# How to make teams for projects

[Team building models](mgmt-3_teams-theories.md)

Unless you're taking over an existing project, you'll likely have to get a [budget](money-3_budget.md) and assemble a team.

- Contract employees are perfect if you simply need people without any loyalty or long-term commitment.
- If you want them through a series of projects, hire them as an employee to ensure they'll stay with you.
- Contract-to-hire is only worth your effort if you only intend to keep *some* of the workers after each project.

## Hierarchy

Define every important functions you will need for your team.

1. Specify the necessary tasks as precisely as possible:
   - Hours required per week
   - Severity of the task
   - Necessary skills for the task
2. For each task, indicate the kinds of expertise or [personality](personality.md) required for the role.
3. In order from most critical to least, assign the tasks to specific roles.
4. If a task is somewhat out-of-place for a role, assign it as a secondary task to at least 2 roles.
5. If any roles have too many tasks or the tasks are too burdensome, add more roles.

Create an organizational chart.

- Define the necessary, specific details for each role:
  1. The direct responsibilities.
  2. Natural [personality](personality.md) strengths those responsibilities would require.
  3. The typical weaknesses those strengths would likely have.
- Indicate the measurements for succeeding or failing at that role.

In general, every role will specialize into 4 possible functions:

1. Acquisition - growing and getting more (sales, [marketing](marketing.md), business development, etc.)
2. Delivery - getting things to where they need to be ([logistics](logistics.md), customer support, etc.)
3. Development - improving the outputs (product development, [engineering](engineering.md), [maintenance](https://adequate.life/fix/), [programming](computers-programming.md), etc.)
4. Operations - broadly supporting the organization ([finance](money-accounting.md), [HR](business.md), [IT](https://trendless.tech/fix/), recruiting, etc.)

Create a [budget](money-3_budget.md) for each role:

1. The expected wage for each role.
2. Secondary costs attached to the role ([taxes](money-accounting.md), filing fees, required certifications, etc.).
3. [Advertising](marketing.md) and recruiting costs (job board, recruiter commission, etc.).
4. Initial costs attached to training and getting acquainted with the role.
   - There's usually a break-even point a few weeks/months in where that worker actually turns a profit.
5. Turnover costs for new hires for the role.
   - Each new hire can cost about 3-12 months of an employee's yearly pay.
   - These costs come from lost management time interviewing, training, HR, and time with an unfilled role.

Calculate the team's turnover costs:

1. Find all the combined costs to hire each role, then work out an average number.
2. Estimate a turnover percentage based on industry data.
3. Average Role Hiring Costs x (Turnover Percentage x Number of Workers) = Team Turnover Costs

Never let each team or sub-team surpass 4-8 people.

- The number of interactions becomes exponentially more as the team gets larger.
  - N * ( N - 1 ) / 2, with N being the number of people.
  - With 3 people: 3 * ( 3 - 1 ) / 2, or 3
  - With 5 people: 5 * ( 5 - 1 ) / 2, or 10
  - With 15 people: 15 * ( 15 - 1 ) / 2, or 105
- Going past a team consisting of a few people guarantees multiple problems at once:
  - [Communicating](mgmt-5_communication.md) to everyone at once becomes far more complex and time-consuming.
  - People won't feel like their contribution means much, so some members won't adequately perform their roles.
  - There will be unavoidable [personality](personality.md) [conflicts](people-5_conflicts.md), *especially* when trying to achieve group consensus.
  - The [corporate culture](groups-small.md) of large groups tends to generate enough [peer pressure](power-influence.md) that everyone will be more likely to resist [change](people-changes.md).
- If you expect your team needs more than 8 people, break apart the tasks into more explicitly-defined specializations.
  - You can make as many teams as you want, as long as your team *leads* communicate with each other.
  - However, the upper threshold of lead-to-lead interaction becomes its own limits: only have meetings with up to 4-8 team leads.

## Specific roles

Each role should have overlapping tasks with other people.

- Even if it's only a secondary task, everyone should have the freedom to *not* be the only person responsible for the results.
- To avoid [technical idiocy](https://gainedin.site/idiot/), try giving associated tasks that demonstrate the consequences or inputs of their dominant role (e.g., sales staff also makes a few followup calls).

