I made a comment to a coworker today about creating a “farm team” for our company. This weekend I watched my FIRST EVER (!) professional soccer game. Way better than I thought it was going to be. The team I was watching was the feeder team for the Seattle Sounders, the Tacoma Defiance. (BTW: forgive me for lingo mistakes – noob in the house). My comment to my coworker was that we have overlooked the importance of creating our own farm team. Like others, we tend to hire people to fill relatively advanced roles and then, guess what, those people leave. When they leave there is a hole in the team that we try to fill with somebody of equal experience. BUT (with one “t”) what if we could reorganize our teams just a bit so we had people ready to call up. In our case It would mean we would intentionally create a group of relatively inexperienced people who would be coached up through mentorship and experience to take on other roles. Not revolutionary you say? The concept might not be, but the difference is in the execution. There’s more here than a single post can cover, but let the concept marinate. Your spark plug team members will leave at some point. What if we could reduce the morale and productivity hit by intentionally reorganizing our team structures?