Vanity Naming

Copying the nomenclature from Spotify, Holacracy or Amazon became a trend in the recent years. Companies are renaming departments into "tribes", teams to "units" and "squads". Unfortunately quite often that it's all about the naming only: company operating model has to look up-to-date in the job listings and at a next conference where the CTO is giving a talk.
Vanity Naming - Teamleadsky
How does this anti-pattern impact the team?
  • Impact
    Team members get disengaged from trying to introduce modern ways of working in the organization for real. They understand that the management does not take such initiatives seriously.

    This anti-pattern impairs the ability of the team to Learn and discover it's way to better performance.
How can you spot this anti-pattern?
  • Signals
    • We have Engineering, Marketing and Product tribes."
    • "Aligning Design squads with the Scrum team sometimes does not go that smoothly…"
    • "Peter was assigned the Rep Link role by the CPO."

    These signals are the "red flags", that indicate it is worth taking a closer look to check whether the anti-pattern is present.
Written by Alex
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