Clarify each role with a full job description:

- Even if you're working informally with others you know personally beforehand, a job description clarifies expectations.
  - It's a lightly enforceable [contract](people-6_contracts.md) that keeps the manager safe from misunderstood expectations and the subordinate safe from coercion or abuse.
  - Frame job descriptions around necessary performance more than required skills.
- **Job title and duration** - the actual name of the role.
  - Look at other roles similar to what you need for inspiration, which may mean titling the role *last*.
  - While [title inflation](marketing.md) isn't uncommon, the roles should have a relationship to other roles.
  - It varies by industry, but there are often certain patterns of hierarchical authority (e.g., Coordinator < Supervisor < Director).
  - Contract workers are usually less committed than official employees, but can often be cheaper.
- **Summary statement** - 1-2 sentences that specify duties and who that person reports to.
  - It should be jargon-free and clearly summarize what the job involves.
  - If applicable, it should indicate the geographical region as well.
- **Benefits and pay** - the aspects of what you're providing in exchange for their work.
  - You save a *ton* of time by publicly specifying how much you're offering.
  - Give pay based on what the industry expects and they'll need, *not* what you feel they deserve or the rest of the budget.
  - If the pay is non-negotiable, give a precise number.
  - Make the pay a fixed range instead of a fixed amount to attract more talent.
  - If they're particularly talented, they will likely [negotiate more](jobs-6_negotiating.md) than you expected.
  - Pay more when the labor market becomes scarce.
- **Responsibilities** - specific functions and details about the role, which is usually the longest part.
  - Describes day-to-day tasks and supervisory elements of the work.
  - Clarifies the work environment and any specific expectations for that workplace.
  - Specify anything in particular that will be measured, which should be as close as possible to effectiveness in the role.
  - Typically also indicates who they're communicating with:
    - Customers
    - Public or internal workers
    - Suppliers
    - Supervisors
    - Departments
- **Requirements** - pre-existing conditions the applicant should have.
  - They should have core
  - A listing of specific machines, software, tools, and technical understanding.
  - Clarify any preferred or required education or technical background.
  - Indicate any cultural/attitude [personality](personality.md) requirements as well.
- If you want to get the point across, do *not* add other sections:
  - Team, Training and Support - should be covered under Benefits
  - Highlights - should be covered under Benefits
  - Our Culture - should be covered under Summary Statement or Benefits
  - Schedule - should be covered under Responsibilities
  - Our Values - should be covered under Requirements

## Scouting

There are several places to find new hires:

1. Via network, among the people you know.
   - Gives the least opportunities, but can create a more well-adjusted team because people like to [associate](people-4_friends.md) with others who are like them.
2. Over the internet with a job board.
   - Will require you to manually sift through dozens or hundreds of roles, though an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can help deduce candidates based on keywords.
   - Gives *tremendous* breadth, but very little depth.
3. Delegated to a placement agency.
   - They'll receive a commission if you hire them, but successful placement agencies will do a preliminary interview to see if you're a good fit.
   - It adds another party to the arrangement, which can make the hiring process more complicated (e.g., constraints from the [right to represent](people-6_contracts.md)).

Focus on growth, impact, and care when [marketing](marketing.md) the job:

1. Growth is essential for everyone's career self-interest, especially for young workers.
2. Impact is critical to give [meaning](meaning.md) to the work, especially for younger workers.
3. Care is important for everyone's personal self-interest, especially with older workers.

Don't pay a salary premium to compensate for a miserable workplace.

- Instead, devote at least some money to equipping them to have an easier time in the workplace (e.g., paying to keep equipment well-maintained).

## Interviewing

Every time you need to interview, improve your process.

- Focus on high-quality candidates over a larger quantity of them.
  - Draw from your personal network to find more loyal candidates.
- Use [personality](personality.md) tests to clearly demarcate what kind of person they are before you hire them.
- Unless it's *highly* specialized, focus more on motivation than skill.

## Deciding

Consider your own [personality](personality.md) when hiring.

