Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Retaming is hard. Rearge are hard. You can't lump them all into one thing with, you know, oh, it's all great all the time. No, it's not. If we could just build the software, deliver to the customer, get the product market fit. Hey, have we delighted them or not?

Starting point is 00:00:16 If only, it could be that easy. No, we have the people there. So let's focus there too. Today, my guest is Heidi Halfand. After two decades in the tech industry, Heidi became fascinated with how teams are organized, how org structures change, and how to set teams up for success through that change. She now teaches workshops and runs courses and consults on how to effectively reorganize your teams. And in her book, Dynamic Reteaming, Heidi delves deep into why change is actually good for your teams,

Starting point is 00:00:49 why you're better off not having super stable teams, how to effectively execute reorgs, and through that how to reduce attrition, stagnation, and knowledge silos. In our conversation, Heidi shares the five types of reteaming, anti-patterns to avoid when making org changes. What sort of team structure is most conducive to creating totally new products? By being transparent about your re-orc plans is definitely worth considering. Also, how Heidi became such a great listener with a lot of really interesting insights and advice there.

Starting point is 00:01:19 And so much more, huge thank you to John Cutler for introducing me to Heidi. With that, I bring you Heidi Halfand, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Productroadmap.AI and Ignition. Product roadmap.AI is the first AI roadmapping suite. It helps ensure roadmaps drive revenue by instantly aligning product with your sales and marketing teams to capture upsell opportunities. Built by early leaders from rippling and craft, it automatically identifies feature gaps from your CRM data and your customer conversations,

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Starting point is 00:03:41 Heidi, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Lenny. Great to be here. It's great to have you here. So I had this colleague at Airbnb. Her name was Jana. And she always had this joke that she shared that if it's been six months and she hasn't switched teams or hasn't moved desks. She knew there was this reorg coming. There's something

Starting point is 00:04:01 happening. Something was coming to change everything. And you wrote a whole book about this general idea of teams changing reorgs. You call it reteaming. I have the book right here. It's called Dynamic Reteeming, the art and wisdom of changing teams. I feel like just people underestimate the opportunities and benefits of change. And I think they always see it as a scary thing. So I'm really excited to spend time with you and chat about this topic. Before we get into the meat of it, I'm just curious why you decided to spend so much of your time researching this area of team change, reorgs, reteaming. Yeah, that's a good question. It wasn't necessarily planned. I had been working in a variety of different fast-gring startups for most of my career, I got in like 20 years in software as a service companies in particular. And I read a lot of books to try to get better at my work and what we're doing in our team.

Starting point is 00:04:56 teams. You know, I have a lot right over there, as you can see. And a lot of the books I would read on teams and the advice that I would get from people would be, you know, you really want to keep your teams the same. You want to go for that, forming, storming, norming, performing kind of thing. And I had thought about that. And I was like, wait, well, it wasn't really possible for us when I was at a startup and I was the 10th employee. And we grew to 900 people and now thousands of people. Our teams kind of morphed and changed. So I feel like if you're in a fast growing company or a shrinking company, look there. Don't look at trying to fight the natural evolution. So I was just trying to prove a point and to illustrate that teens change. And I was also curious to see, well,

Starting point is 00:05:46 was that just my experience and the experience of my colleagues in Southern California? What is it like for other people. So I was just curious. You have this code in your book where you say something like, sure, we deliver software on time. We make products people love and want to buy, but there's this people there that happens that people may not be thinking enough about it. Is there anything more you can say to that? Yeah. I think a lot of the things that I would read about teams, you know, just are naturally focused on, well, you want to build things that customers love. You want it to be an enjoyable experience. You want to do. deliver on time. You know, there's this, there's a reason we're there as a business, but there's also

Starting point is 00:06:29 a lot of company building that happens in building the people structures and, and just kind of, you know, when you go from one to many to a multitude, there's a lot of work that goes into it. This is enablement type work, and it's where I focused a lot of my time in my career, helping make teams and organizations successful. So there is this people layer. However, We're, you know, I've thought about this a lot over the years, and I think it would be highly convenient if we could just focus on building products that people love and, and getting product market fit, talking to customers, it would be great if it could only be that. But the reality is we're humans together, and there's a lot of opportunity to build

Starting point is 00:07:15 companies that delight people where they're excited to be included in decision-making about how the organization grows and changes or shrinks. So, yeah, there's this whole kind of other area of work that I think just doesn't get enough attention, and I guess that's where I live and breathe. Awesome. Okay, so I definitely want to get into the five types of reteaming, as you described. But before we get there, What I find with reorgs and change is that it often leads to the biggest career opportunities because there's new roles to be filled. If things aren't changing, there's not going to be all of a sudden, hey, we have this new role that we want for you.

Starting point is 00:07:59 And a lot of the, I don't know, a lot of the leaders that move out quickly are the ones that seem to take advantage of change and think ahead and get involved and like position themselves in a way. We're like, okay, cool, there's a new position. Oh, clearly it's going to be Heidi. Is there anything you can share there or any advice for? for people that maybe see reorgs coming and what they can do to help themselves in that pending change? I really like it when there's transparency in reorgs. There's a story in my book from Christian Linwall at Spotify about how they reorged a large

Starting point is 00:08:31 infrastructure team. And they visualized it on whiteboards and brought people over to the whiteboards to see the future team structure that the leaders wanted. And they got input into the design. And we did this at ProCore as well, inspired by Christian and his story. And we had, I think there were like 80 people involved in this platform organization that was splitting from two large kind of clusters of teams into three. And I remember when we rolled out the whiteboards from a back office where we were talking about this change for a few weeks. and it was scary to roll these whiteboards out because, you know, it impacts people's day to day.

Starting point is 00:09:16 It's like when when somebody is suggesting that maybe you do something different or that something different happens, you know, sometimes it can be kind of triggering. Like you want to know what's going on. So anyway, we, but we had courage together. So we rolled these whiteboards out. And it had the team structure with everyone's names on it. It had like the name of the team, the mission of the team. How many open slots for hiring across all of these different teams and then people's names in their existing team positions? And people were invited to look, give feedback.

