“Teams are becoming a basic building block for many contemporary business organizations, with one survey finding 68 percent of Fortune 1000 companies using self-managing teams”

- Lawler, Mohrman & Ledford

Our world is getting more complex every day, and change is the only stable factor. It is impossible to solve the problems as an individual. Teams are required to deal with the problems we have to solve. This could be developing new products, serving customers, research new tools, etc.

We all probably worked in a great team once. At that moment we maybe did not realize it but when working in other teams we realized how great that one team was. Great teams don’t just happen. There are many models that can help you to build great teams, and still no guarantee!

In this talk, I address several things that are important related to great teams.

To start with, what is a team? I first want to create a common understanding to make sure everyone has the same view on a team. Just having six people in a room, doesn’t mean they are a team.

Should there be a maximum of six people in a team? Or is it 15 like Dave Snowden writes? Or should it as it is described in the Scrum Guide? We will look at different models and make a conclusion about the optimal team size.

One of the most important characteristics of a team is diversity. Many people think about gender when they talk about diversity. Diversity is much more, in this talk I will describe what makes up team diversity. Diversity has advantages. However, I will also address the disadvantages in this talk of diversity. I will share and exercise that teams can use to calculate their diversity score and help them to increase diversity.

Many organizations and people performed research about what makes great teams. For example, Patrick Lencioni (Five dysfunctions of a team) Google (Project Aristotle) and the Rocket Model. All this research has value, and there is also overlap. I studied different models and combined them into one. Great teams have conflicts, clarity in the team, trust in each other, understand the impact, are Reliable to each other and care about results. I will dive into these six topics and give examples, as also tools and practices to improve the topics.

I will close the talk with the Team Decision Matrix. More and more teams are expected to be self-organizing and are empowered by management to make decisions. However, management would like to know how they make decisions, and the team is often wondering how to make decisions. The Team Decision Matrix describes five approaches to decision making. I will share those approaches with the audience, and also show how they can use this to coach their team to provide clarity in decision making.

Take-Aways:

• A common understanding of what is a team

• Insights in how many people should there be in a team

• What makes up diversity, what is good and bad about diversity and a tool to increase diversity

• Six characteristics that make a great team (Based on research) and tools to grow these characteristics

• A tool to help a team making decisions, Team Decision Matrix