The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams by Heidi Helfand

Episode Date: September 7, 2020

Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams by Heidi Helfand Heidihelfand.com Your team will change whether you like it or not. People will come and go. Your company might double in size or even be acquired. In this practical book, author Heidi Helfand shares techniques for reteaming effectively. Engineering leaders will learn how to catalyze team change to reduce the risk of attrition, learning and career stagnation, and the development of knowledge silos. Based on research into well-known software companies, the patterns in this book help CTOs and team managers effectively integrate new hires into an existing team, manage a team that has lost members, or deal with unexpected change. You’ll learn how to isolate teams for focused innovation, rotate team members for knowledge sharing, breakthrough organizational apathy, and more. You’ll explore: Real-world examples that demonstrate why and how organizations reteam Five reteaming patterns: One by One, Grow and Split, Isolation, Merging, and Switching Tactics to help you master dynamic reteaming in your company Stories that demonstrate problems caused by reteaming anti-patterns About Heidi Heidi Helfand is author of the book Dynamic Reteaming. She coaches software development teams using practical, people-focused techniques, with the goal of building resilient organizations as they double and triple in size. Heidi is currently Director of R&D Excellence at Procore Technologies. She draws on her vast experience from coaching there, as well as at AppFolio and Citrix Online, where Heidi was on the original development team that invented GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. Heidi is based in Southern California.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in be sure to give us a like. Subscribe to us at youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss, where you can see the video version

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listen to. You can also go to our new book club. It's at patreon.com forward slash chrisvoss. And you can see all the wonderful books from all the wonderful authors that we have on. You can go to amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash chrisvoss. And there's a whole list of all the great authors we've got on the show. Today we have the most brilliant author, Heidi Helfand. She is the author of the book Dynamic Reteaming. She coaches software development teams using practical people-focused techniques

with the goal of building resilient organizations as they double and triple in size. Heidi is the current director of R&D Excellence at Procore Technologies. She draws on her vast experience from coaching there, as well as at Appfolio and Citrix Online, where Heidi was on the original development team that invented GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. Heidi is based in Southern California. Welcome to the show. How are you, Heidi? Hi, Chris. Thanks. Great to be here. Doing well. How are you? I'm great. You know, it's kind of cool. We're on this technology. You guys help pioneer. How's that for fun? Well, you know, screen sharing, I have roots in screen

sharing technologies, right? And we're here using Zoom. I was part of the startup and a company that invented GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. Yeah, and you guys really made it mainstream too. It was really an amazing, it was an incredible time. It was back in, I started there in 1999. I was the 15th employee and really helped kind of grow and scale the company. Yeah. And build,

you know, it's, it's amazing what we can do now with screen sharing and live online meetings. So I'm very grateful how everything has evolved. Yeah. I remember the early days of 2008 and 2009 where we had this great technology where we could do video, but you know, the problem is the slow computers and the slow internets and you know, but you know, now, now just everything blazes across the internet.

In fact, we couldn't, we're in an age right now or a year right now where we couldn't live without talking to each other on Zoom because no one can get near each other. Yeah. So there you go. So you've got this amazing book called Dynamic Reteaming, The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams. Give us your plugs, I'm sorry, first on where we can order the book on the internets and get to know you better.

Yeah, you can order the book on Amazon. You can order it at Barnes & Noble. You can order it from O'Reilly.com. Yeah, it's available where other books are sold. Most definitely. So what led you to want to write this book? And give us an overview on it, if you would, please. Yeah, so I've been working in the software industry for over 20 years in software as a service.

Three different startups that became public companies or got acquired. And yeah, one of the common threads in my whole professional experience is that as your organization grows and changes, your business morphs through time. And teams grow, they split, they change. You might reorganize. People come and go. And I've really found that leaning into the fact that change is something that happens all the time is more beneficial than preaching some of the traditional wisdom in building

companies and building teams that emphasizes team stability or keeping teams the same. I felt that having an emphasis like that is counterproductive. And, you know, the world changes all of the time. Sometimes we want the changes to happen. Sometimes we don't. We have to adapt. We have to shift forward. And so I wrote this book to kind of prove the point that, hey, you can have very successful companies that grow and change all of the time. It's a natural occurrence. So I have stories from various companies around the world sharing their stories about how their teams morph and change, how their companies change, as well as anecdotes from my personal experience and practical ideas of how to get better at it. I mean, we've had a lot of changes due to COVID and there are deliberate

strategies that you can do to kind of try to thrive and help your company succeed, even when it's really challenging. And, you know, it has been a really hard time. And so how can we kind of shift our perspective and morph forward so that we can adapt and really try to thrive, even during the most challenging times? We're definitely going through some reteaming right now. We are. We are. We are. And, you know, it's been really, really challenging and really, really hard. And I think, you know, leaning into empathy, putting people first,

and really, you know, anchoring to your strong company strategies and vision to move forward is what we need to do. And, you know, it hasn't been easy. But we can't crumble during times of stress. We've got to band and be strong and move forward. Yeah. There's definitely on our teaming going on with parents and kids having to suddenly become educators now.

