Foundations, scaffolding, and building successful teams
The workplace is a complex, ever-changing environment where success is most often achieved as part of a team.
When it comes to teams, we talk a lot about ways of working. How 'the work' happens. How it's tracked, how progress and blockers are communicated, how it's described, and how it's measured. We stress the importance of communication and put practices in place to support it.
But this is all scaffolding.
Scaffolding is necessary for the work to happen, and crucial for scale, but still subject to the strength of the foundation any team is working from. The scaffolding may allow the team to build higher and faster, but cracks in the foundation don't care how much progress the scaffolding is enabling. In a world with finite time and resources, over-indexing on scaffolding is done at the expense of the foundation. Over time, a weak, neglected foundation will cause the entire structure it supports to collapse
I find myself on a new team in a world where work is ramping up after layoffs and a re-org. As I identify opportunities and spin up new work, I've taken on the role of guiding my team through building both a foundation and scaffolding. To go even deeper with the analogy, the scaffolding at this stage is more like the forms that hold the concrete foundation together as it hardens.
As this work unfolds, I can feel myself wanting the establishment of a foundation to happen in one big leap when I know it's going to take several steps to get it right. I’m sure I’ll encounter this again in my career, so here's a note-to-self on some steps I'm taking and what I've been part of in the past:
Don't forget the importance of a foundation. Spend time here first!
Start with human, social connection. Break the ice with something async, like the creation of user manuals or a BOMWOM activity. Use what's shared here as the foundation for a sync session where social connection has a warm start.
Continue building social connection by:
Carving out time at regular team meetings for discussing things unrelated to work. Add just enough structure to aid in engagement.
Encouraging team members to share bits and pieces of their lives asynchronously. Weekend updates and pictures in Slack etc.
As human connections grow, begin discussing how individuals will function on the team and what the purpose of the team is. Answer questions like:
What do we expect from one another?
How will we hold each other accountable?
Why do we exist as a team?
How do we want people outside the team to see us?
What are some emerging habits we want to build on? What are some we need to change?
It's normal for the team to feel like scaffolding is missing at this stage. As it has in the past, work will happen with or without established ways of working. It's OK if the scaffolding is assembled over time and is informed by the work as it happens, especially if time to build a solid foundation is the result.
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