Team change is inevitable, especially when your company is hiring like crazy and doubling in size. Your teams might grow and split. 20 people might arrive in one day. What feels like “tectonic shifts” happen as you morph structurally in an attempt to refocus work and people. How can we bring a humanistic stance to this dynamic reteaming? How can the people be empowered to own their own team changes? How do you integrate the new people in without losing your sense of “culture?" We will explore questions like these with an interactive format. Along the way, I’ll share case studies from 3 successful startups I’ve been a part for nearly 20 years.

Key takeaways:

• Learn patterns of team change including: isolation, one by one, grow and split, and load balancing.
• Experience what it’s like to let people choose their own teams.
• Analyze your current situation with ecocycle and panarchy tools.
• Determine a strategy for dealing with the “how do we maintain our culture” question as your company grows.
• Analyze reteaming problem sets to determine how you would approach solving them.
• Learn tactics to help your teams gel and get up to speed after they change.

Each team system has a different dynamic. Sometimes we have great chemistry and it’s easy but other times it can be really challenging! We can reduce our risk and deliberately build self-aware teams that reflect, experiment and decide how they want to work together. In this interactive workshop, we’ll practice specific tactics to kick off a new team or to bring the life back into a stagnating one.  We will experience ways to surface and get rid of toxic communication and how to foster empathy between roles.

Key takeaways: 

• Learn how to start up a new team or reset an existing one.
• Gain alignment with building team alliances and conflict protocols.
• Experience how to foster empathy between roles.
• Share communication anti-patterns and remedies.
• Learn basic workflow visualization to jump start continuous improvement.

Let’s debunk the myth that you must keep teams stable or “the same” in order to have a successful company. Changing teams can help reduce the risk of attrition, learning & career stagnation, and the development of knowledge silos. I’ll share original case studies from companies that enable dynamic change to their teams propelled by retrospectives and other humanistic practices. In this talk, you’ll learn tips and tricks for building a sustainable company by changing teams – whether it’s by growing and splitting teams, merging teams, seeding teams, adding new people across multiple teams and more. I’ll also share reteaming antipatterns and what not to do.