Sandy Mamoli - Creating Great Teams: How Self-Selection Lets People Excel

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Many people have contributed to this book and wed like to say thank you to all of them!

Thank you to Julie Starr for cleaning up our language and helping us structure our thoughts; Brenda Leeuwenberg for asking difficult questions, pointing out holes and inconsistencies, and constantly challenging us; Paula Boock for pointing out what publishers actually do and making us contact The Pragmatic Bookshelf; and our editor, Katharine Dvorak, for her inspired and sane advice, her lightning speed, and her awesome editing.

Thank you also to Susannah Pfalzer, Dave Thomas, and Andy Hunt at The Pragmatic Bookshelf and all of the reviewers: Alessandro Bahgat, Jacob Chae, Derek Graham, Alexander Henry, Aaron Kalair, Nigel Lowry, Matthew Margolis, Loren Sands-Ramshaw, Tibor Simic, Federico Tomassetti, and Colin Yates.

A special thank you goes to Trade Me, which trusted its employees to solve a complex problem and let us write about it.

As a consultant and expert in organizational dynamics, Ive worked with scores of organizations, and over the course of four decades, Ive observed hundreds of teams and team formations. In many of those cases, the focus was assembling the required mix of technical skillsas if the skills existed apart from the people who had them.

Many years ago, I worked for a big, multinational corporation. The company had technology centers spread over every time zone. Every possible skill was represented somewhere in the company. Couldnt we save money and avoid hiring new people if we could make efficient use of those resources? an executive wondered.

Every technical employee filled out a profile and became an entry in what was called the Global Skills Inventory (GSI) database. When the executives approved a new initiative, a manager created a skills list and cranked up the database. The manager fed in the requirements andboom!the GSI spit out a list of resources deployed for the project team.

Its easy to see the faulty reasoning behind the GSI database. People are not interchangeable units, and technical skills are only part of the equation when people need to work collaboratively.

But what about the traditional way, relying on management judgment to form teams? Ive seen selection processes range from very informalwhat my friend and fellow agile coach Don Gray calls the Five Yous Method (You, you, you, you, and you. Youre the team.)to very formal processes with job analysis, selection criteria, interviews, testing, and auditions.