Formally Established Teams

This page is part of 🧰The Toolbox by Danny Smith.

Most companies group people into teams to get work done. I’ve seen a lot of very complicated approaches for how to do this, and also a lot of confusion around what certain teams do and who is or isn’t part of what team. To address that, it’s useful to define what a team is and have a process for standing up formally established teams that’s universal across the company.

It's fine to informally establish a group for a short period of time to work on a particular thing – that’s not what we’re talking about here – I wouldn’t call that a “team”. Here’s my definition of a team…

A team is any formally established non-temporary grouping of people.

This definition is deliberately loose – it includes what most companies call teams, but also what many companies call departments, squads, guilds, functions etc. This keeps things simple… they’re all just called teams. This definition also allows us to create cross-functional teams drawn from right across the company. Bear in mind that people can (and should) belong to more than one team at once.

For this to work well, all teams must have more than one member and the following four things:

1️⃣ Clear membership rules

Being explicit about who is in what team and why creates clarity. Some teams’s membership will be based on role (eg Senior Leadership Team or Engineering Team); some will be down to arbitrary appointment (eg. feature team); some might allow anyone to voluntarily join. And some might be a mix of these.

Examples

2️⃣ A clear mission

Every team needs to know why it exists, and it’s often best to describe this in the form of a mission. For some teams this should be fairly easy (most small delivery teams will already have some sort of mission), but it can be a bit harder with larger teams that we’d normally call “departments”.

It’s an incredibly useful exercise with these teams though – asking “why does the finance team exist?” or “how do we describe our collective mission as the engineering team?” doesn’t often happen and is super valuable on it’s own.

3️⃣ A team lead or coordinator

Some teams will have an obvious lead based on role: The Head of Finance leads the Finance Team, the CEO leads the SLT etc. Other teams might want to ask for a volunteer or take a vote.

However you select your team lead, it’s important that every team has someone who’s responsible for keeping the team on track and working well together. What they do day-to-day will differ depending on the type of team and their mission.

4️⃣ A descriptive name, used consistently

This might seem like a small thing, but it’s important that teams have sensible, descriptive names. It should be easy for people outside the team to understand what they do based on their name. You should also use this name consistently when creating user groups, team areas, slack channels and the like.

It’s a good idea to keep track of your teams in your knowledge base. Here’s an example Notion database you could use to do that…

What about departments, squads, chapters, business units, guilds etc?

Even in small companies these terms are often applied inconsistently, which causes confusion. By calling all of these teams we avoid this, and often end up with a simpler, more flexible company structure.

Only introduce concepts like department when you have so many teams that folks are finding it hard to understand how they fit together.

Establishing a team

Yous should define some rules around how to establish/disestablish a team. For smaller firms this should probably involve the whole senior leadership team. However you do this, it’s important that people don’t just form new teams willy-nilly.

A process for establishing a new team might look something like this…