8 Steps for Bringing People Together (Team Formation & Creation)
This week, one CEO downsized the team and wants to re-energize and reset the group that’s left, another CEO is bringing a new person to the leadership team and wants that person to feel like part of the group, and another CEO is stepping back from their role as CEO and bringing on a new CEO that will need to work with a team already in place. Each of them wants to be thoughtful about how to set the group up for success. They asked, “What can I do to help a new team/group/coworkers who are going to work together closely come together?”
In all these situations, whenever there’s a new team member or the team is restructured, a team formation/creation exercise is powerful. Thanks to my colleague Zach Nies for this framework from which I have modified. Note: this formation exercise can be used for any team, whether it’s intent in coming together is short or long-term.
1) Paint a Picture. As the leader, everyone will look to you to set the north star or paint a picture of the larger vision. It’s worth creating a couple of slides and spending 5 to 10 minutes talking about where you think the company is and where you think the company can go. This vision from a leader helps ground the team in what’s possible. It should be inspirational, medium to long-term, a stretch, but also obtainable. It’s appropriate for a leader to share the vision and then take questions rather than collaborating on the vision unless the team has previously generated one together or the leader and team are capable of truly co-creating it.
**The first step is the only one I recommend not doing collaboratively with the group. For the rest of the steps, I suggest either a digital whiteboard or physical sticky notes and sharpies to let everyone silently generate their ideas and then share them with the group.
2) Define the Worthy Cause. To use Simon Sinek’s phrase, people are more inspired when they come together to make something possible that requires more than just themselves. One way to ask the group is, “What is this group of people coming together in order to accomplish?” I like it even better said this way, “What is this group coming together to accomplish that is bigger than what any one individual could do on their own?” It probably borrows from elements to the leader brought into the conversation in step one, but this time the team gets to reflect their own take on the vision. The leader gets to see how each individual reflects in their own words the journey they are on together.
3) Motivations and Rewards. This step asks each individual to set aside any altruism and be realistic about what they are getting out of working on this project/company/tast/problem. It could be anything: intellectual stimulation, monetary gain, professional development, to work with particular people, to work on something worthy. There is no one answer, look for each participant to own as many answers to this question as they can come up with.
We often make up stories about an individual’s motivations, by making motivations explicit rather than implied, we can let go of some of the stories we tell about our teammates. Why guess when you can know? It also helps a leader understand what success at the individual level might look like for members of the team, which is helpful in guiding the work the group does together. A clear definition of success makes success more likely.
4) Talk Talent. Many of us are shy about talking about ourselves. We have been socialized not to boast or brag about our capacities or our talents. But on a team, it’s important to know the strengths of everyone involved. A leader could ask, “What strengths/talents/skills do each of us individually bring to this team?” This prompt helps generate a list of resources the team can use collectively to accomplish its mission. As a facilitator, you might even prompt the group to add strengths for someone else that they know and have worked with as a way to navigate our overly modest tendencies.
5) Refine Roles and Responsibilities. Getting clear on what each person thinks is in their domain is helpful. I’m not advocating for a list of people and jobs that would exclude one person from jumping in wherever they are needed. I see clarifying roles and responsibilities not as an exhaustive list of assignments, but rather as a way to surface what various individuals think their jobs are on the team. It can lead to a fruitful discussion between individuals involved about who’s leading what element of the work. For example, in the company where one CEO is stepping back into more of a board member position and a new CEO is coming into the picture, it’s very important that they have clarity around roles and responsibilities. This prompt might not get them all on the table, but will hopefully accelerate their understanding of their new relationship within and to each other and the company.
6) Draft Working Agreements. Whenever a group comes together for any period of time, I always recommend they draft working agreements. They can be changed over time as the group needs, but there’s nothing that takes the place of working agreements for setting expectations upfront. We all have different things that help us work better together, and agreeing to the things that make us function well as a team is important. There’s also significant data around teams with psychological safety performing better than teams that don’t, and so getting clear about what people’s needs are and how they feel cared for on the team are better when they’re explicit. I ask it this way, “What agreements will help the team be effective, motivated and cared for in working together?”
7) Get Good Goals. I think about goals as both being qualitative and quantitative in nature; both are helpful. Smart (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals are the quantitative piece, and it’s worth spending time with specifics, but there are also more narrative or story-driven goals that are just as compelling. I combine the two with the following prompts: “How can we use SMART goals to measure our success?” and “What inspiring words or phrases capture what we need to accomplish to achieve our work together?” It’s the same principle I use in teaching OKRs, the objective is the short qualitative statement that inspires others to join the mission, and the key results are the way we measure and define whether we’ve accomplished it or not.
8) Pepper In Some Productive Paranoia. The last step in bringing a team together is having an honest conversation about what things could prevent the team from achieving success. We’d all like to think it will go perfectly, but Jim Collins has the perfect phrase for the kind of worst case thinking that can be productive and avoid potentially bad outcomes. There’s a difference between productive paranoia and ruminating on doomsday scenarios. A leader could ask this question: “What could prevent us from achieving our goal?” Spending some time on the former is the sign of a team that has enough safety to talk about things that aren’t working, and that kind of candor is critical for a success.
Wrap-Up. There are lots of ways to put a cap on this work together. One is to simply allow the time period to end, create an artifact from the work that was generated together and don’t try and sum it up or slim it down to something more sanitized. For some groups that’s the right decision, for others, they might use some voting to highlight the things that they feel like are most important amongst all the topics they discussed, and still other groups might decide to create a final work product from the draft. As a final note, team formations are living documents, a constantly evolving draft. It’s not meant to be laminated or made precious. Come back to it if the team changes or the mission changes or conflict requires its re-examination. It’s a tool to provide clarity and a container for the work of the team. It should evolve as a team evolves.
