where applying a new type of team structure, set of rituals and process can change the entire speed at which you achieve goals.
I had just handed over the management of a part of the team to our new Program director at Superconnectors. This move came way earlier than how I did it at my previous company.
As much as I enjoy seeing people in our team grow, I am too taken with the external focus of our company mission to give our pirates the individual attention they deserve.
I therefore know that it is better to rely on experienced team leads that are consistent with weekly meetings, remember important milestones and ask critical questions if specific targets are not reached.
In this article I want to zoom in on 5 gears of a team (of which I have closely whitenesses the first 4).
Curious to hear also from you. What was a moment that you “switched team gears”?
The 5 team gears
First gear – Individualistic stage
Main goal: Finding an idea that works
Description: Everyone in the team has a very clear individual objective that they can build on their own.
Properties:
⁃ Everyone builds a component of a simple product or service
⁃ Staccato goals: build a website, organize an event, create brand, create app prototype
Second gear – Team stage
Main goal: making the team twice as effective with the existing resources
Description: Everyone is getting to a point where success in their individual objectives is much more interdependent on others
Properties:
⁃ Setting up weekly cadence and team processes
⁃ Team goals need to be set together
⁃ More frequent communication needed until everyone is on same page
Third gear: Department stage
Main Goal: enrich the company with experts that can lead the departments to the next level
Description: The classical departments are reaching levels of specialization where the team effort and existing knowledge is not sufficient to elevate the work to the next level
Properties:
⁃ Giving harder targets and budgets for the team leaders
⁃ Further develop the existing team to either specialize further or take on generalist leadership roles
Fourth gear: Division stage
Main goal: create different focus areas to prepare the company for new areas of innovation
Description: This is the phase where the entrepreneurial part of the team looks into new opportunities to grow into what can be the next green frontier of the company
Properties:
⁃ Innovation become a separate objective
⁃ Two teams emerge, one dealing with the old reality and one dealing with the new
Fifth gear: Entities stage
Main goal: Separate entities into productive units to maximize productivity
Description: This is the phase where teams split off in separate legal entities with completely different objectives. They can still serve the same company group, but the teams can follow different rituals, ways of working and processes and are less interdependent.
Properties:
⁃ Separate entities pursue different priorities
⁃ Clear alternative leadership leads the next company
Shift when it feels right
If I look back at my career I feel I might have stayed stuck in first gear for too long with my first company.
We were young and having an unstructured environment without any rules was comfortable for us as founders.
However the team will develop different needs way before you realize it.
The team might become frustrated that their own career goals are not important enough, a process is kept vague for too long or that their voice is not heard on a specific goal.
It might feel like an open door, but it is essential to Shift gears at the right time.
Lingering too long in the same gear can slow down the progress or make you lose momentum that you might never regain.
So once you recognize the symptoms and descriptions above, don’t wait too long to change or take a step back from the process of getting out of your team’s way.
