Sherwin - Turning people into teams: rituals and routines that redesign how we work

Praise for Turning People into Teams

Bringing together people with different perspectives and areas of expertise is always a challenge. In Turning People into Teams, the Sherwins equip teams with the context and exercises needed to help them understand each other, break down barriers, and align on long-term goals. Using these exercises with my companys cross-disciplinary teams of designers, engineers, product managers, and data scientists has already led to several breakthroughs in how we identify goals, share feedback, and work together.

Patrick Weiss, Director of Product Design, Omada Health

In Turning People into Teams, the Sherwins share practical rituals, routines, and activities that help teams understand what it means to exhibit ownership, values, and integrity as individual contributors to a collective effort. Curating best practices from corporations, nonprofits, and academia, this book has insights into building effective teams and transforming how they work.

Ratna Desai, Director of Product Design, Netflix

When working on teams, you might not always get to choose whom you work withbut you should definitely choose to read this book. Turning People into Teams enlightens the reader with an inspiring, common-sense approach on how to turn a group of individuals into a team that functions on multiple levels. The Sherwins practice what they preach, and this book gets rid of the fluff and provides a practical mindset and corresponding tools to evaluate your teams rituals, behaviors, and values. They prove that its possible for almost anyone to learn the etiquette of collaboration.

Alie Rose and Simona Maschi, cofounders of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design

In a world with so much written about team processes for greater development speed and effectiveness, Turning People into Teams provides immediately usable tools for any kind of team to work better together. For anyone leading a multidisciplinary team, this book provides simple frameworks for getting at the hard challenges of team dynamics and a common format for engaging your team that can be experimented with and freely adapted to work within any context.

Many changemakers and writers focus on the initial stages of ensuring a team is aligned to a shared goal. While this is critical, in my work helping organizations transform to be more innovative, I find the true test of change to be how it plays out over time. The Sherwins provide not only effective methods for framing the problem to be solved but also tools for completing a teams efforts and learning from what has been done. Written in a tone that invites readers to craft their own solutions, this book offers a way of approaching teamwork that you and your team can own and adapt to your needs.

Turi McKinley, Executive Director, Org Activation, frog

turning people into teams

Rituals and Routines
That Redesign How We Work

DAVID SHERWIN & MARY SHERWIN

Turning People into Teams

Copyright 2018 by David Sherwin and Mary Sherwin
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

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First Edition
Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-5230-9574-2
PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9575-9
IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9576-6
Digital audio ISBN 978-1-5230-9578-0

2018-1

Book produced and designed by BookMatters; copyedited by Amy Smith Bell; proofread by Janet Reed Blake; indexed by Leonard Rosenbaum; cover designed by David Sherwin.

For Maryrose,
who brought this team together

Checked out. Thats how you could describe your new team. Here you are, in another meeting with the right people, at the right place, at the right time, and yet... when you look around the room, its a sea of blank, disengaged stares. This isnt a team, you think. But maybe, this time, it will be different.

Teams take the ingredients available to them and transform them into exceptional outcomes. They craft software applications, from early ideas to compiled software. They create plans for social services and urban centers and Michelin-starred meals and bring them to life. These teams bring the best effort of each individual into their collective work. They debate and align on critical decisions, pursuing a common purpose. They solve problems for the benefit of others and take ownership of what they produce. Most important, they thrive under a shared vision of success.

When we put it that way, dont you want to be on a team, all of the time? Sure you do! Except that teams are made up of people. And people are messy and complicated, even when theyre trying to be logical about making decisions and solving problems. Theywe, you, all of usconfound each other, even on the best of days.

This is the central contradiction of work: team ideals versus people reality. Were thrown into a room with a bunch of strangers and asked to do the seemingly impossible. And to manage the impossible, we need a way to get things done with some semblance of order. We never have enough time to do any of this, and sometimes we make distressing compromises to deliver. All to sell and ship and innovate and save lives and change the world.

Todays teams strive to serve their customers with the highest-quality products, services, and experiences they can create. And while their attention is focused on creating great project outcomes, weve seen that the quality of teams experienceshow they work togetheroften falls by the wayside. Even worse, organizations are putting less care into sustaining and retaining teams over time. The dominant, unspoken assumption is that people will be at their jobs for only a few years, so theres little motivation to create the right conditions for teams to flourish. Many organizations struggle to define how their employees will be successful at teamwork over the long-term.