TeamX: This Is Starting to Feel Like a Movement
Reflections from our TeamX™ Community June MeetUp
Last week we brought the TeamX community together in London for the second time (the tube strikes didn’t stop us!) The community is about bringing together a group of people who care deeply about teams, about people, and about what it actually feels like to work in the tech industry.
It’s not overly structured or polished. It’s more about starting a conversation and seeing where it goes. Seeing everyone bounce ideas and discuss in an informal way is just brilliant.
What stood out this time wasn’t planned, the conversation naturally kept coming back to what we’re building at Amplified. They wanted to challenge it, shape it, and make it better. That’s was just mind blowing!
This feels like it’s becoming something bigger. There’s a level of energy, openness, and willingness to lean in that you don’t see very often. People questioning things, building on each other’s ideas, and genuinely engaging in where this could go.
A few things that came up . . .
It wasn’t just the energy though, there were some really consistent threads in what people were saying.
Speed and action came up a lot
There’s a bit of fatigue with traditional engagement surveys. Too slow and disconnected from what’s actually happening. And not enough real follow-through.
What people leaned into was the idea of being able to understand what’s going on in a team and do something about it straight away (rather than the annual survey tucked away in a drawer somewhere.)
Everything kept coming back to teams
It felt pretty unanimous that performance comes from how a team functions, not just how individuals perform. And yet most organisations are still set up the other way around. Measuring, rewarding, thinking at an individual level. There’s a shift needed there.
There’s a gap
Right now it’s either big company-wide culture surveys, or individual sentiment tools. But neither really captures what’s actually going on day to day, inside a team. That middle layer, where work actually happens, is where the conversation kept landing.
“High performance” isn’t always what it looks like
Teams can be hitting numbers and still feel off. Teams are fragile and hard to sustain during tough times. There was a shared view of what “good” should look like instead: something more stable, repeatable, and genuinely team-owned.
And leadership came into it more than expected
Particularly around vulnerability. One of the biggest blockers is still leaders feeling like they need to have all the answers. But equally, one of the biggest opportunities is leaders who are open enough to say they don’t have all the answers, and want to improve.
Output: Helping to develop the Team Maturity Model
The first TeamX meetup 6 months previous had resulted in a conversation around developing a Team Maturity Model. Thanks to Jamie McDonnell for helping shape this further from this discussion. The model provides a roadmap for how teams can move through different stages of maturity. These team stages are:
- Emerging
- High Potential
- High Performance
- Exceptional: This level represents a team that is consistently high performing for at least 18 months.
We will create a toolkit of accelerators to help teams move through the stages.
A Word of Thanks
What an incredibly special group of people this is. We feel overwhelmed by the passion, energy, openness, and richness in conversations.
Given that we’re all from different backgrounds and roles, we’re all shaping how to improve how teams work, and actively helping to build something better. That’s what TeamX is all about.
Thank you so, so much for being part of it,
Vic, Linds, Pip, and Harry
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