The Biggest Challenge of Team Work

Notice how I wrote “team work” and not “teamwork.” I mean the act of working as a team. That’s the topic.

I spent a great deal of my life as an individual contributor, and also as someone who tends not to “want to bother anyone” and thus does it myself. That’s not how organizations work. In fact, that’s the fastest way to make a mess of big goals and intentions is to try and hold onto everything.

Team Work is a Team Sport

You know how to do what you know how to do. The challenge becomes knowing how to work with a team to accomplish goals and move the ball forward. There are points to consider at all levels.

At the executive level, one of my realizations is that whenever I ask someone about some facet of the business, I run the risk of having them think I’m criticizing their work. If I say, “Who wrote the website copy on our Solutions page?,” it might come off as a negative tone, so I have to add, “I really like how they put it.”

The other risk of me peeking over someone’s shoulder such as it were is that they’ll accidentally place extra emphasis on a project or facet of their work because they might interpret my inquiry as an indicator of heightened importance. I might just be poking around.

At the team lead level, there’s a risk of people wanting to prove their individual prowess when what’s most necessary is that they develop the team they’re leading. It’s very hard to be both a leader and a contributor, and while I personally feel the best leaders can do the job they’re managing, it’s a lot more important that they learn the skills to develop stronger team members instead of stress and emphasize their individual ability.

You Have to Allow a Little Bit of “Danger”

As a kid, I was absolutely the “touch the stove” kind of child. “Don’t touch the stove right now. It’s very hot.” My mind would think: “how hot?” And I’d end up with a nice red burn and a lot of first hand knowledge.

In work, sometimes you might see a team or team member headed towards a result that will be less than optimal. Do you offer a course correction? Or do you let them bump into the wall?

You probably already know the answer has to be an “it depends” kind of affair. Why? Because if the issue might impact customer satisfaction, that might be one to head off at the pass. If the issue might mess up a lot of other team’s timelines, you might cut that one off early, too. But if it’ll result in a smaller dent or a little accident along the way? Well, sure. Let it happen.

There’s NOW and There’s “As We Grow”

Appfire, for instance, is growing. It’s almost strange to type that given the ways of the world right now. But we’re growing and we’re angling for what it’s going to take to be an even bigger and more complex organization. That means we’ll need more leaders, more integration points, the ability to work on complex interactions that involve multiple teams.

Luckily, that’s also the core of the products we build. We sell apps that help developers and teams plan and deliver their best work. Given that, we think a lot about the work of teams around here. If you make decisions with this in mind, you have to think quite often “as we grow.”

As we grow, who will handle this?

The “Let’s Check With Mom and Dad” Problem

I showed up at Appfire right as we went from around 150 people to over 500 in a very very short time. I came in to help augment the capabilities of the Executive Leadership Team, nurture the strategic growth of the company, and to help us get to our big goals. One challenge in going from a smaller company to a more enterprise-shaped solution, is that people are used to checking in with the bosses often.

The CEO tends to get dragged into a lot of decision points because that’s how it was always run. Anyone else in leadership gets the same experience. Everything tries to float up. But that’s not a great use of anyone’s resources.

Instead, the challenge of team work is that we all have to empower decision making at the closest-to-the-front level at all times. Executives and senior leadership exist for keeping the vision and strategy to reach that vision top of mind. Everyone else should feel empowered to make decisions and to learn how to get guidance without escalating. That’s the goal in these situations everywhere. We sure work at it here.

Team Work is a Team Sport

As organizations grow, one detail that’s a bit challenging is to let go of certain aspects of your position and let others handle it. You might have been the keeper of thirty different functions, but as it turns out, your role going forward often revolves around parsing out all but eleven or so of your tasks to others. THAT is tricky. Especially if you associate yourself and some part of your identity with those efforts, it might prove hard to surrender those tasks and develop people to grow.

Finally, that last point bears a little emphasis. As a team leader, there are two basic “above all else” duties you own: make your team work well with others (the stakeholders who count on your output), and develop your team members to excel not only at their roles, but encourage potential growth of your top performers.

If you’ve ever been the top performer, you’ll know that leaders hate and often refuse to do this little duty. They don’t want to lose their #1 player to some other team, so they lock you in place. That means that if you want to grow, one way you do it is to stop being the #1, which of course is a poopy way to have to handle that. The only way out of this is to encourage team leaders that the system and the team are what develop #1 players, and that it’s not the individual; it’s the process.

That’s how I see it anyway. You?