Starting point is 00:09:55 They identified mistakes that we have in the design. Oh, this team might be better over here and here's why. And people had the opportunity to see opportunities within their own company that they might say, hey, I'm interested in this. Might I be considered for this? And then they could have their discussion. So I really like that the opportunities were shared and presented. So it wasn't some sort of thing that happened, you know, in some kind of backroom, you know, for the whole time.

Starting point is 00:10:27 And like we, we like unearthed the beginning of a plan. I think sometimes you, you know, when you convene people for a meeting to talk about anything, it's good to have like a starting point. So we had the starting point. We had a variety of different things. And I call it whiteboard reteaming in my book. And I write about that. And, you know, there's even structures that are more open than that.

Starting point is 00:10:51 Redgate Software in Cambridge, UK, Chris Smith is a colleague of mine. And they do regular open self-selection reteaming activities when they're changing their strategic priorities. He talks about this globally, very, very interesting space. And it's even more open than putting the names on the whiteboards. They have teams to give pitches and this is what they're looking for. And they have a whole method for enabling people to say, hey, I'm interested in this. And I think that really helps because sometimes you might think, oh, no one's going to want to work on this. But people can be delighted by working on things that another person doesn't think are particularly interesting. So giving choice is important. And there are, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:43 again, there are different grades of transparency. We weren't up for doing this kind of open, open reteaming self-selection event. But we were open to the whiteboard variant. I imagine individual employees hearing this of just like being involved in the reorg strategy sounds amazing. Executives and leaders hearing this are probably really afraid and feel like there's no way this can work well. And so what I want to understand is how do you actually, I actually set this up for success. What I'm imagining when you do this is many people disagree.

Starting point is 00:12:19 There's teams people want to join. There's teams people don't want to join. It seems like there's a consensus challenge where do you wait for everyone to agree, does someone end up making a decision? does it distract everyone from the work they're doing when you're kind of involving everyone in the reorg versus what typically happens it secretly is planned amongst executives no one knows it's coming and I think the reason they do that is because they don't distract anyone and they don't want anyone to start freaking out until it's like here's the final plan here's what we're doing

Starting point is 00:12:48 so what other advice do you have for people that want to practice this way of reteaming and reorging where they involve the actual team in the plan there's a book by William Bridges called Transitions, Managing Life's Changes. I have it right here. Making sense of life's changes. He talks about endings, neutral zone and new beginning. You know, ending, you're going through a change. Your team is changing. Neutral zone. The period of kind of liminality where you're like, gosh, I don't know how this is going to go. You're not quite comfortable. You're not quite in that new reality yet. You're still thinking about what it was like before. And, you know, once you're in that new reality, you know, and leaders can, you know, paint the vision and picture

Starting point is 00:13:31 about the benefits of the new reality and the purpose and why we're here and anchor to that to try to raise positivity. But once I learned about that transition framework, going through any subsequent changes myself became a lot easier to grasp. And, you know, really kind of, this changes in any part of your life. I mean, his book is not written a about soccer development or product development. You know, sometimes we're going to have a say, we're going to be able to participate. Sometimes we're not. And being clear on who the decision maker is in a change is really important.

Starting point is 00:14:11 There's another framework that I really like. I don't think it's in my book, but I've written about it in my new book. But it's called Ride. And we had a chief people officer at ProCore, and she's now at UKG, Pat Waters. She taught us the RIDE framework for decision-making clarity. And it's who's requesting the change, who can give input to the change, who's the decider on the change, and who's going to execute on the change? So it's like R-I-D-E.

Starting point is 00:14:44 And I Googled this for a while. I couldn't find anything on it and encouraged her to write about it. And I credit her to that, Pat Waters. She's awesome. And, you know, so a lot of the times it's kind of like, you know, what are you dealing? what's the problem you're going to solve? You have a current state and a future state.

Starting point is 00:15:01 Okay. And that future state might be up to a discussion, but maybe it's not, depending on what it is, right? You're getting acquired. Like, you're probably not going to have a stand-up meeting and talk about you, could we get acquired or not? No, you're not part of that decision.

Starting point is 00:15:16 Right. So, and then how is a change going to get rolled out or how are we going to do it? You know, in other cases at the teen level, maybe you have a retrospective and you determine, hey, I think we'd be a bit more effective and would be able to deliver, you know, at a better cadence if we were two teams instead of one team. And if teams have the ability to talk about that and impact and have some agency

Starting point is 00:15:40 into how their part of the org evolves and changes, I think that could be really cool. I think that could be really empowering. I think that could help us feel more ownership in that company that we're in. It doesn't always have to be like, you know, decision making equals hierarchy or the person at the top. It doesn't have to be like that. But again, like, retaining is hard, reorges are hard. You can't lump them all into one thing with, you know, oh, it's all great all the time. No, it's not. It's not. But anyway, we need to focus there. We've got to focus on this people layer because, you know, retaining is inevitable. You might as well get better at it because we're going to have to deal with it. If we could just build the software, deliver to the customer, get the product market fit.

Starting point is 00:16:28 Hey, or have we delighted them or not? If only, it could be that easy. No, we have the people there. So let's focus there, too. On this transparent, collaborative reteaming, well, final question here is just, would you recommend timeboxing this so that it doesn't suck up everyone's brain power for weeks and weeks and weeks? Or is it very dependent? Yeah, yeah, time back. Is there a advice you have on how long?

Starting point is 00:16:53 Make a schedule. bias towards shorter as opposed to longer. You don't want to deliberate on this forever because especially as you include more people, you know, it can be distracting. So you want to like proceed as expediently as you can. Okay. Let's talk about the types of reteaming.

Starting point is 00:17:13 That's kind of the core of your book and we haven't even gotten there yet. So you've identified there's five ways teams change. Can you just walk through them, help people understand what they are? And then I'd also, we use this term reorg a lot in this conversation. I think that's the way most people think about change.

Starting point is 00:17:27 After we go through this list, like what does reorg refer to when it's maybe from the perspective of these five ways of teams changing? Sure. Okay, so the five patterns of reteaming, one by one, someone joins your company or someone leaves your company, grow and split. It's a growth pattern.