- If you're extroverted, you'll draw out passive workers' performance better.
- If you're introverted, you'll give more stability to extroverted employees.
- If you find workers who are more [creative](mind-creativity.md) or [intelligent](understanding.md) than you, expect them to frequently prove you wrong.
- If you know someone will work harder than you, make sure they'll be well-paid (and possibly more well-paid than you).

While every potential candidate *could* do the job, aim for a [culture](people-culture.md) fit.

- A diverse range of demographics ([age](maturity.md), [gender](gender.md), [family composition](people-family.md), [political views](politics-conservativeliberal.md)) is guaranteed to generate more [creative solutions](mind-creativity.md), but at the risk of more [conflicts](people-5_conflicts.md).
- Diverse workplaces are *not* conducive to mindless tasks (e.g., factory work).
- Pay close attention to how a candidate interacts with current members or leadership, since *any* social friction will magnify itself later.
  - At the same time, a neurodivergent (e.g., [ASD](https://books2read.com/autism/), Cluster B) in many industries is literally *the* most diverse hire you can acquire.

Team involvement and great work aren't necessarily related.

- While every person's contributions might need interaction for handing off their completed work, not every task needs a team player.
- However, if it's a new team, it'll take a bit more work to assign roles for everyone, since [conventions](people-culture.md) haven't been established yet.

Every new person will dramatically change the group.

- Each member, even in an unimportant role, will dramatically shift everyone else's attitudes and thoughts.
- Group harmony with each other comes through everyone's shared [identity](identity.md), but group harmony *outside* the organization comes through how many demographics and contrasting [value systems](philosophy.md) are represented inside that group.

If you give intelligent, lazy people the role, they'll often find an easier way to do it.

## Onboarding

Once you've hired them, only drop a few tasks on them at first.

- Shave down the required training to the bare minimum necessary for them to start working.
- Too many tasks will ensure they become overwhelmed or develop bad habits (e.g., inefficient, sloppy).
- If they *must* have extra training to handle specific tasks, give them the skills for the low-effort tasks, then train specifically for more difficult tasks.

If possible, avoid on-the-job training.

- The intuition is that someone is getting paid while they're also learning.
- However, in practice someone is simply getting paid to learn, but with a *very* distracted [teacher](education.md).
- Save examples of what finished work typically looks like (both good and bad) or record videos of typical tasks (both good and bad), then use *that* as a teaching aide for the trainer.

If you only want workers to make long-term commitments, pay them for the training and then pay a bonus for them to quit.

- It may cost in the short-term, but will *dramatically* increases retention.

## Note any risks

Stay vigilant for *any* risks to the workplace culture:

- Bullying makes people fearful or resentful.
- Conceit sows disrespect among everyone.
- [Distrust](trust.md) is contagious.
- Antisocial tendencies make the rest of the group informally separate from that person.
- Laziness means nobody trusts that person, and will generally instill apathy with everyone else over time.
- Excessively communicating about private matters will make everyone else uncomfortable over time.
- Excessive low-channel communication (e.g., email, texting) inspire antisocial tendencies within others.

People tend to create workplace issues for several reasons:

- They're re-creating [personal family roles](people-family.md) and subconsciously drawing out others' unhealthy behaviors.
- They feel inadequate in their private life, so they seek revenge through their work.
- They believe they'll find [meaning](meaning.md) or [solutions](purpose.md) to their problems by controlling things beyond themselves.

## Don't micromanage

Your first impulse as a manager who sees problems will be to micromanage.

- While micromanagement can fix some things in the short-term, it creates an uncomfortable work environment.
- You may need to micromanage a low-skill team (e.g., fast food, construction), but [legitimate professionals](professionals.md) should *never* be disrespected over their free decisions.

The [personality disposition of a manager](mgmt-1_why.md) means you may easily err in overstepping your boundaries:

- Giving mandatory time for breaks, even when the work doesn't need people to work together or synchronize schedules.
- Asking for constant status updates, even when the work is hard to measure (e.g., [tech management](mgmt-2_projects-cs.md)).
- Forcing specific choice of words or prohibiting discussion about perfectly legal subjects.
- Prohibiting people from going where they're freely allowed to go (which is often legally defined as false imprisonment).

