Building A Jigsaw Team

In this 6 part series, Raghu Raman, Former Soldier, CEO & Bureaucrat leverages his experience across diverse operating environments to discuss elements of leadership that are domain and industry agnostic and explains the ‘FutureSkills©’ that leaders will need to acquire in an increasingly VUCA World

- Raghu Raman

Building a resilient and passionately aligned team is the job of every leader. While there are several strategies for creating teams, they fall into two broad buckets — Uniform teams and Diverse teams.

Uniform teams, as the name implies, consists of people who have similar skill-sets and are ideal for tasks that are routine, modular, requiring consistency and standardization. Think of a BPO or a fast food franchise, whose competitive advantage is the ability to provide a similar experience and scale rapidly. In the army, such teams could be equated with Infantry battalions or Armored/Artillery Regiments who have more or less the same tasks, and will be required to work with other infantry battalions/regiments and hence uniformity and standardization allows rapid scaling.

Uniform teams are ideal when the task is clearly defined, the environment is fairly predictable and past knowledge is easily transferable. This is what allows a BPO to learn from one unit and quickly transfer that knowledge to other units or allows a fast food franchise to discern bestselling items on the menu and replicate that across all outlets.