Starting point is 00:17:46 Teams grow bigger, and then they split into two or more teams. Opposite of grown split is merging. Sometimes two or more teams merge together. It's more of a shrinking pattern. We might be seeing more of this these days as companies downsize. Things merge together and consolidate. Isolation is, or innovation by isolation, start a new team off to the side, a beneficial silo.

Starting point is 00:18:13 Give that team process freedom. Great for catalyzing new product lines within your existing company. Also great for emergencies and they just happen anyway if we have incidents and people have to come together, solve an incident, and then go back to their teams. And switching. So switching is moving from one team to another team. You can do this at a variety of cadences, short-term, long-term. And then difference between a re-teaming and a re-org. I think re-org is a word that has very traditional baggage and connotations. And when I was writing dynamic re-teaming, it just didn't feel like an appropriate word to use for, well, you know, Sue is looking to learn a little bit about how our web operations work.

Starting point is 00:19:04 She's going to move to that team. It doesn't, it didn't feel appropriate to call that a reorg because Sue's moving and switching from one team to the next. I think reorg, you know, again, it's true. Reorganization is a traditional word. It implies on the large. It implies tap. changes that you have no sand. It's just, it's, it's something different than what I consider reteaming, which is these five patterns that happen at different levels. Awesome. So let me just

Starting point is 00:19:31 repeat back of these five. So one, one by one, basically people joining your team, leaving your team, something very natural people do all the time. Your company. Oh, or your company. Yeah. Growing, splitting, a team gets really large and then it's like, okay, let's just split this into two, focus them on specific things instead of this one team trying to cover key. much. Merging teams, the opposite of that. Isolation, I want to chat about that one a little more, where you just have a team off to the side and they're just like dedicated to something that you find really important. So with isolation, you have this awesome story of your time at a company called Expert City,

Starting point is 00:20:04 which turned into something people know most likely and ended up being a great outcome because of this reteaming into an isolation team. Could you talk about that? Yeah. So I've been at different startups that have grown bigger. And one of them, I was the 15th employee. I started as a web editor and became an interaction designer. And we were going to change the world. And it was very exciting. We were in Santa Barbara, California. So the company is called Expert City. And we were working on our first product, which was a marketplace for tech support. So imagine you have a problem on your computer, you can go to our website and then you can select an expert to see and control your screen to help you solve your tech support.

Starting point is 00:20:49 challenge. And so we had the screen sharing technology that we were inventing in the company. We had the web-based software to manage the interaction between the customer and the expert. We had the experts. We had in-house experts. And then, you know, the vision was global, worldwide experts. You were going to be like this marketplace, this like eBay of services is what we talked about in the early days. And I was like really into this. This is my first job in tech and I became an interaction designer working on kind of front-end UI flows with engineers. It's actually before the word interaction designer. I was like my title was like navigation designer.

Starting point is 00:21:31 We made this up. So I was very into like it was before the words like U.S. and other things. People were talking about information architecture and other subgenres of design. And we had individual offices. I had all the interaction flows. my walls. I was, you know, really into the words. And one day I was like in there and we were working on a new flow. We had all these hopes and dreams for this product. And the CEO came into my office and he

Starting point is 00:22:01 said, Heidi, we are stop working on the marketplace. We're not going to do that product anymore. We're killing it because nobody's buying it. And like made six bucks or something last month. And he said, go to the beach. You know, we were by Santa Barbara. I'm like, what do you mean go to the beach? He's like, well, I don't want you to start any work that you're going to have to maintain later as we figure out our next step. And I was like, okay. So I remember that day and I'm looking around my office and all these flows on the walls. So like really like, you know, these were domains, like kind of like domain driven design. It was like all these like web domains and which user interactions were going to happen and all these hopes

Starting point is 00:22:46 and dreams. And it was the first time in my career where something was, you know, we were told not to work on something. And it was, it wasn't paused. You know, some people say, oh, we're going to pause this and then they never get back to it. This thing was like gone. And I didn't get it. I just didn't get it. I cried. I was like, I like acted out. I like sent this email like, how can we kill the marketplace? It must live. Yeah. I was like, like it was, it was quite an experience. But then, and I don't know what the timing was, I was invited to be on this team off to the side, and there was market validation going on. We became like our founders and product and others became students of market validation, four steps to the epiphany. So we had

Starting point is 00:23:33 built this thing. We spent all this time on this marketplace, but nobody would buy it. And so it was like do or die. I mean, we had to shift. This was like before Lane's. startup. So Forseps of Epiphany was the book. It was manual. It was like guiding the way. And so there were people that had a ton of conversations with potential customers about this new thing that we were going to build. Right. And it, so I was invited to be at this team off to the side and there was a small team and we didn't have to do waterfall software development. We were freed from that. We were like liberated from that. We got to work in other ways. And I remember working with an engineer and like we were figuring out how to like create a forgot password flow

Starting point is 00:24:20 because like none of these patterns existed you know back then and like we got to do this stuff we got to deploy like you know more frequently and the product was called go to my PC where you could see and operate someone's computer from a distance and that you know was essentially the pivot that I feel like saved the company later we went on we got folded back into the teams and we built go to meeting and go to webinar as a technical project manager at that time. And yeah, so taking a team off to the side, giving that team process freedom, they didn't want us distracted from the drag, from the, you know, when you're working on an existing product line, you get this cadence and it can become a mature cadence. You know, maybe people work in

Starting point is 00:25:06 two weeks or one week now. But when you're working on something new, you need faster iteration loops. And our founders knew that mate, you know. So it was a privilege. And I was like delighted to be part of this other team. And yeah, it was really, really exciting. So then looking back over the years, I was like, yeah, you know, isolated teams, beneficial silos. You know, again, it's going against green of what some of these books say. Oh, you want to desilow everything. No. Sometimes there's a reason why you have a problem, you want to solve the problem. This was like, like, we're going to, I mean, was this company going to go under? Like, I didn't think of those kind of things at the time because I was just super into the work and very passionate and motivated about what we were building. But, yeah,

Starting point is 00:25:51 isolation pattern came up and we used it at another startup as well, and, you know, ever since. So, so, yeah, that's the story of, of expert city. And from my perspective, you know, ask different people have different vantage points. But, you know, this, that if we would have stayed within our teams and we would have had to develop with pixel perfect mockups done in Photoshop, like, here you go. I, I don't think we would have been fast enough. I don't, like, that was not good for the innovation that we needed. So it's like also like innovation by isolation. Like, it's good for emergencies. You know, I was at another start-up. We had performance issues with our first product.

