The First Small Thing

Every team has a way of doing things. How meetings run, how decisions get made, what happens when work gets stuck. When you join a team, you learn those things so you can get on with the work. After a while, they can stop feeling like choices anyone made. They’re just how work works.

The trouble is that the way a team works can keep going long after the circumstances that shaped it have changed. People come and go. Customers change. Products and codebases grow. Teams move offices, go remote, and then return again. A process that made sense at a time can stop making sense. If the org doesn’t have the muscle to contend with those pains, then they are addressed long after they start hurting.

Most people experience process as something that happens to them. A reorg, a new customer, a new priority: suddenly the way the team works is different, and you may not have had much say in it. You may not be able to control those bigger changes, but you can have some agency in how your team responds. And if you’re a leader, helping create that feeling of agency is part of your job.

One way you can start is by paying attention to how the team works, not just what it delivers. That means making it possible for people to flag problems early, talk about what’s working, and try a small adjustment without treating it like a grand transformation. The point isn’t to change things just to change them. It’s to take responsibility for how the team works and why and to help build the muscle to respond when circumstances shift.

So this is a series of 52 small things you or your team can try, one each week. While some will be focused towards technology teams, many of the prompts are generic enough for anyone to try. Some are personal prompts to reflect on how you work. Some are small changes to things like how you run standup. Eventually, I’ll ask you to get the team itself involved. They’re meant to be small enough to try without turning them into a major initiative.

These small practices won’t make every workplace problem easy to solve. But they can help a team get better at noticing what needs attention, taking ownership where it can, and adapting when things change. That’s part of creating the conditions for healthy teams.

I hope that after a few months, you’ll have more than a list of things you tried. I hope you’ll see that you can influence how your team works, that you can talk about what’s working and what isn’t, and that trying a small change doesn’t have to be a big, scary commitment.

And maybe you’ll start to notice more of what’s working, too. When a team pays attention to how it works, it has more chances to understand what helped, celebrate it, and carry it forward.

Don’t spend any time thinking about what you would change, how to fix it, or even whether the meeting should be canceled. Just reflect on the questions and write your thoughts down somewhere. For this first week, the goal is simply to notice.