One of my friends was started, they started school recently and he was having to be the technical he was actually having to help the technician on the other end working with the school to get the kids online so there's a lot of home reteaming going on and then there's a lot of companies now that are that are uh having people work from home i think a lot of the big tech companies now have said uh you know they may have employees working from home. I think a lot of the big tech companies now have said, you know, they may have employees working from home until 2022. And, you know, there's different funding they're getting to, you know, learn to work from home. And I'm sure that's causing some interesting things. What's the definition of reteaming in your mind as you use it in the book? Reteaming is like changes in teams. So people form teams, people change teams.

And yeah, in essence, it's about organizational team change. And it can happen at different levels, right? A company might acquire another company and then they blend. An individual might join a team or leave a team. So it's kind of like a multi-level concept yeah about organizational change so a lot of different acquisitions like i have friends at sprint who just got acquired by team mobile and they're they're going through the whole what do we do now yeah yeah it's interesting you know it's like you get a a change kind of happens like something like a when you acquire a company or

some company acquires you it's a big shift in the system and it's kind of like like something like a, when you acquire a company or some company acquires you, it's a big shift in the system. And it's kind of like, how can we support the people through all of these changes and kind of come to it with, you know, a people first perspective where there are specific tactical things that you can do. And I write about that mainly in the second half of my book, but it's inevitable. You know, I like to say team change is inevitable. You might as well get good at it. We got to lean into some of this stuff. Just like with what you were saying about there's shifts in school,

there's shifts in working from home. You're noticing that there's friends in industry that are helping educators. These are the kinds of more creative, more uncommon interactions that need to happen in order to shift us forward. So I think people are starting to and have been applying a lot of great new techniques to help each other move forward. I know people in the software industry like Silicon Valley and stuff, friends that I have, they're kind of used to this mixture of reteaming. I think, at least I think they are, you know, they're used to working in open offices and, you know, doing projects and things of that nature, a lot of software. So I think it's kind of like, it's, it's sequenced a fairly little more easier.

Do you find that, uh, challenges like, uh, what was the old story of the, who, who moved my cheese sort of thing? Um, you know, where a lot of workers have issues with, with maybe reteaming because they're like, well, I was fine doing what I was doing before. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember that book who moved my cheese and I have this faint memory, excuse me, of being at a company where one day that book appeared in our physical mailboxes it was kind of like huh what is this this is many years ago we're getting cheese yeah like cheese that's like free cheese at the commissary yeah i think i think it's a human reaction i think that you know a lot of the times we might catalyze change ourselves maybe we choose it so let's say

we're in a team and the team has gotten bigger and we feel like, God, we're not as effective as we used to be. Maybe we should split into two teams. And sometimes the people in the teams themselves make this decision. Like in order to pursue this effectiveness, we have to make this change. So there's that. But then there's also sometimes things are going to happen outside your control and you feel like you're forced to adapt. And people get to choose how they respond to these kind of changes that are put upon them. You know, we've all had this grand global change and, you know, many, you know, many things have happened with COVID. We didn't try to create this and make it happen.

It's like something that happened outside of our homes, our families, our systems. And it impacts people in many different ways, not to be taken lightly. But the fact is, I guess if you abstract that out to change in general, sometimes we choose it and we want it. Sometimes other people choose it for us. Sometimes it could be that someone else chose the change. And then later we see, wow, I'm really glad that happened. I didn't know I was ready for that. Other times where, you know, it's like, feels like it's the worst thing possible. So, you know, this is a, it's, there's a variety of angles at which you

can explore changes in, in teams and organizations. And, you know, that's why I became obsessed with this topic. And I wrote about it in the book, you know, really mostly because, you know, we built GoToMeeting, we built GoToWebinar. I was at another company, Appfolio, public company traded on the NASDAQ, a company that builds software for property management companies, law firms, and other verticals, very successful company that deliberately had a lot of reteaming built in just for the resilience of the company. We would reteam to spread knowledge around our engineering teams so that we become more resilient. So like we deliberately built in resilience, you know, now I'm at Procore Technologies, you know, we make software for the construction industry. We shift based on the needs of the company to move it forward. And it's a

thing, you know? So when I heard about traditional wisdom saying the best organizations or teams are the ones that stay stable, that stay the same, forming, storming, norming, performing. And then I looked at my 20 years in these successful software as a service companies, and I was like, you know what? I don't think so. I think the more appropriate approach is to lean into the change. How do we get better at that? How do we deliberately build it in so our companies can survive and become resilient?