Starting point is 00:26:38 People went into left teams, went into, we brought a consultant in, went into a conference room for a couple of weeks, figured out some major changes that needed to happen, solve them, went back to the teams. This is not a new concept. The chicken McNugget was saved by an isolated team, SWAT team. There's a book called Teamwork. It's an old book from, I think, the 70s. I have in my bookshelf here.

Starting point is 00:27:03 and there's a story of the chicken McNugget that you can read about where they brought in a consultant and had a very small team and worked in a different, they didn't work in their same like plant where they were developing the product. They worked in a different plant. They reported straight up to one of the executives at McDonald's. And yeah, the chicken McNugget lived on because it was like having challenges in the test marketplace and Indianapolis. So, you know, we didn't make this up. It's just like some of these things are kind of like, oh, it's like a noticing. And then you're like, oh, that's pattern.

Starting point is 00:27:37 So it's a collection. There's this idea of a startup within a big company. Everyone's like, oh, it's just like the startup within a big company. It's all the, we have all the resources that we need. There's no less risk, but we can innovate and try any things. Rarely does it feel like it worked out? You're sharing stories where it does. Is there anything you found or any advice for how to actually be successful in this idea of having a team off to the side,

Starting point is 00:27:58 doing something innovative and different? At Appfolio, we did this. So there's a company called SecureDox. It branched off into its own company, and it was just acquired, I believe, in 2022. When SecureDox was happening, I was not on that team. I was like, I was on the other teams and I was watching. And again, same pattern. The team was created off to the side. And they were given process freedom. They worked in more of a daily sprint style as opposed to the two-week sprint style that our other teams were doing at the time at upfolio, early at folio. And so one, isolate the team or put them in a different area. We could still see them.

Starting point is 00:28:41 We were in this big open room, but they were, it was their team area. I mean, we had these like impermanent walls between some of the teams. Like, it was their region, and they claimed it and they named themselves. And so one, you know, separate location. There's another story in the book about a team that incubated a product idea within Citrix. And they were in a garage of all places. So they were like really isolated. But just put the team in a different region, make it that area.

Starting point is 00:29:16 That's number one. Number two, tell other people not to disturb this team. That's key. And hearing it from a leader is really, really important. No, you're not going to pull them in. into something else. They're working on this other thing. So, you know, people need to shed their skin of the other things that they're working on. If you take a bigger picture, kind of forrest through the tree's picture, you want people pairing and switching pairs so they're not single

Starting point is 00:29:40 owners of the system. So when they have an opportunity to do something that could be really important to the company, like be on one of these isolated teams, they can kind of fade out and not be the only owner that has to transfer knowledge and then field questions for two years on how that system works. You want to build this redundancy in your teams, right? So that's like, if you really want to plan ahead, do that first. You know, have that as part of how you operate, building this team redundancy and switching.

Starting point is 00:30:10 Because then it frees people to not be the only owner of a system and chain to a system. And, yeah, so isolate them, tell people not to bother them, do pairing and have shared ownership, so it's easier for somebody to switch into something like this. process freedom again they can do things differently ideally they report up to someone that has that really has decision-making authority and decisions won't get reversed or they have to go through some complex like web of like is it okay if we do this now like you need kind of like a clear

Starting point is 00:30:46 decision-making structure they saw that at the macdonald's case study as well which is not in my book but it's in this other book called teamwork and then you know that group, having that, you know, senior leader that they report into, you know, getting the clear lines of communication there is also really important. So not having this, you know, like heavyweight, like bureaucracy of, I don't know, quarterly business updates where everybody's like making a slide deck for two years before they go to that meeting. Like, like trying to like relieve the team of things like that and kind of make it lighter. And yeah, you know, and some of these teams, like SecureDox, became like another product at a folio.

Starting point is 00:31:33 It was very, very successful at one point. I think it was before we went public. It branched off into its own separate entity. I think maybe they shared like a board member or something. I don't know how that worked. But it became its own entity. SecureDx became separate. And then it grew from there.

Starting point is 00:31:50 And then it became this like, you know, wonderful, successful. product that that was recently acquired. You know, people come and go at companies and companies grow and change and more. And, you know, that was like one case of departures, you know, that, you know, it's like, that are sweet, right? You're happy for your friends and colleagues. Say, oh, he's going to be a CTO. It's going to be the CTO.

Starting point is 00:32:13 Like, there's a sad to see. I remember visiting their office in Santa Barbara. You know, it's great to see your friends succeed and thrive. and we developed other companies in that way. Awesome. I think it's really nice to hear. There's many success stories of this idea of a mini little startup within a company. And these are really good tips.

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Starting point is 00:33:12 explanation and advice on how to fix it. Visit HREFs.com slash AWT, set up a free account, connect your website, and start improving it. That's a H-R-E-F-S.com slash AWT. I feel like to me, one of the most important ones you've talked to, and this is having an executive essentially sponsoring this team

Starting point is 00:33:33 and supporting and protecting it versus, you know, some manager, just like, now we're going to go do this off to the side because otherwise, no one's going to really take that seriously. Yeah, I think that's really, really important.

Starting point is 00:33:46 You know, and I will also say that, you know, things don't always succeed 100%. I've seen isolated teams within companies where someone has the opportunity to sell something. They talk to their friends who are the engineers who build the feature for them, but then it leaves something for other people to maintain later and they weren't involved in the decisions and it can be a big mess. You know, for all of these patterns, there are, it's like kind of like balconies and basements. There's, you know, you can screw it up too.

