Team building with real options

Over the past year or so I’ve had the privilege of building a large team of ways of working practitioners. This has been in the face of a…

Oct 16, 2022

Over the past year or so I’ve had the privilege of building a large team of ways of working practitioners. This has been in the face of a challenging economic environment and a competitive industry for amazing people.

The mission

build the team within 9 months
hire a mix of people from both outside and inside the company
end up with an amazing team culture where psychological safety is there from day one
hire the team over multiple time zones / countries
don’t hire too quickly, or too slowly
don’t screw it up

We were confident it could be achieved, none of us had done anything on this scale or period before but we knew if we all worked together, we could find amazing people. Which meant the challenge was challenging, not impossible.

What approach did we take?

We applied a real options approach to what we were doing, because the one thing we knew up front was that we didn’t want to over commit on day one.

For those not familiar with Real Options (popularized by Chris Matts and Olav Massen)

Options have value
Options expire
Never commit early unless you know why

We prioritized finding awesome people as the priority over filling specific roles. We focused on building the environment for most of the teams to emerge and end up self-managing. That way all that was required was the occasional nudge. I’m a believer in the notion of ‘make the commitment at the last responsible moment’ (Preston Smith).

We also leveraged our networks and online presence to attract a few candidates as well. Whilst this didn’t result in a lot of hires, it did allow us to get a few people that really would add to the team’s collective IQ.

How did we manage?

‘Never commit early unless you know why’ — One of the challenges with keeping our options open was really a simple case of dealing with having too many people reporting to me directly until we had all the necessary structure in place (team leads etc.). So rather than wait until all forty people arrived, we created a scaffolding approach whereby we kept enough flexibility as needed until we had to decide. That way we had as many people in the team as possible so that we could then build up the structure with as much information and confidence as possible.

‘Options have value’ — Hiring people into certain roles was going to be risky when we had not done this before and at this scale so we thought hiring good people and then letting the rest emerge would be a more pragmatic option if we were transparent and fair with people.

In some cases, we didn’t always get the balance right. We knew it would be risky, hiring so many people in such a short amount of time. Instead, we swarmed around the joiners and made sure they had buddies and a support network in place, so they didn’t feel isolated. I am particularly proud of the state of the team as of today and look forward to closing out the last couple of roles before the end of the year.

What did we learn?

‘Options expire’ — you can always find people that are amazing, but at what cost to the rest of the team. Whilst it is tempting to go chasing every option (your ‘white whale’), you do so at the risk of diminishing returns and you can only have so many lead singers in a band so we wanted to prioritize team players over dragon slayers.

We took a pragmatic approach, we hired for team fit and aptitude over qualifications or expertise. We really didn’t want a team of unicorns all with their own personal favorite flavor of ice cream (or whatever unicorns eat); we wanted a team who could work together and do incredible things as a team.

Before you call me a collectivist, I do appreciate individuality and what each person brings to the table, it is just not at the expense of the team dynamic and collective team IQ. There is no perfect balance but involving as many people in the process of hiring as you pragmatically can is an effective way to build consensus and collective ownership of the process. That allowed us to continue to tweak our heuristics and approach over the year and get better at finding our goldilocks zone. Would this person ‘play well with others’ or would they be a ‘lone ranger’.

The number 1 thing we wanted to see was if people are actively engaged in continuous learning and were the type of people who kept strong views but loosely held when presented with new information. The world changes so quickly, no one can know everything and quite often what people do know is not always up to date or accurate, so we wanted to be able to challenge each other and learn as a group. No top-down imposition, just best approach and results wins and then share with your team to build sustainability.

How does this help?

I am sharing my experience with the hope of showing you what worked and what didn’t. The one thing I cannot stress highly enough is that you cannot and should not rely on a recruiter to do the heavy lifting. They are a partner, not a service provider to you. Work with them, build, teach and collaborate with them in a high bandwidth sense.

Having regular touch points and if you are hiring a lot of roles, then having a visual board is key to having everyone on the same page. A simple Kanban board can work well for everyone as each role goes through each step in the value stream.

Finally, don’t think that your work is done after someone has signed the contract, you have their on-boarding and then next steps to contend with. Give people as soft a landing as you can, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen people join a company and must hit the ground running and are then plagued with admin work and getting up to speed with the organizations structure, terminology, and ways of working.

Lastly get all your new joiners to challenge your team's on-boarding guide, mission, thinking and approach. e.g. review the team norms, comms agreement, ways of working and visualization etc.

Getting an outside in view is super helpful to validating your approach and making sure you are not getting complacent and remember to keep your options open!

Contextual Healing

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