There's a time to adapt factor with a lot of this. We need to shift forward. We need to survive as companies. can survive and become resilient. There's a time to adapt factor with a lot of this. We need to shift forward. We need to survive as companies. And, you know, people need to be included in decision-making so we can own these changes and shifts together. So I help people do that. Sorry. Yeah, I help people do that.

You know, I do that on a day-to-day basis in my role at Procore. With the book, is it geared on both sets where it's good for a person to understand, okay, what are we going through right now? Or is it mostly aligned towards managers and people that, you know, have to re-team people? Yeah, I think I'm trying to influence anyone who is able to influence or make decisions about how organizations grow and change. And so it could be an engineering manager, it could be a CTO, it could be a founder, it could be an engineer or a product manager that speaks up and influences decision making. You know, I really feel like in order to really kind of grow

and change organizations for the better, we need to be inclusive and to hear different voices and how we can shift forward. So it's not really kind of, you know, like a top-down thing. One of my, like, personal values and missions is to really kind of, you know, how can we get more voices heard? You know, we have amazing, you know, how can we get more voices heard? You know, we have amazing, you know, it's that I'm talking about software industry in general, amazing engineers who build incredible solutions. And we really need to, to listen to listen to our

engineers and really include them in the building of the company, just like they're included in the building of the products and services we make. Because when we're, when we're, when we're building software, we're also building our companies. And so, uh, let's, let's include people and include different perspectives in our decision making about how we do that. Yeah. So I, I, I'm really passionate about trying to empower people to have a voice. Awesome sauce. And you speak on this stuff too as well when you travel. Well, you probably do a little less traveling than a lot of my speaker friends are doing these days. I haven't spoken in a while.

But hopefully we'll get back to that, right? So reteaming is important. Before I started working for myself or in my younger years, we ran a facility for Cincinnati Bell, and we would have different teams for different projects and stuff, and you'd move people around. And then when I got my own companies, it was hard to re-team people or retrain them or get them to adopt different models. And there definitely is, like you say, a learning curve where, you know, you've got to let people adapt. One of the, one of the models we used to have because environment and, and the,

just how the whole company would work was important to me. And so one of the rules we had was the only dumb question is the unasked question. And innately throughout my whole business, anytime an employee would cost me a small fortune in some sort of mistake, it was because they were too fearful to ask the question that they ended up, you know, like, Oh, I shouldn't have lit matches in the corner of the cubicle and burned half the company down.

So I think it's important. And when you talk about the book, where, where people can, where it can be set up, where people can learn, they can adapt, they can adopt, and they can, they can be made to feel inclusive. There's a lot of inclusivity going on. And actually a lot of companies I think now are bringing on inclusive, inclusive people to train and teach on that. So do you see a lot more of that going on in companies? Yeah, I do. And what you're talking about brings to mind the concept of psychological safety

and a book called The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson, who also wrote a book called Teaming. She's a Harvard professor who's also reviewed my book. And, you know, the general idea that, you know, we need to include people and people need to work in an environment where they feel like they can bring their best selves, where they're not afraid to share an opinion or an idea. And how can we get, and how can we really kind of encourage and tap into all the great ideas that our people have and create an environment where it's not managed by fear tactics, where it's managed by more of an approach where people feel like they can disagree,

they can disagree productively. We lean into the skills about how to disagree effectively and that we need that. If everybody says yes to everything that the leaders tell them to do, you know, it's like you're missing out. You're going to have less opportunities. So how can we create a climate where people can thrive, bring their best, have productive conflict and disagreements, and kind of really own that kind of shift in company direction. I think it's really, really important. And I think, you know, we're living in a time where more and more people are recognizing that. Google's Project Aristotle, one of the findings of that study was about how one of, you know, what makes an effective team, right? Well, near the top of the list is feeling safe to express your opinion

or to speak up. And so, you know, that we've got to foster that kind of mindset, I think, you know, it not only engages people and can encourage people, but, you know, we're, we're working every day with our colleagues, and we can create environments where we can, you know, really innovate if people can really express themselves. So how can we encourage that? And I think it starts with leadership, it starts with people speaking up and sharing their ideas, it starts with having a feedback culture where if somebody, you know, feels like they can't express themselves, that there are ways that they can get that feedback to the leaders and the colleagues. So, so things can change.

That's really important. Yeah, it's really important. I think that's the reason I started working for myself when I was young is because no one wanted to listen to me. And, and I don't know, I have a weird logic way of approaching stuff, I suppose. I don't know. For some reason, I got successful running my own company. So I guess I knew what I was talking about. But there were a lot of organizations that I would join that had different management styles.

