“I’m a diehard Yankees fan” my friend exclaims as we sip brews and watch a game. “They’re in a rebuilding season this year though” my friend laments, as if to excuse the terrible season they’d been having. I’d heard this same excuse for years, and it made me realize it’s not just in baseball. This allegiance to a team is common, knowing the team stats and always remembering to highlight the good old days of when their team was at its peak. Let’s look at the Yankees. They weren’t always the Yankees we know today. Established as the New York Highlanders in 1903, they were renamed to the Yankees in 1913. Like any sports team, the Yankees have had their good and bad seasons, let’s not forget the historic 1927 season. But what made that season so magical? Most fans would point out, it’s not the name of the team, it is instead the players, the managers, and the coaches. Oh and the fans, let’s not forget the fans!
An interesting parallel to sports occurs in organizations that move away from temporary project teams. Project teams have their place in an organization, but start out with the idea of being temporary, like an All-Star team, designed for a specific purpose, and then they’re gone. Persistent teams on the other hand are designed with a longer term mandate in mind. Many organizations understand that persistent teams are key to their success. Maybe these teams are organized around a technology, a product, or an organizational capability. The team is set up, a goal established, and then they get to work. Time passes, people leave, others stay, and yet the original team concept remains. The team is often recognized by its mandate, not its members. This makes sense when the value of the team is in the work it delivers.
As we know from sports, the team mojo comes from the players, not their name. Unfortunately, most organizations never make this distinction between a team’s purpose and the tenure of its members. Leaders often tout “they don’t disband persistent teams” as an accomplishment and yet a closer look reveals, the majority of the members have been around a year or less . So while organizations aren’t disbanding teams in principle, they’re doing so in practice. This doesn’t mean that you can’t make changes on your persistent teams. Even pro sports teams trade players during a season. What it does mean is that you should pay attention to the team’s turnover.
Tuckman’s model for group development provides valuable insights into the impact of high team member turnover obscured by the illusion of persistent teams. In an organization where tenure isn’t valued, the team is constantly going through the forming, storming, and adjourning stages of development. These stages, while necessary, are almost always the least productive for the team. Never reaching norming and performing, these teams never find their groove. This makes the organization’s investment in persistent teams useless and provides no value over traditional project teams.
Your organization’s structure can further obscure team tenure. In a model where the team leader is directly responsible for the reporting relationship of their team, an understanding of member turnover is important, usually evident in the members that join or leave the team directly. However, in a matrix model organization, a situation where people with similar talents, such as developers, report to a single person and are assigned to persistent teams, this gets even harder to track and manage. Under this model, team members can be removed from and assigned to a team based on the urgency seen in the organization’s work, this often means considerable hidden team turnover. So much so that a “persistent team” may never actually get past the forming stage or worse, may never invest the time to get to know fellow team members because they know the team affiliation will be temporary, either for them or the other members.
If your organization has little to no understanding of the member tenure of your persistent teams, you are at significant risk to your delivery as team members act more and more like individuals and you never realize the true power of teamwork. It doesn’t matter which agile approach you choose if you do not have teams that stay together as all approaches require teams that work together through mutual trust and respect, forged over time and shared experiences.
The Moral: Confuse a team’s name with a team’s members at your own risk.