Starting point is 00:34:17 You know, it's not all, you know, stuff is hard. You know, that's why I like to lean into it and have written about it. You know, things take effort. You got to, the tree is going to drop the leaves and you got to sweep them up. You know, it's, everything takes work and effort. We've talked about the isolation pattern. I thought it would be good to talk through the rest of the patterns real quick and share maybe one or two tips for how to be successful or make it work well or better. Sure.

Starting point is 00:34:45 Before you start, actually, I think I missed a nuance and you corrected me, but I think I missed. which is for the one-on-one pattern, it's actually describing joining the company specifically, not joining a team. Is that right? Yeah. And in the book, it might be a little blurred because this is like some of the switching in one-by-one

Starting point is 00:35:05 sound very similar, and they do have some like kind of then-diagram overlaps, but I'll distinguish them as I talk about them. Cool. So yeah, so one-by-one, someone joins your company or they leave your company, right? So the tip with one-by-one is when someone joins help them build a sense, feel a sense of belonging. And you can do that through not having their first day, be them sitting over there alone, right? You could have someone have a first pair.

Starting point is 00:35:31 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. Right.

Starting point is 00:36:08 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, right, especially if they weren't involved in the particular decision, bringing on this new leader that comes in and brings in all their people, right? 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

Starting point is 00:36:55 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 it changed 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 a 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 stand-ups 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,

Starting point is 00:37:49 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. we just have one product manager. We just have one designer. We just have one person who helps us anticipate quality challenges. So, you know, it's a lot of problem trading when you do a lot of this stuff, like anything. You know, you have a challenge.

Starting point is 00:38:23 How might we solve it? Well, there's option A, option B, and option C. Okay. So that's grown split. So then, and it's very common, I think, when your company is growing and changing, kind of like that. Merging is the opposite of growing split. Two or more teams combined together. Or at a higher level, a company acquires another company and there's like a merging that happens. So merging, I think, is related to when companies downsize or shrink. Things consolidate,

Starting point is 00:38:57 come together. Or again, when at the company level, you know, companies combine, you know, 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 there's changes, you know, at the individual level, the team level, the team of teams level, department level, the company level. So yeah, so 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

Starting point is 00:39:34 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, you know, again, we weren't involved. I wasn't involved in this decision as an I see 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 grown split. One, I typically,

Starting point is 00:40:24 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 join 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 branched together with their newly merged team. And then it's good for to get a shared sense of history. So you have these teams or companies that come together.

Starting point is 00:41:05 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, like we didn't know that. Oh, I didn't know that. You have built a system like that. we did too or we've never built anything like that that is so cool like you know what did you learn from that you know we get to learn about each other and then we're together we're like all right

Starting point is 00:41:31 you know we're this merged entity now like what's next like looking out to the future so we have the same shared vision so i love doing that so there's different tactics you can do before during and after each of these patterns yeah so that's merging isolation we talked about before put the team up to the side, give them process freedom, have them report up to a decision maker, tell the other teams not to bother them, let them work at the cadence that they want to work at. That makes it easier. If you are doing a short-term thing, you got to work it out with the larger entity so you don't create something in isolation that other people have to maintain.

Starting point is 00:42:11 Like, you know, there's ways that this can be messed up. And then switching. So switching pattern is really tied to learning and development and fulfillment. It could be that you want to work with other people. Like, you know, forming, storming, norming, performing, Tuckwin's model, he forgot the phase called stagnating. Sometimes it feels like we're in a team for too long. We're tired of working with these people. We want a little variety.

Starting point is 00:42:39 We want to work with that person over there. Or maybe we want to work on a new system. We don't have the opportunity to do that in our current team. but what if we could work on that system over there with those people? It could totally refresh us. It could be like having a new job within our same company. It could extend the lifespan of the amazing employee in your company, right? So switching is tied to that kind of fulfillment, which is one of the reasons why I made it separate from one by one and tied that to the company.

Starting point is 00:43:10 And the other thing with switching is that you could create safety nets in your company. company through switching. I just wrote a newsletter post about this yesterday because, you know, maybe we're going to have some more changes this year. Maybe companies are going to be hiring less. I don't like the thought of companies downsizing or having layoffs or anything like that, but, you know, I think to myself, well, have multiple owners of a system. So not only one person is that tower of knowledge that owns that one system. There's some stories in my book where I interviewed Richard Sheridan, who is the chief storyteller and co-founder of a wonderful company called Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Starting point is 00:43:56 They built their company Menlo to have people working pairs, not just the software engineers. Team members work in pairs and they switch pairs at a regular cadence. And you know that when you're joining the company because you're involved in some kind of pairing. So there's parity from when you're interviewing when you're at the company. But switching also helps build that knowledge redundancy in your company, a little more about tolerance. So if someone leaves, they don't leave with all the information in their head. We had that.

Starting point is 00:44:26 At that first startup, Expert City, we had that some single owners of systems. And when they left, it just becomes a challenge and a setback. And at the second cut, you know, at Epfolio, we shared a founder between the first startup and the second startup. Many of the early engineers from that first startup went to the second startup, right? So I was 10th at Appfolio. I was 15th at Expert City. So we wanted to work together, right? So it was that, you know, global idea of, you know, switching in one by one or similar.

Starting point is 00:45:02 But anyway, at the second startup, we had the chance to do things differently. So we had pairing and switching pairs and test-driven development. We had helped to do that. But this kind of redundancy built safety into our systems, especially when, you know, AppFOLio is processing a lot of rent payments. There's a lot of money. There's ACH going through. You know, those are critical systems.

Starting point is 00:45:23 And it's very important that things are safe and secure. You know, you don't want to haphazardly switch people around. You can screw this up. You know, again, that balconies and basements concept. You don't want, you know, somebody over here, they will switch every two weeks and have no say in their team. Like, you can like, you know, there's ways to screw all of this up, you know, but there's other ways to do it well. I remember, you know, when we were at our first team at Opfolio and we did a grow and split, right? Like it grew and it split into two or three teams.