Like, you know, I think some of the early ones that I saw were really high school popularity sort of contests. And so it was kind of, you know, all about the leader and serving the leader and whatever he said. And then I've seen a lot of in studying a lot of companies through a Harvard business review and, and different business theory. I've seen a lot of companies where when they have that, that, uh, just shut up, do your job sort of, uh, you know, mentality, um, whatever, whatever we tell you, you don't need to be your own special person and contribute, just do this.

And we don't want to hear, you know, we don't want to hear stupid ideas. You know, you see that in the end product or the end customer service results where it's, you know, sometimes it's a sabotage. I recently saw a software company that's a gaming developer, that the game they released was just so poorly put together and you could tell it was put together by a bunch of angry employees who were like you know what if you're going to treat us like that well then f you and here's your game and it turned into a huge meltdown after the failure of the software company so they had a really toxic environment and and you could just you could just read between everything that was going on.

You're just like, wow, okay. So they basically said, what? You don't want to listen to us? Here's your product. And hopefully more and more CEOs are reading books like yours and getting to understand that you're better off as a company to let these creative juices flow, to let people have their input. You know, I learned a long time ago running companies that, and I can't remember who taught

me this. It might have been Tom Peters or something, but they taught me that you always want to have that one guy on the board who's the, whatever the thing is, he's got a problem with it. Like, you know, he's got that issue with it. Like, you know, he's got that issue with it. You want to keep that guy because that guy's always going to challenge you. He's not going to ever be the yes man. And I used to tell my people, my company, look, I don't have all the ideas. So give me, give me your ideas. Let's all have an input because I'm, I don't have

the corner on, on, on everything. I like to live that life where I'm like the narcissist going, I know everything. But having that input is really important. In your book, you talk about five reteaming patterns. Do you want to talk about those? Sure, sure. So the first one is, so these are just based on all the interviews that I did with my worldwide colleagues that work in different software companies.

And they're listed in the book, by the way. I came up with five base patterns. These were just themes that emerged out of the interviews, out of the data. So like the first kind of most basic way teams change is someone joins a team and someone leaves a team. Right. And that doesn't always happen at the same time, but maybe hiring, you hire a bunch of people, maybe someone leaves the team, they move to another team, or maybe they move, they just go to a different opportunity. So it only takes kind of the addition or removal of one person from a team to have a new team, to have a change in your team system, right. And then sometimes what has, so the first

one, I call that one by one. So then what happens typically, especially, you know, startups that are growing or we have a mandate to double in size or to grow. I've been through that a lot. People get hired and hired and hired. And sometimes these teams get big and they just split in half. So I call that pattern grow and split. So it's when you have a team, it grew larger, the work becomes unrelated, the meetings take longer, it's harder to make decisions, and there's usually a disturbance in the force, which usually the people suggest that maybe we'd be more effective if we split.

And so there's grow and split. And now the opposite of grow and split is merging, right? And these things can happen at different levels, right? Maybe merging a company, acquires another company and they combine, they merge together. It also happens at lower levels in product development teams where for whatever reason, it's usually due to a work strategy, like a strategy reason that two teams will combine forces and become a larger team. And so merging, there's grow and split. There's one by one, there's grow and split, there's merging,

then there's isolation. So let's say you have an existing product and you want to start a new one. Sometimes people will branch off and start a team off to the side. You typically give them product freedom, and that's how they can start and innovate and work on something completely new without the baggage of the existing processes that are propelling the maintenance of this other product. So I've seen that play out in numerous cases. Also, when you have an emergency, you have an outage, you have some other kind of situation, and you got to work fast. It helps to take a team off to the side, tell everybody else, leave them alone, let them work. So that's isolation. And then the final pattern is switching. So I think it's a fact of life that if you keep us on the same team forever, we're going to lose interest in the work and we're going to get sick of working with all the same people all the time.

So it's very healthy to enable people to pursue different interests and really grow your career by switching teams at work. So it could be that I want to work with these people over there or I hear that you're building a team focused on this new technology over there. Could I switch to that team? So there's very good fulfillment reasons. And the other thing with switching is that you can build deliberate redundancy in your teams so that they can withstand changes that you don't want later. So if you deliberately spread knowledge at a regular cadence by switching people from team to team. You can help kind of really build a stable foundation so that when people leave, and they will, because we don't stay at companies forever, that you have more knowledge retained. It'll be easier.

