Why it’s difficult to build teams in high growth organisations
The "absorb and split" pattern recommended by the author (basically: add people to a team, observe who naturally works with each other, split team along natural cohesiveness) works if, and only if, the person assigning the teams can accurately gauge who's actually doing the work.It sounds easy, but evaluating who's doing the work and who they're working with can actually be extremely challenging unless you're embedded with the team. It's too easy to misjudge who's accomplishing what if your only input is observing who speaks up the most in meetings, who's the most talkative in Slack, or who spends the most time putting together presentations. Visibility metrics don't always correlate well to actual productivity.This method also has a high risk of rewarding people for excluding others. Prefer to work with your old friend instead of the actual lead? No problem, just exclude them from your communications and eventually leadership will split that person out of your team.This becomes very problematic when hypergrowth companies are desperate to recruit so they start hiring friends of current employees via referral. When you hire groups of people who have a history together, they tend to stick together in the new org and resist integrating into the company culture. They want to isolate themselves and operate like they did a few years back at a previous company. You end up with a lot of pockets of people trying to operate as independent teams with their own work culture. It takes some work to break up those cliques and fold them back in.All in all, I think the absorb and split pattern in this blog can be good, but you need to watch out for cliques and focus on actual productivity, not just visibility competitions.