Heidi Helfand: recommendation

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…Cool. So one by one, someone joins your company or they leave your company. So the tip with one by one is when someone joins, help them feel a sense of belonging, and you can do that through not having their first day be them sitting over there alone. You could have someone have a first pair. There's a chapter in my book about onboarding. This is in the space of onboarding. Also with one by one, when people join, you also need to pay attention to the people who are already there and it's good for them to know when someone is joining the company; that it shouldn't be a surprise. So visualizing the hiring and the opportunities is something that I think is a really good idea. It could be challenging for someone if somebody joins and they become their manager, but what if that person wanted to be the manager and then they brought in someone from the outside to become the manager? So you need to pay attention to the new hires that are joining, help them feel a sense of belonging, get them to talk about themselves, which is said to increase their sense of connection and retention. There's some research in the book The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, which talks about that. But then it's also important to coach the people through change that are already at the company, especially if they weren't involved in the particular decision, bringing on this new leader that comes in and brings in all their people. So you got to pay attention to different people. Grow and split is a natural thing that happens when you're like startup scale up and growing bigger and bigger. The first team probably grows bigger and then splits into two or three. So when the team gets bigger, facilitation and communication tends to break down. So some signals that teams might bring up when they feel like a change might be helpful is the meetings are taking longer. You're in that case where it's harder to make decisions. It was easier when there were like five of us, but now they're 13. The work becomes divergent. They're working on this one thing, they're working on something else. No one's paying attention in the standup so much anymore because this work has diverged. And those are a few of the signals. And then someone typically brings it up. If you normalize the idea that it's okay for teams to have input into their future structures, maybe they'll bring it up and decide that, "Hey, it might be better if we split." Sometimes splitting though can create dependencies that weren't there when you were together as one team. So you inherit other problems or you might inherit challenges like, all right, the team decides it's far effective if they split into two or three, but we just have one product manager, we just have one designer. We just have one person who helps us anticipate quality challenges. So it's a lot of problem trading when you do a lot of this stuff. Like anything, you have a challenge, how might we solve it? igner. We just have one person who helps us anticipate quality challenges. So it's a lot of problem trading when you do a lot of this stuff. Like anything, you have a challenge, how might we solve it? Well, there's option A, option B and option C. So that's grow and split and it's very common I think when your company is growing and changing, kind of like that. Merging is the opposite of grow and split. Two or more teams combine together. Or at a higher level, a company acquires another company and then there's a merging that happens. So merging I think is related to when companies downsize or shrink, things consolidate, come together, or again, when at the company level companies combine, one acquires another, gets acquired. How that goes down varies, but there's this concept called panarchy that I write about in my book that a lot of these changes is changes at the individual level, the team level, the team of teams level, department level, the company level. So yeah, merging. So there's a business decision that the companies merge together and then changes might ensue. So maybe the company wants to get ahead on building and having another vertical in their SaaS company. We acquired a company at AppFolio to bring us faster into workflow software for law firms. So we acquired a company based in San Diego, and that got us a couple of years ahead. I remember one of the leaders saying that. So again, we weren't involved... I wasn't involved in this decision as an IC at the time. So it could be a business decision for merging at that level. It could be that people leave, there are departures and teams and responsibilities consolidate together. That's merging. So it could be that kind of shrinking that we're seeing. It could be that the company is having one leader instead of three and there's a consolidation and the teams kind of merge together. So it's the opposite of grow and split. One activity I do like to do with teams that merge is called story of our team. That's in chapter 13 of the second edition. So with story of our team, each team makes a timeline of... They stand in order of when they joined their team and they make a timeline with milestones of when they joined their team, when people left, and significant events and things they created that they're excited about and that they're proud of. And that they branch together with their newly merged team, and then it's good to get a shared sense of history. So you have these teams or companies that come together, they make shared timelines, they share their milestones and things that they built that they're proud of. They tell each other about it and then they have a sense of like, "Wow, we didn't know that. Oh, I didn't know that you had built a system like that. We did too." Or, "We've never built anything like that. That is so cool. What did you learn from that?" We get to learn about each other and then we're together. We're like, "All right, we're this merged entity now. What's next?" Looking out to the future so we have the same shared vision. So I love doing that. There's different tactics you can do before, during, and after each of these patterns. Yeah, that's merging.…

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