And then also, if I'm the engineer working on this technology, and I'm the only one that knows it, what happens when I want to learn something new? I'm kind of chained to this technology and I'm the only one that knows it, what happens when I want to learn something new? I'm kind of chained to this technology. So how can we build in this redundancy with pair programming, with mob programming and with switching so that, you know, I can have options later too. So those are the five patterns. I've seen them play out on the individual level, team level, department level, organization level, company level, department level, organization level,

company level, global COVID-19 level. When all this stuff is happening at once, when your company is just on fire, growing at a rocket speed, it can feel very dynamic. So it's dynamic reteaming. It's about all that. You know, I wish I'd known that like 30 years ago, especially the switching part and the value of it. Because one of the challenges that we had in our company, and we were in a software company, we had multiple companies, was like you say, we would have a siloed employee that would have like all the knowledge and experience.

And sometimes they would want to move to a different department or get promoted. And you're like, well, that's the only guy who knows how to fix the, you know, X, Y, Z. And you're like, and then we got to retrain that guy. And then sometimes that guy, like you say, left or got fired. We, you'd have this hole and you're like, oh crap, we got to retrain that guy. It's going to slow you down. I mean, you might as well prepare for it now. Yeah. And so I love the idea of – and I imagine doing the switching thing, you teach people to build a bit of a callus where they're used to moving around. Like I know a lot of Silicon Valley people,

they've gotten away from the thing where this isn't your desk. You don't come sometimes back. You just go find a place to work. And so that kind of helps people not have that, you know, well, here's my cheese and nobody move it sort of thing. But no, that makes brilliant sense. You know, I think, you know, one of the things that I talk about at the end of the book is that you find your cadence as a company. And then you, when you're hiring and when you're recruiting, you share how you work. Like, like there's a wonderful company in Ann Arbor, Michigan called Menlo Innovations, and they do this really well.

And I write about this in the book, they pair program. So two engineers coding together, using the same, same screen together, two minds together. It really helps improve quality. It shifts the quality first, so you're preventing defects from happening as opposed to finding them later. Anyway, so they also pair amongst other roles. But you know that when you're joining the company, and they'll pair and they'll switch pairs. And there's other companies that do that as well. And it's almost like you got to know what you're getting into

when you join a company. And so you have to have parity between your hiring and your actual work experience, but you learn and you shift based on having what we call retrospective meetings. So maybe your organization is there together and maybe you want to build in some deliberate switching. Maybe you started at a cadence like every four months. Maybe there's an opportunity to switch teams and you talk to people about it and you find and you share opportunities. And then you have a retrospective after the four months. How did that go? And so at a regular cadence, you're talking about how things have gone. And then maybe it could feel like, well, this is too much,

or this is not enough. And so you shift. So through a regular kind of feedback loop, you can really help kind of morph how your company grows and develops. And there's a company in Southern California called Hunter Industries. They're a sprinkler manufacturer. That is the company at which something called mob programming originated with a manager named Woody Zool. And I interviewed Chris Lucian, who's head of the engineering department there. And they program in groups. Those are their teams, all together at once for a variety of reasons.

And when the team members want to change, what they would do is the team members would work in the design and development of the organization at the same time that they were designed, that they are designing and developing the product. So one thing we tend to overlook is that we're doing more than software development. We're doing more than product development. We're also building these communities of people that work together. So how can we include them through practices like retrospectives, for example, so we can, we can move practices like retrospectives for example so we can we can move forward and everybody owns the changes it's not just inflicted on us like you know it's not about

moving people around on a spreadsheet right it's about like what do you think incredible person that i've hired because you have these amazing skills like we want to know your thoughts and so you know that's my bias that's where i come from you have to have a healthy relationship between autonomy of the people and choice and alignment of the company it has to be bi-directional it's not absolutes i'm not saying change all your teams right now tell the people you have freedom to do whatever you want that's not what i'm saying what i am saying is that we got to shift the narrative. We got to talk about how change is going to happen.

We got to lean to getting better at that. And we've got to include these brilliant people that we hire so we can make the right decisions. And then we're going to talk about what happened. We're going to look back and we're going to be like, okay, well, usually when you make any shift, you get new challenges. You're never going to be challenge-free. So let's talk about it together and let's morph forward together. Being a CEO of companies all my life, I've seen a lot of what you're talking about. And I love the retrospective idea because it really calls into like, okay, is this working?

Because sometimes you go out and you pitch some big idea to your employees or group of employees. You're like, we're going to do this. And you get them on board and everyone's fired up. And then it does feel like a ramrod where some things aren't working out or there may be members that, you know, this isn't just my thing. Like, you know, they come to me, people come to me and be like, Hey, Chris, man, I love you, man. But, but this, this part of what we're doing here, this isn't my thing. Can I go back to the other thing or do some other thing? And hopefully a lot of CEOs, especially in reading your book, realize, you know, how important it is. We pay, we pay people. We, we, we want, when people are creative, we want that because that can contribute to so many great product advances or service advances