Starting point is 00:45:58 I remember there was a loss for some of the engineers who wanted to pair program with some of the other engineers. And they started a regular rotation themselves from one team to the next, right? And that brought fulfillment. It brought joy. I mean, they would see each other in the, in the workspace every day, but they wanted to work together. It brought them learning joy and fulfillment. And I love that.

Starting point is 00:46:24 For those who are like, keep the team stable and the same forever, I'm like, well, well, what about that? Like, it brings me satisfaction and joy when I see my colleagues. You know, it's like autonomy, mastery purpose, like Dan Pink's book drive, when people are really like given some agency and the opportunity to work a little bit differently than maybe that, you know, traditional boxed version you might see on my bookshelf, you know, it you can really create not only products that people love, but companies that people love and want to be at.

Starting point is 00:47:02 All these stories of team changes and reorg. It made me think about a quote that one of my managers always used to say about reorging and changing teams is that there's no perfect org structure. There's only the best idea you have at the time for what the org could be. And then there's the issues with that org that you identify as you're putting in place and then set up processes and systems around to try to catch that. Like dependencies, as you said, or overlap of ownership. Is there anything along those lines that comes up of just things you've found of just like there's never going to be the purpose? way to do it. This is just our best idea at the time. And here's how we deal with the downsides of this approach. Yeah. I think there's a lot of wisdom to what your manager said and your colleague there.

Starting point is 00:47:46 Because, yeah, I mean, as time goes on, conditions change. You know, we evolve and change. We're subject to different influences. COVID happens. We weren't dealing with that 10 years ago. you know, we, we grow and adapt and morph. We try to get together and make the best decisions that we can when we're faced with challenges. And, and yeah, you know, a lot of it is problem trading. You know, we have this challenge today. We decide, oh, there's a few ways we could handle this, pros and cons of each solution. And let's, you know, it's like the, it's like the Cata. It's like the Toyota Cata, you know, like, grasp the current condition, you will experience, you know, you have challenges. What's the next evolution or the next target condition? How might you get there? And then you're there. And you're like, okay, grasp the current target condition. What's it like? What, you know, what are you experiencing? Oh, we might try this. You get to, you know, it's always, we're always transforming from the current state to the future state. So, you know, to that I would ask people,

Starting point is 00:48:56 well, how do you want that to be? And how do you want to show a, up and be as a leader, right? You want to just be like, all right, you know, got to get this done. The reorg is done by an email and we're just sending it out, you know, or this small team change. And here it is. It's done. Goodbye. You know, or is it a little bit where you get people's input, you know, and that in itself, you got to weigh, you know, what you're dealing with, you know, again. But I like to, I think about that. Like, what kind of leader do you want to be? Leaders need patience. it's hard to be a leader. It's challenging. But what kind of an environment or vibe do you want to cultivate in your teens?

Starting point is 00:49:38 And what do you want the people to be like? I have a degree in teaching English and applied linguistics. And I remember studying like Paulo Frere and other educational problem-posing methods of education. We have these teams that solve these complex problems and challenges. and build these really cool things for customers, let's involve them in some of the org decisions that are going to be part of their daily life. I really like that idea.

Starting point is 00:50:10 Again, it's not perfect. You can't involve people on everything, especially if there's, you know, wide-scale changes that you just can't. Along these lines of doing things badly sometimes, you have this whole section on anti-patterns of reteaming. I think there's about five of them. I don't know if you have these all top of mine.

Starting point is 00:50:29 But if you do, I'd love to hear some anti-patterns. Yeah. Well, one of them is people always think that reteaming is you have a pool of people and you're assigning them to a bunch of different projects like, okay, you'll work 10% on this one, 5% on this one, 20% on this one. We are going to allocate the resources from our component-based teams into these different projects. I lived at that.

Starting point is 00:50:53 We did that in waterfall like many years ago. You know, but that doesn't really work. A lot of the times the percentages don't add up. It's very hard for people to multitask and be involved in like multiple efforts at once. It's hard for the brain with all the context switching that needs to happen in that case. So I call that the percentage anti-pattern. There's also, I probably wrote about it, like, poof, they're gone or like suddenly they're here. Like, you know, re-teaming or having people suddenly show up and you weren't expecting them or suddenly they're gone.

Starting point is 00:51:27 and there's no communication around it whatsoever. That's another anti-pattern. One of the ones I love is this idea, spreading high performers, this idea of we're going to spread the high performers across other teams. That's an Appfolio story. John Walker was telling me back in the day that, yeah, he had this thought. I mean, he did this experiment. He had this thought that, you know, maybe if, like, we had this one team that was like,

Starting point is 00:51:54 I guess they were delivering at this cadence that they love. and they were building this stuff and there's this energy and you can almost feel it. Like, let's just spread the people from that team across the other ones and then we'll have that. And it didn't work. Like, you didn't have that. Like, it didn't happen. And that was a visceral learning for him that it doesn't essentially work. And, you know, and, you know, people are like, like, you know, what does it take to be a high performing team, right?

Starting point is 00:52:22 Like, what does it take to have that magical team experience where there's that chemistry? And the people are together and there's stories in the book. Damon Valenzhen, was telling me one about how it's like it's a band and we're with it off each other. And like we're creating this music together. So, you know, John felt like he essentially destroyed that when he split up, split up that team. So that's, you know, the story that inspired that anti-pattern.

Starting point is 00:52:49 The reason people are worried about re-teams and reorgs is this, a lot of times this exact reason that you just share. which is our team is amazing. Why would do? I don't want it to change. I don't want to split. I don't want to add anyone. I don't want to remove anyone.

Starting point is 00:53:04 I guess is there anything else along those lines to help people feel better about, no, this is actually going to be okay. And or it's inevitable. You're not going to, it's not going to last. I think sometimes you have that awesome team situation. It's an enjoyable experience. People are learning.

