Weekly Mix #274 - Team Performance, Mental Models, Hypergrowth & How Movies Are Made

Team Performance, Mental Models, Hypergrowth & How Movies Are Made

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Happy Monday!

One of the topics I always find interesting is what makes high-performing teams.

It's a consistent question in everything from pro sports to anyone in the modern workforce: how do I help my team perform?

A friend of mine told me about this particular model, and it struck a chord at the time because my own team at work had just been re-formed, and was clearly going through the stages.

The model, proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965, is called the forming–storming–norming–performing model:

Forming: When your team is just getting started. This is a group of individuals trying to get tasks done, not a team.

Storming: The start of the team. This is the first time team members risk conflict, and may clash about how to tackle things. Group dynamics are being established.

Norming: The group has become a team. They're comfortable with each other, and start working together towards goals.

Performing: At this point, the team is working at a high level. They're independent, knowledgeable, and know how to work within the boundaries of the team to get things done or resolve conflict. The desired state of every team.

Why do these stages matter? Understanding and planning for each stage can get you through them faster, to the place everyone wants to be: performing.

It's also a good model for understanding why something within the team is happening (a change might bring you back from performing to storming, for example).

Have a great week!

Graham

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Links

📖 Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained) - Farnam Street - This is a long article, but one that I return to regularly, and it was the basis of three books on mental models also published by Farnam Street.

If you need to find some new ways of thinking, this is the place to go.

📖 Rituals for hypergrowth: An inside look at how YouTube scaled - Shishir Mehrotra - In keeping with the team performance theme this week, this is an inside look at how YouTube built their teams internally, and scaled from the small startup to the giant company they are today.

It gets into everything from strategic planning to meeting rules, so there's something actionable for almost everyone.

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@behindthescns

7:55 AM • Jun 8, 2023

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