Leading Teams of Teams
A group of teams needs leadership. If there are ten teams and each has ten members, it is not practical to expect them to organically coordinate. If they are left to themselves, leaders will emerge and get everyone organized, eventually; but those leaders might not be the best ones, and centers of influence will likely emerge. It is therefore important to be intentional and observant about the leadership that is applied to a set of teams.
The behavior of teams depends strongly on the nature of the individuals. If the population of team members leans extrovert, then there will be a tendency for the teams to want to coordinate. But if the individuals lean introverted, there will be a tendency to make each team independent. We see this in the software field: today there is a tendency for programmer teams to want to define their “API” and claim that if other teams misuse the API, then it is those teams’ fault—rather than viewing that as a product issue that everyone needs to be concerned about.
Leaders of a group of teams therefore need to observe the behavior of the teams, and ensure that the right amount of collaboration is occurring about each category of issues. For example, again in programming, it is common that there is a lot of collaboration about product technical design, but not enough about flow issues—the “DevOps” issues that span multiple teams.
One challenge is that above the team level, leadership tends to become political. This is somewhat inevitable: resolving conflicting needs among many groups is political by definition. But in a healthy environment, there is a strong win-win attitude, rather than a competitive one. Incentives for cooperation are therefore extremely important. We discuss that in the article Engineer the Leadership.