What a team is
What a team is
A box on a chart is a reporting arrangement. Whether it is also a team is a separate question with a checkable answer.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerFive of this person's six pairs are with people not in this grid
- 02The senior engineerThe one working pair on the whole team that does not involve the manager
- 03The second engineer
- 04The engineer who joined in MarchNo pair with anybody
four people · 6 possible pairs · 2 of them have worked on something together · 4 have never done either
Four of the eight, and only the pairs that run between those four.
A team is not the box on the chart
A chart draws a box around eight people and calls it a team. The box is a reporting arrangement; whether it is also a team is a separate question.
The difference a shared task makes
Two people who have shared one piece of work know things about each other that no amount of friendly conversation produces. This note is about what those things are.
Why eight people need twenty-eight pairs
Adding one person to a team of seven adds seven new pairs, not one. This is why a team that felt connected at five stops feeling connected at nine.
What a manager-shaped team looks like
When almost every working pair includes the manager, the team is a wheel. How wheels form, what they cost, and why nobody is to blame for one.
The team that is really three teams
A box on a chart often contains two or three real groups with little between them. Counting the pairs makes the fault lines visible without anybody having to say so.
When a team is correctly just a list
Not every group of people reporting to one manager should be a team. Sometimes the sparse network is the right answer and the word is the only thing that is wrong.
The word team is doing too much work
One word covers a reporting line, a working group, a guild, a project and a shift. Separating the meanings is most of the way to fixing what people complain about.
What the org chart cannot tell you
A list of the questions a reporting chart answers well, the questions it answers badly, and the one question people keep asking it that it was never built to answer.