A blog about people, culture, organisations and teams.
How do you know when you’re ready to scale your team(s)?
Jamie Arnold and I have been exploring this topic and have created a handy download to help leaders and teams answer the question.
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People often struggle to describe who does what. Getting it wrong can mean that things fall through the cracks, or it becomes so descriptive that it hinders work.
Articulating roles and responsibilities, especially in the 4Ds format, can clarify decision-making, help set expectations within and outside of the team, and foster better collaboration.
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In my previous post Team exercise: Building empathy and understanding with the Capability Comb, I introduced an approach to help a team surface their capabilities and identify opportunities to collaborate.
Since then, I have created a miroboard on the miroverse to use with the workshop. You can get a copy of it here miro.com/miroverse/the-capability-comb-workshop-template . If you use it, please drop me a line and let me know how it goes.
******Updated 26th Jan 2024******
In my recent post, Why Can’t we all get Along, I discussed the value of overlapping roles in multi/inter/transdisciplinary teams and referred to using the broken comb shape to describe skills and capabilities. In this post, I’ll expand on that theory and add an approach for using it to help teams build empathy, understanding and opportunities for contributions.
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I recently had the opportunity to work with the awesome people at Citizens Advice, guiding them in creating a capability and progression framework for the newly formed design, data and technology (DDaT) function. Being a forward-thinking organisation, they were open to trying something a bit different; this post describes the approach I used to help them do that.
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**Post updated Feb 2025**
In a recent talk that I gave at Agile testing days and Lean Agile Scotland called “Whole Team Responsibility”, I mentioned the team manual as a way of growing empathy in teams. Here is a quick write-up with a little more detail on how to use it.
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After my talk and post in May, I have now turned the Team Onion (formally the Agile Team Onion) into a free ebook.
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