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Team Patterns

Form a team that works well together.

Methods for anyone building or running a team. The cards cover starting a team on purpose, agreeing roles and structure, working across team boundaries, building trust and using conflict well, checking team health, working remote and hybrid, and growing or changing the team. A final suit offers retrospective formats that stay fresh and lead to real change.

58 cards · 8 suits · 9 recipes · 6 missions

What's inside

• Form7Did this team start on purpose?
• Shape7Is it clear who owns what?
• Connect7Can you work with other teams without friction?
• Trust7Can people speak up and disagree safely?
• Pulse7Have you checked the team's health recently?
• Apart7Does the team work well when apart?
• Grow7Will the team survive its next change?
• Retros9Does the team learn from its last cycle?

A few cards

Form

Real Team Test

Before you build a team, check the work actually needs one.

Connect

Mirror Check

Your system will copy your org chart, so design teams and architecture together.

Pulse

Health Check Grid

Let the team score its own health on a handful of dimensions, then watch the trend rather than the snapshot.

One card in full

Grow

Onboarding Buddy

Pair each newcomer with a peer, not their manager, who answers the questions they would rather not ask the boss.

New people carry dozens of small questions: where things live, who to ask, whether it is all right to leave at five. Many feel silly asking their manager. A buddy is a peer whose job, for a few weeks, is to be easy to ask.

How to use it

1. Choose a buddy from the same team who is not the newcomer's manager and has been around long enough to know the unwritten rules.
2. Give the buddy time: lighten their load for the first few weeks, and say so openly.
3. Agree a simple plan: a welcome on day one, a short daily check-in for the first week, then weekly for a month.
4. Give the buddy a list to cover: tools, people, rituals, how decisions really get made.
5. At the end, ask both what was missing and add it to the list.

Example

A hospital ward could pair a newly qualified nurse with an experienced colleague on the same shift pattern, who shows them round, introduces the doctors and checks in after each shift for a fortnight.

Watch out

• Using the buddy instead of the manager. Goals, feedback and performance stay with the manager.

Share the useful parts of the hiring First-Week Handover with the buddy. Then run a Mini Re-Kickoff and swap a Personal User Manual each.

Recipes

• Across The Clock: Find the shared hours, move everything else into writing, give each kind of message a home and a speed, level the hybrid call, and save travel for what distance makes hard.
• After It Went Wrong: Learn from a project that failed or left people bruised, without the session turning into a hunt for someone to blame.
• Day Zero Team: Confirm the group needs to be a team, then give it a written purpose, a shared start, its own rules and a first read on where it stands.
• Half-Hour Remote Retro: Run a remote retro in thirty minutes that still ends with clear, owned actions.
• Project Wrap Retro: Close a project by retelling its story, sorting what it taught you, testing it against your charter and taking the lessons into the next one.
• Smooth The Handoffs: Find where work bounces between people or gets redone late, and agree the few fixes to make first.
• Stale Retro Rescue: Reset the tone with good faith, change who runs the retro and how, try a fresh picture, keep only two owned actions, and track the team's health between sessions.
• Thaw The Silence: Measure how safe it feels to speak, have the lead go first, share the floor, and give disagreement rules and names so it can surface.
• Untangle The Seams: See how team boundaries shape the work, find the waits that hurt, agree what each team is and how teams relate, publish it, and settle stuck disputes by a known route.

Missions

• Open a role: from "we need someone" to a scorecard, a pay band, a job ad and an interview loop, ready to publish.
• Charter a new team: from a list of names to a chartered team with working agreements, clear owners, a published team API and a first health baseline.
• Mediate a clash between teammates: from two colleagues working around each other to a prepared joint conversation, changes they both agreed and one new team habit for handling tension.
• Revive the retro: from "the same retro again" to a format chosen for the moment, a room where people speak, and two owned actions checked at the next one.
• Settle in a new teammate: from an accepted offer to a ninety-day plan with agreed success, a briefed buddy, a team restart, check-ins at set points and a better welcome for the next person.
• Write up an incident: from a raw timeline, chat log and alerts to a blameless post-mortem with impact, contributing factors, what went well and owned follow-ups.

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