Building the TeamFit Team
2015 already! We started talking about what is now Ibbaka Talent in 2012, got started building it in 2013, and made the pivot from collaboration and decision making to team building in November 2014. What is next?
Ibbaka Talent is about helping people build high-performance teams: getting the people on the right team, helping them understand how to work with each other, and generally finding the patterns that lead to success.
Ibbaka Talent is also about helping people find, and get onto, the teams where they will be most successful. With more and more people working as freelancers, it is critical that we help these people get on the projects where they are the best fit for the team.
So how we will go about building the Ibbaka Talent team in 2015? The first part of the answer to this question is to ask who is on this team?
The obvious answer is the people who work at the company. The core team. We will need to expand this team over 2015 and add in some key skillsets. We need to strengthen development (we are a technology company and building great software is core) and will be looking for people with front-end development skills, machine learning skills, and integration skills. As we launch Ibbaka Talent we will also need to provide great support for customer success. Too many early-stage companies assume that software will sell itself and that people will figure out how to use it without their help. Not so.
But Ibbaka Talent is more than just this core team. There are a group of dedicated friends and advisors around the company. Some are on our formal advisory board, others provide coaching and consulting on go-to-market and product development (coaches are critical to high-level performance), and some engage with us through social media, Twitter and our LinkedIn Group on Team Performance. This year we want to profile all of the people in our network, understand their skills and who they work well with, and how we can leverage them better while giving more support to them. Of course we will use Ibbaka Talent to do this!
Another area where we want to deepen our extended team is in a basic understanding of teams, projects, and project management. A couple of interesting reports that are drawing attention in this area:
Benjamin Voyer on the psychology of teamwork in the Economist
You can attribute most of what goes wrong in medical units to dysfunction in the team.
Everyone wants to be in charge, a director of something, but nobody wants to be responsible.
Top Ten Trends in Project Management in 2015 from ESI
Project management methods that allow for accelerated development and rapid learning will become critical to serving the business.
Project organizations must work to build a bottom-up process that continually links project outcomes with organizational strategy.
Change management and project management will continue to merge. Inherently projects are about change. No project has “steady-state” as its goal, yet historically change management and project management have been kept apart. Projects have been entirely about delivering project outcomes on time and on budget. This perspective has, for the most part, entirely ignored the underlying purpose behind any project — to move the business forward.
There is an active discussion of both these articles on the LinkedIn Team Performance Group (click to read and contribute).
Understanding and supporting team dynamics is critical to team building. We will build part of this capability through partnerships while we work hard to improve our internal capabilities as well.
But the most important people on our team are our customers and users. In 2015 our goal is to bring a lot of users into the Ibbaka Talent team. The main way we will do this is through the Talent platform itself. But we will also be sponsoring and hosting events on team performance and the future of work, forming partnerships with other companies that support team performance in their own ways, and listening, listening, listening to what people are saying.
We hope that 2015 will be a great year for you and for all your teams!