The solution to micromanagement is to take clear actions a few steps *away* from the problem:

- If someone is being rude, make that part of the company policy.
- When people cause undue burden on others, promote the harder workers.
- If a worker is power-mongering, give all new responsibilities to other workers.

## Firing

In general, don't jump to conclusions.

- If someone is under-performing they might have an attitude problem, but it may also be a [cultural](people-culture.md) misunderstanding.
- Sometimes, under-performance might be *your* failing as a manager, especially if it's more than one person.

There *are* specific actions that can be grounds for immediate termination.

- Malice toward anyone else.
- Completely unethical behavior (e.g., lying, theft).
- Inappropriate behavior to other team members or customers.

Other times, the situation can build up to a necessary termination or layoff.

- The role's needs and [personality](personality.md) of the person don't match.
- After repeated admonitions and warnings, they're not improving.
- Consistently disrespects and subverts the workplace culture.
- [Technology](technology.md) or industry changes has made their role no longer necessary.
- They're now old or disabled enough that the role is too physically demanding for them.

Do *not* fire someone on an impulse.

- Firing should be the last action of a long process.
  - A termination is the direct loss of an investment, with the added bad faith (and [risks](safety-riskmgmt.md)) that comes with someone forcefully terminated.
- Some people have bad days or [toxic arguments](people-5_conflicts.md), but one event alone is rarely enough that you should outright terminate them.
- If that worker has a [family](people-family.md), your termination will impact those people as well.
- Unless that person is completely unproductive, firing and rehiring for the role is typically more resource-intensive than [giving that person more motivation to work](mgmt-6_morale.md).
- In many places, firing someone may require you'll have to pay the government for their unemployment afterward.

Barring truly awful human behavior, you should *never* [want](purpose.md) for them to quit, but instead for them to [change](people-changes.md).

- Before firing them, try to motivate them to do better.
- Set reasonable and accommodating standards that apply to everyone equally.
  - If they don't rise to fair standards, it's harming *other* group members to accommodate their situation.
- If you need to, adapt pay incentives to performance-based measurements instead of simply time worked.

The absence of someone in a necessary role can create extra costs and burden:

- Missed deadlines and interrupted workflow.
- Damaged [reputation](image.md) of the team and organization.
- Whatever knowledge or systems that person exclusively controlled will need someone else to do the same.
- The extra stress can create more absences from other members.
- Depending how the person left, it can disrupt the group's harmony and potentially cause others to leave as well.

If someone is in a position of exclusive responsibility and may potentially leave, closely monitor *everything* they do during the prior weeks and months.

- Monitor every routine task they perform and every organization they interact with.
- If they leave and you *didn't* find out what they did first, you'll have much more work finding out exactly how they did everything.

Firing the wrong way will create *severe* [legal risks](legal-safety.md).

- Before you even approach an unpleasant or lazy employee for dismissal, acquire plenty of documented evidence ahead of time.
- Your organization's company policy *should* reflect at least some elements of how they're failing.
  - If you can't find anything, clearly and specifically make a new policy that indicates the new rules, then hold them accountable for what they do *after* the new rules.
- Keep multiple records from different angles that demonstrate their performance or attitude problems.
- Have multiple recorded times where you've discussed the same matter with them.

When approaching them about termination, unapologetically own what you must do.

- Say "I'm sorry, but I have to let you go", without any further explanation.
  - They don't care how much it hurts you.
  - If they want to know, they *do* deserve to hear why they're getting fired.
- If they try to argue, don't respond to it.
- Don't offer to do anything for them (they'll want you to give them the job back).
  - If you value their work and know someone in your network, give that referral outright.
  - If they were laid off, do whatever you can *before* approaching them to find work for them elsewhere.
- Have a witness during the conversation (preferably another manager) to ensure they don't make false claims over what you said.
  - It may seem patronizing, but is necessary.
  - Alternately, record them and ask for their consent to record at the beginning.
- Do *not* do anything condescending (e.g., escorting them to the door to make them look like a criminal).

If you've made a hiring mistake, learn from it and move on.

- Make your relationship with future candidates better than what you had.

If you keep letting go of qualified workers after projects terminate, consider a [project-based](mgmt-2_projects.md) hiring arrangement for future hires.