Starting point is 00:53:19 You're looking forward to it every day. You're delivering the stuff that people love. You're telling people what's going on. You have that matched. expectation where people aren't like breathing down your neck because it's late or something. You know, sometimes you want to keep that team together. You don't want to destroy that dynamic. But the thing is, you know, maybe that's a small startup that grows. And you need to grow because you have a bigger vision and it needs to be more than these 10 people. And so, you know,

Starting point is 00:53:49 there is sometimes this feeling of loss. Like, this is our company. This is my experience at this company of 10 people, but suddenly we're 20 people. It doesn't feel the same like it did anymore. And it feels, it feels different. And people always, they always ask the question, how do we maintain our culture? It feels different than it was before. And the thing is, it is different. And our companies go through stages. The company of today is not the company it was a year ago. The people turn over and change. What we work on turns over and change. You know, kind of world and industry and global events change and put different pressures on us. And, you know, we got to live in this global context. So nothing lasts. And sometimes I have like a picture

Starting point is 00:54:42 of myself or like holding an ice cream cone that's melting. You know, not to be a total downer, but, you know, it appreciated when you're on a team and you love it. And it's amazing. Because you know, these are our lives and, you know, we have to have gratitude and appreciate what we have because naturally things evolve and change. It's just inevitable. So we appreciate what we have. A lot of us can look back on our careers and remember those times when we were, in my case, skipping through halls because I was so happy. And it was like, I couldn't even tell you like, well, why was I skipping through the halls at that moment? What was it? Well, was the people and the conditions and what we were doing in like the time, the era, almost.

Starting point is 00:55:28 Because, yeah, it does change. There's a book by Itzac Adaisus called Managing Corporate Life Cycles. It's one that many of us read for years out at Follio, maybe the previous company as well. The Adaisus Institute influenced some of our leaders, and, you know, they influenced us with us. And it talks about the different stages of companies from birth. And, you know, there's go-go-stage maturity.

Starting point is 00:55:55 death of companies. You know, these are like life cycles. Like, you know, the company grows and changes and morphs and changes. The people in teams do that as well. I have an eco cycle on my book where I talk about that kind of aging and changing. Then there's a disruption and you have a new beginning. You know, we're part of these stories that are in progress. This is not an unchanging, unmoving kind of entity that we work in. So just be kind. Be kind to each other, enjoy your experiences, and learn as much as you can. It reminds me of a advice Cheryl Sandberg shared when she came to the Airbnb offices. Someone asked her, what advice do you have to deal with all this constant change?

Starting point is 00:56:38 Like the quote I shared at the top of the episode of like every six months, there's a massive reorg. Our culture's changing. Teams keep changing. It's constant flux. What is your advice to deal with that? And her advice was like, that is good. The fact that you're growing so fast and having to change. is the best case scenario because the alternative is you are not growing and it's much harder and much more painful because the changes are much harder. People get let go. You business may go

Starting point is 00:57:08 away. So her advice is just this is good. Change means things are and growth, growth lead to change, especially hypergrowth and that you should appreciate this time versus be afraid of it and think that it's a negative. Yeah. And it seems like she, she, she has. had such a wide vantage point and could kind of see the forest through the trees of the fact that all this company is doing well. Right. And this is why we're growing and changing. And I remember one of, one of my leaders, CTO John Walker, you know, at Fulio, he told me that once too. He was like, you know, I'd be like having a problem or something and I'd come to him. And he'd always say to me, it's always great to be at a successful company, Heidi. And, you know, it's like, well, yeah, like, sometimes

Starting point is 00:57:54 you don't think about the finances when you're in your day to day and you have a problem with another person or they come to you and they have a problem with this other person, you know, but in the grand scheme of it, like, how is the company doing? Like, it's really like a critical vantage point that we need to remind ourselves of. But yeah, you know, I wouldn't say all change is always good. Your mileage may vary there. But the general idea that the company is doing while you're growing and changing, you're trying to make things happen. I think it's definitely the space I'd rather be in than the opposite. Yeah, and I think it's especially true for people that haven't worked at a company that didn't

Starting point is 00:58:34 work out where they think this sucks when really this is like pretty good compared to all the things that could be happening. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So we, you know, we coach and help each other as we go along. Final question before we get to a very exciting lightning round. used to work with John Cutler, who was a previous guest on this podcast, and he had a question that he wanted me to ask you. He said that Heidi is one of the best listeners I've ever worked with.

Starting point is 00:59:03 And so the question is, what's your secret to being a good listener? Well, listening is a muscle to build and to always work on. You got to put your attention out, focus on the other person. You know, sometimes, like, if I'm looking down, maybe I, like, reconnect and look at them. you got to read body language and other things. I'm trained as a coactive coach, which involves different levels of listening. So you have level one, which is internal listening. Like if you and I are talking, but I'm thinking about like, what am I going to have for lunch?

Starting point is 00:59:34 I'm in level one. I've got to redirect it out to you and focus on you. So when I focus on you is I'm in level two listening, I'm like putting my attention out and I'm like really anchoring towards you. It's a coaching skill, right? And then level three is like global listening, environment. to listening. If a marching band suddenly walked behind you, I'm going to point that out because it's in

Starting point is 00:59:57 my field. I'm not going to ignore that. I'm going to bring that up, right? So we pay attention to kind of the vibe and the feel in the room and where we're at. But then also, if you're talking about something and suddenly you go like this or you have this kind of sudden pain in your neck when you're talking about this one thing, I might notice that you're doing this and like touching your neck because that's information that's a kind of listening and so i might ask you about that or if the face turns red or um you look down or away it's another

Starting point is 01:00:36 kind of listening so coactive training institute coactive dot com is my coactive coaching training so i learned it from them henry kensie house and wow that is it also master. There's like real, a lot of depth there. So coactive.com. I'm going to check that out. So you actually got trained in this skill. Okay. That's great. That'll make people feel better. They're like, okay. Okay. Amazing. I'm going to check this out. I'm going to try to be a better listener through the rest of this podcast episode from these tips. I will say that sometimes I am not a good listener though. Yeah. So it goes. Heidi, is there anything else you wanted to touch on or share before we get to our very exciting lightning round.

Starting point is 01:01:21 I don't think so. I really appreciate your questions and talking with you. Well, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yeah. All right. First question. What are two or three books that you recommended most to other people? Leading intelligent teams is one. Liberating Structures is another one. of course, transitions by William Bridges. I also like the leader's guide to participatory decision making. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?

