HappyFirms

The first month of a new or merged team

For a reorganisation, an acquisition, or a team assembled from four others.

For
Leads of teams that have just been formed, merged or substantially reshaped.
Horizon
Four weeks, about seven hours of scheduled activity
Sessions
6

A newly merged team has three problems at once: nobody knows who knows what, everyone is carrying the norms of their previous team, and nobody is saying what they are worried about. These sessions take them in that order, because the third one is impossible until the first two have been done.

The schedule

  1. Week 1, 75 min

    Find out what is in the room

    Run the cross-team edition. Expect to find duplicated expertise nobody knew about and at least one area where all the knowledge sits with one person from one of the old teams.

    The Map of Who Knows What
  2. Week 1, 50 min

    Six conversations with people you have never met

    Pairings assigned across the old team boundaries, never self-selected. Finish with the written follow-up minute — without it the connections do not survive the week.

    Speed Networking Roulette
  3. Week 2, 75 min

    Surface the competing norms before they become conflicts

    The real content of a merger is that two groups have incompatible working assumptions nobody has stated. The auction makes people argue about trade-offs out loud, in a frame where disagreeing is the game rather than a problem.

    The Values Auction
  4. Week 3, 45 min

    Lower the cost of admitting something went wrong

    Only once the group has spent two weeks together, and only if the lead will genuinely go first. Run too early in a merged team it reads as a trap; run at the right moment it changes the next six months.

    The Failure Résumé
  5. Week 3, 60 min

    A shared problem with no history attached

    Something where the old team boundaries are irrelevant and the teams are deliberately mixed. The handover lesson from the blind build lands particularly hard in a merged team, because the handover problem is real and current.

    The Blind Build Escape the Process
  6. Week 4, 90 min

    Write down what this team will actually do

    On the team's own first substantial piece of work. The fears that come out are usually about the merger rather than the project, and that is exactly what you want on the board.

    The Pre-Mortem

What it looks like when it is working

  • People stop saying 'how we used to do it at…' as an argument-ender, and start saying it as information.
  • Someone from one former team asks someone from the other for help without routing through a lead.
  • The pre-mortem board contains at least one note about the reorganisation itself.

Things that are hard to recover from

  • If redundancies are still being decided, run only the first two sessions and wait. Trust activities during an unresolved job threat are experienced as manipulation, and that perception is very hard to undo.
  • Do not mix the old teams' names into team assignments. Mix the people and drop the labels from the first session onwards.