to the company, but also to when people are creative, they just feel more fulfilled, right? Yeah, they feel more fulfilled. And, you know, if we're with the same people the whole time in this small group of, you know, five to 10 people all the time, we don't, I think, get the diversity of thought needed to really innovate. And especially now when we can't have those casual conversations in the kitchen, we can't run into each other as we're walking by. You know, we have to get a little bit deliberate about creating these uncommon interactions. Now, Zoom, screen sharing technology, right, has a wonderful feature called breakout rooms. You know, so the next time people have a meeting and you have 50 people and you're hearing from the leader and everybody is very passive in the meeting, right, you can utilize a breakout room feature where you can pose a challenge, put people in groups of three, bring them back, you'll get more discussion. So I think there's, you know, it's a very different circumstance now that we're all kind of one person, one screen, but there's also an opportunity to engage with people differently and to try to foster some, some different

interactions to create something unique because yeah, you know, uh, I can totally attest to what you're saying. Cause I've seen it work from both ends of it. Um, you know, there were times where, you know, I grew up, I grew up in an age where you went to work for one company, you did usually one or two things, you know, you did that thing really well. And then you went to work for one company you did usually one or two things you know you did that thing really well and and then you got a watch and you retired and everything was cool you know i grew up in the 70s 80s so um and then we saw the breakage of that with with what went on with the economy recession and different things uh japan of course was one of the things that started breaking the unions and people,

they're like, I have to get another job. What? Two jobs in a lifetime? And so, you know, but now we live in a gig economy where people are used to fooling around, multiple clients and multiple things. People in software are good at this, different things. Are there any other real world examples you want to share with us of other ways this has been successful for companies? Sure. Yeah. You know, I was really inspired by my colleague, Christian Linwall, who's an engineering leader at Spotify in New York. And he told me a story that I wrote about where they came to a place where they have a structure where groups of teams together are called tribes. And those tribes are also organized in larger structures called alliances. Well, they got to a point where in his tribe that he was managing, it felt like

some of the work was becoming unrelated and they really felt a need to kind of reset what's the mission and goal of each of the teams. And what happened was he and some product leaders came up with some initial ideas. And what they did was they sketched out the design of the new reorganized structure on whiteboards. And they put the whiteboards in an open area of their office. And every day at a certain time, they'd have a FICA, kind of a coffee hour, and they encouraged the people in the teams to come and take a look at these ideas and plans. And so they had this whiteboard reteaming in which they exposed the new structure before it went into place. And they got the input of the engineers and the different team members. And those team members through a period of a

couple of weeks helped them get to a structure that they never would have gotten to on their own if they were a group of managers doing this in a closed room and then announcing it. And so including people can help show you, hey, you have this team over here. It's more appropriate over here. And here's why. And so they included the ideas of all the smart people that were in their environment and they got to a better result. And the people were given, they could stay where they were. Maybe they could suggest that they talk with managers about moving to a different team. And so there was like a great degree of openness in this. And we applied a very similar thing at my company a couple of

years ago, Procore Technologies, inspired by that. And we reorg'd with whiteboards. And so I talk about how to do that in the book. And you can do that these days with, there are different online tools, which would enable the same kind of results, where you can share your screen. You could use shared whiteboarding tools. There's great products out there in which you could do the same kind of thing. But the key is, how do we include people in these decisions? And no matter what you do, even if that happens or, you know, if somebody comes up with a solution and you have to follow it, all of this can be very triggering and very challenging for people. So I don't want to minimize the idea that any of this is easy because it isn't. That's one of the reasons I wrote a book about it because I'm leaning in and getting better at it.

And I'm a practitioner. I work in a software company. We go through things together and we learn and we shift. And so, you know, I lean on my worldwide colleagues. We form networks where we talk and we share challenges and help each other. And Christian and what I've learned from him and his colleagues at Spotify, you know, it was just tremendous. And, you know, I thank them for sharing about that because it helps the industry. And it's really important to do because that's, if you think about it, that's another level of team, right?

So, you know, people in the past called that networking. I always think it's kind of making friends. And then later on, you know, you help your friends out. So you share ideas. That's awesome sauce. And that's probably one of the things that contributed to them being so successful and leading in their field.

I would think so. Understanding that you need to include people. Feeling a sense of ownership in how the company is developing is, is extremely important. I think it ties to why are we at this company and not that company? We have to anchor,

we have to have anchors, right? So it being included in a reorg decision is an anchor. Yeah. Originally I had one of those dreams where they were just coming out with them at the time when our business is really huge. And the whiteboard rooms where you could get like a whole panel, a wall panel, a whiteboard. But I love the idea of where everyone contributes to it because getting people on board on something like that and getting them sold.