Starting point is 01:01:57 I did like The Bear, the cooking-related show, the restaurant-related show, and talks about the hospital gets into the hospitality industry. I really like that. I was, you know, movies, I, there isn't really one that stands out. I always look forward to being on an airplane to see what movies are playing, but no movie for you. What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask people that you are interviewing? I always like to ask people, well, why do you want to join our company? What is it about working with us that would be exciting for you? Like, why our company as opposed to another one?

Starting point is 01:02:39 What do you look for in their answer that is a good sign? You know, they have some knowledge about what we do, what we build. Maybe they bring up that they've noticed something on one of the websites or a product launch that we just announced, just that maybe it's part of their story and their career. They're going in this direction and they heard about us. And, you know, they thought, wow, I would love to work on that. Is their favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? I'm very into vintage clothing and specifically like real wool, cashmere, not synthetic blends.

Starting point is 01:03:23 I also like vintage blazers. A lot of the times where I'm giving a talk, I'm wearing a vintage blazer. I really like the clothing and design. And I kind of, you know, really, really love unusual vintage pieces that I could find. But they do need to, you know, a lot of the fast fashion that's out there today is a lot of these blends with these materials that you've never heard of. But there's like something special about like, you know, vintage cashmere, for example. Do you have a source for some good stuff? Is it like eBay?

Starting point is 01:03:58 Is it stores locally? Is there a site? Is there something you find finding some good stuff? I travel around the world and I give talks on reteaming of your workshops. And usually I go to vintage and antique. stores. I was just in Berlin. I was doing that. I was doing it in London. And yeah, I, you know, I love thrifting, Salvation Army, Goodwill, you know, any of these places that we have in many of the U.S. cities, the Humana line of stores that I've been to in Europe and other places. I try to find

Starting point is 01:04:32 the small, unusual antique places as well, my aunts in the antique dealer. in Michigan, and she doesn't specialize in vintage clothing, but I just love that idea of discovering unique and unusual things that maybe they remind you of times in the past. Like maybe you find that, oh my gosh, we had that mug, you know, back in the 80s or whatever, or in the 90s, you know, things, you know, can kind of remind people of other times. So I like that. I think there's information stored and unique items. Beautiful.

Starting point is 01:05:13 I bet Berlin has some really cool vintage stuff, really wacky stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of really interesting places to explore. And I think it's just so much more interesting than some of the brand new kind of stuff. Agreed. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often find yourself coming back to or sharing with friends or family either in work or in life? I like asking people, how can you be kind to yourself?

Starting point is 01:05:46 Say more. I ask myself that too. I used to run a lot in Santa Barbara at Elwood, which is a beautiful trail that you can go down to the ocean, you come back up. It's like a mesa, more mesa in Santa Barbara. And I would run. And then I'd be like, God, this is so hard. And then I would walk for a little while.

Starting point is 01:06:11 And I'd think to myself, well, how can I be kind to myself? I mean, like, what am I doing here? Does it have to be fast? No. Like, I'm here to, like, decompress and, like, enjoy. So how can I be kind to myself? Like, I think sometimes I get hard on myself or have very high expectations, kind of achieve our mentality.

Starting point is 01:06:30 And it's, I've learned through the years that, like, it's okay to slow down. It's okay to like, you know, not go, go, go, go the whole time, you know. So I, you know, would ask other people that as well. Like, especially if they're going through a challenge or burning the midnight oil or whatever it is. Like, you know, what about self-care? How can you be kind to yourself? Beautiful. Final question.

Starting point is 01:06:58 I was scouring your LinkedIn. And I saw a quote from the CTO of Appfolio in his endorsement of you said, that you were the unofficial director of fun at Appfolio. Is there a story that comes to mind of something that you did at Appolio that created a lot of joy and fun for the team? We had these hack days, and I think they do that to this day. So like twice a year, we bring people together, and we copied and learned from Atlassian.

Starting point is 01:07:27 I remember we had calls with some coaches from Atlassian for how did they do their shipet day, or they originally called it FedEx Day, changed it to ship it day. We followed their model and we'd had this, you know, two o'clock on Thursday, two o'clock on Friday, where we'd build whatever we wanted, and we'd have a theme,

Starting point is 01:07:47 and then we'd have goofy prizes at the end that were like traveling trophies. Like one of them was like a clickety-clack keyboard that we spray painted gold by the railroad tracks. You know, but people could work on anything. There were teams that formed. We did it with a self-select. Marketplace, right? People form their topics and teams. And one team had geocaches throughout Santa Barbara. They're there to this day because we registered them with the geocaching website.

Starting point is 01:08:16 Another team built a vintage video game machine and it was in the dev room. You know, another one like they catapulted. They built this like trebishop. Is it a trebache? But like catapult this fruit in the parking lot. I don't know how we got away with that. But we were. in the early days, we did a lot of fun stuff like that. You could work with different people, build these larger relationships, which later makes it easier for reteaming because then later if you reteam, you're not strangers with people. So you want to cultivate the community. So we had this department of fun. We would plan the fun in a variety of other ways as well. So fun. Heidi, you're awesome. I think we've helped a lot of people feel better about the endless

Starting point is 01:09:02 change that they're probably going through right now. Two final questions. Where can folks find your book, find you online if they want to reach out, and how can listeners be useful to you? You can go to Heidihealthand.com or Google my name and I come up. Heidi at dynamicreteming.com, Heidi.com. Heidi.com.com. You can find me.

Starting point is 01:09:21 I'm out there. And yeah, I love to work with companies and teams going through change. And I do that in a variety of ways, teach workshops, do talks. So if any of this is interesting, reach out. And then do you also consult and work with individual companies or not? I do. Yeah, I do that now. I like to work on a retainer basis or I'll even join a team. So looking for the next for the next one. Amazing. And we'll link to all this stuff in the show notes.

Starting point is 01:09:49 Heidi, thank you again so much for being here. Yeah. Thanks so much, Lenny. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming)

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