Dynamic Reteaming, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. The Power of Team Assignment

There are different ways in which people arrive to their teams and later change teams. Some companies are open to having the team members decide where they go. For others it’s more of a controlled management decision. Things vary and depend on the context. A humanistic approach to team assignment takes the interests and learning needs of the individual into account when they arrive to teams, as opposed to yanking people out of teams without their input and placing them into situations that they do not want to be in. Sometimes we have a say in when we change teams, but other times we do not. There is an inherent notion of power in team assignment—ranging from very command-and-control, “from the top” decision making, to bottom-up, self-organized decision making that is made by team members. I think about this as a continuum, as shown in Figure 3-1.

Figure 3-1. Continuum of team assignment and change

Let’s start at the top of Figure 3-1. I think that when we are put into teams, or removed from teams by decisions made by people we don’t know, there is a sense of abstraction. I’ve seen this happen in my career during acquisitions. I’ve been on both sides—I’ve been at companies that got acquired, and I’ve been at companies that have acquired other companies. I’ve witnessed teams get combined, and code ownership moved from one location to another. ...