You know, as a CEO, I had to sell everybody. I sold the employees, the vendors, everybody you work with. And so you'd sell them on it and they'd kind of be giving you that look like, yeah, it sounds like a grand work. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, man. Whatever you say, boss. But I love the idea of where they can contribute. They can have input because then they're all on board, right? They're, they're all sold because they've you know the contribution of the setup and building of it is is is something they put

into so i love that idea where they they they spend a lot of time planning and then i like like i say i like the look back idea because it questions what's going on one of the concepts i used to have my business was I took from Red October, and I think I'm writing about this in my book right now, but it's a concept of what I used to call a crazy Ivan. And basically, you challenge your ideas and you do a look back and go, why do we do things this way? And a lot of my businesses, I either innovated or created the different processes

through the business and so i would sit we'd sit down with them and challenge them from time to time and go why do we do things this way and be like well i know chris you designed it that way and i'd be like why did i design it this way and but having that openness to where you don't go well i made the design so it's the perfect design ever made and you can't have that in organization because people are just like this design is stupid you know i've worked with people like that um and so uh and so i used to challenge my teams and go go okay so what's wrong with what we're doing and you know it sometimes it was hard but it was a good learning thing for them where they would they would go okay well we can challenge challenge Chris's ideas or we can challenge whoever had come up with the ideas.

And I would tell my employees, I'd be like, hey, man, I don't have the corner on the market for ideas. I really need your input. And let's do that. And so I love that idea. And I think you could really say Spotify was just a hell of a company I mean back when it was only in Britain and you couldn't get it in the US

I had to do like some sort of hacking or some crap I did to get an IP address over somewhere in England so that I could get an account and once you got it set up you never had to do it again I think once they bounced me and went yeah yeah we know what you did and then the second time i i think they kind of turned a blind i don't

know what happened but i buy it i you know i i love spotify i support them yeah and they're doing a great job for podcasts i mean they're just yeah yeah like that. Yeah. Like anytime we create a podcast for us or a client like Spotify is like the fastest people to get it on. But you look at the growth of them. I mean, even Apple tried to, to chase them down on their, on their model. And I can't remember what the numbers are, but I think they're still beating Apple when it comes to the streaming stuff. I'm not sure. It's, it's always hard. Apple usually does catch up, but I don't know on podcasts, like I can wait a week or five days for Apple to approve a podcast, but Spotify, man, they're in there, they're hungry. And I think, I think like what you say, you know, I used to read a lot of Tom Peters books back in the day and he would cite examples like

you did where, you know, you could look at them and go, this is probably one of the, the, the gears that really help propel this company to being successful. And, and when there's a lack of that, there's a lot of failures. Have you seen, do you have any examples of failures where people, I mean, there's probably a million of them where people don't, don't encourage reteaming and everything else. And, and, else, and it ends up to huge failures. There's a, you know, in my book, so I have the five patterns, then I have anti-patterns and things that, you know, sometimes it doesn't always go as well as we wanted it to, especially if we're not informed. I mean, if we make decisions without including the people, we can deploy a solution that might cause more problems than you had before.

So I'm not saying change your teams for the sake of changing them. This has to be very deliberate, very crafted. The closer people are to the change, the different, it'll feel different than if it's a change on the other side of the company. And so there's, you know, there's definitely ways that these things can go wrong, even with positive intent. So I think listening to people, understanding that you can't just have a team, have an organization, and make a structural change, and people are going to snap into line.

There's really a transition period that people go through with different changes in teams. And some people compare this to like almost a grief process where we have a change. It feels like it's a bit chaotic. Where's my place going to be? What am I going to do? And then it's kind of like we get out of a hump to where we're moving forward. We relaunch our teams. But it can be very emotional when teams change. And I think that's something that people need to be prepared about, prepared for as well. And I write in the book about kind of this idea of transition. And there's a wonderful author, William Bridges, wrote a book about managing transitions.

And he talks about, I'm looking over here, he talks about, so you have endings, you have the neutral zone, and you have a new beginning. And so sometimes, you know, things change. Maybe people leave a company, for example, or someone moves to another team. And you really didn't want that to happen. Processing the ending through talking about it is one tactic. I find that I was in a team, we all reported to one CTO, we got reorged, some of our peers became vice presidents, we started, you know, they became our managers and we kind of moved to more of a hierarchical structure at one of the companies I was at. When this all went down, it kind of moved to more of a hierarchical structure at one of the companies I was at.

When this all went down, it kind of happened through a series of one-on-one meetings. But once our team got together and talked about what was going to be different, it helped us process it and get to that new beginning. So I think there's definitely a time for, we're going to have an ending. We need to talk about what's changing. We need to express our feelings about it. We need to talk about what we're losing. We need to say goodbye to the things and to the people. Sometimes, you know, it's unfortunate. Sometimes people leave.

But we need to celebrate their accomplishments. We need to help our people that are leaving. And then it gets to a point where we need to move on. And so being able to sense when it's time to stop talking about it and to move on, to charge forward as a skill. You can't always be looking back, but you need a certain amount of looking back in order to make sense of what happened so that you can be stronger going forward. And so I think really leaning into listening skills, coming at things with curiosity, and leveraging coaching can make a big difference, right? So you got to like take care of the people, have opportunities to talk with the people. But then when you've got that, you feel like you're

ready to move on through discussions and through look backs, right? Through looking back and talking about things, you got to move forward and you got to move forward strong, follow your strategy. You need to get in line and then you got to dominate because you got a lot of things to do, you know, and you got to change the world with the software you're building. You know, it's interesting what you shift forward. It's interesting what you're talking

about, the psychology of it. Um, because you know, people really, you know, like I said, they have to be sold on things, but, uh, I like the idea of what, what you're talking about, where, you know, you, you have to let people process, you know, the death of things or the changing of things and the moving of things. You can't just be like, you're doing this now and just, uh, yeah, just adapt. Right. Yeah. I've seen management styles. You know, and one way to help, I think, increase the time to adapt, right. We got to get good at changing.

We got to get good at morphing forward. I think the secret sauce is including the people and having them really have ownership of some of the changes that they will experience. Not an easy thing to do, not an easy thing to do. And so that's why we need to study it. We need to share stories in the industry and we need to get better at it. Yeah. The psychology of people. I mean, that's the one thing I really learned as a CEO, man, you can, you got to sell people, you got to have them on board. You got to emotionally committed. Uh, and I love the process of, you know, I, I think one of the early books that I read, I read a lot of Tom Peters thriving on chaos was a, was a manual we used to use for a lot of

stuff. And then there was the learning organization book and I remember who wrote it, but, but to me, it became really important to to not have the structures of management where you're just like you'll do what we tell you and you'll just you'll just do it um and and and and creativity is like so important today in a company especially in software because you're designing things and and there has to be different UI things. People have to, the consumer on the other end that's using it has to appreciate it, has to get it, or if they don't get it, you know, the UI doesn't work well or the design doesn't work well, then people don't like it.

I mean, it could be life or death for a product or a service. You know, I mean, you can design or a service you know i mean uh you you can you can design something that uh you know really is brilliant but if the consumer doesn't get it you know whatever it didn't work so you can't just be ramrodding your ideas through a management structure and i still see some of that to to this day i don't know about big companies in the in the software industry like silicon valley they seem to really have this down but other companies where it's just like you know it's very easy in smaller companies to go i'm the boss so i am the way and uh and there you go yeah and so so to that i would be like well how's that working out for you

what's your employee engagement like you know there's different ways that you can kind of measure the health of your organization through surveys and other techniques. And, yeah, so how's that working out for you? Are you hearing how people are feeling? Do you get any feedback that you can respond to? And what is that like? So I think another kind of anchor to how are we doing as a company and really the organizational health is working in ways to actually benchmark how you're doing and getting feedback. So it's another kind of level of that looking back, reflecting on how things are going and making deliberate decisions about, well, what do we want it to be like as we go forward? Because I believe we can choose that. And I think, you know,

again, the secret sauce is in including people and having enough, you know, and you don't do that. You know, it's not, everybody makes all the decisions. No, it's about finding the place on the, on the, on the, on like, is that a synthesizer or something? It's like finding the place in the dial where you're telling people what to do and you're giving them the ability to provide input. You've got to find that sweet spot because you have to lead the people, but then you've got to get the input so you can lead it effectively. Yeah, I wish I'd known more about this and thought more about this back in the day

when we had our large companies. Because it was important to me, but trying to balance it between everything else and what we were doing was so huge. So anything more we need to know about your book and what it entails? Yeah, so you can visit HeidiHelfand.com to find out about me, find out about the book. There's some videos there and lots of materials if you want to dig into the topic, dynamic reteaming. I've had a great time talking about this with you, Chris, and I really appreciate the opportunity to share about dynamic reteaming with you and your listeners. Sounds good.

Give us your plug so people can find you on the web space. Yeah. Yeah. So you can find me, uh, Heidi health and.com and, look forward to hearing from you. Awesome sauce.

Pick up the book on Amazon. You can take and get it or your local booksellers and all that good stuff. The, the book is dynamic reteaming the art and wisdom of changing teams by Heidi Helfand. And you can find it with O'Reilly books. You can take an order of that baby up and learn more about how to brilliant teams. I can concur that this is a important stuff and we'll make your company more

successful. Thanks for tuning in. Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on youtube.com for us. Chris Voss Hopefully, you've seen the video version of this. Refer the show to your friends and relatives at thecbpn.com, and we'll see you guys next time.