Building Great Organizations, One Team at a Time!

One of the most common challenges within a large organization is driving change at all levels. This gets amplified within technical teams where complexities are endless and the need to support current systems is constant.?This quick guide provides four key steps that a technology leader can take in transforming their teams towards greatness.?And they can be done independent of the tools and technologies used.

1. Empower our Why
2. Know your Team
3. Mind the Gap
4. Build a Family

Empower our Why

Goals: One of the most important things a technology leader can do is understand the business and the importance of explaining product goals to their team. If the entire team understands?why?they are building a product and what problems it is trying to solve, then instead of one product manager identifying the solution, it is the entire team coming up with the best possible solution that is streamlined and customer centric.

Our goal as technology leaders should be to involve the engineering talent from the beginning stages of design while identifying the low hanging fruit that can provide value rapidly. This is especially important when we need to iterate quickly on a feature to identify an optimal solution. Providing a space for engineers to connect with business teams directly to understand market and use metrics to measure success of their products is the secret sauce to customer satisfaction.

Let’s say in an agile setting there is a need to quickly turnaround a feature that hasn’t been fully vetted. The best solution would be to have an engineer work directly with the product manager to iterate and provide a high-value solution. If a team isn’t using a scrum framework, it is still vital to have the development team work directly with their business partners. For example: it usually takes longer for an analyst to go through the process of submitting a request for new data elements vs. working directly with an engineer to come up with a solution while reducing rework. In either of these situations, the time to market reduces and the effectiveness of the overall team increases.

Know your Team

Listen: As leaders we are really busy, and we know that, and our teams REALLY know that. Yet, while we think about first impressions for each person on our team, they are thinking the same for us as their leaders. In the first few weeks and months, it is crucial to spend time with each person on the team to really understand their strengths and interests.

A Few key points:

• In one-on-one meetings look at their expressions and shift in excitement as they switch from one topic to another. Are they sharing information that they think you’d like or are they truly sharing what they are interested in?
• Take a moment to listen and understand what skills they have and want to learn.
• Ask questions to clarify and dig deeper to understand beyond the few sentences they have prepared to share with you.

This is not an easy task, especially when engineers haven’t had these conversations before but provide them space to articulate their thoughts.

Motivation: Secondly, we know that our internal motivation drives us to do many great things. Identifying intrinsic motivational factors for each person can help us align them to the appropriate vision and goals. For example: are they interested in learning a particular programming language or using a new technology, or have they worked with the same product and would like a new challenge? How comfortable are they with change? After having some of these conversations, take a note of their current role and if it aligns with their strengths and interests. Additionally, this information would also be useful when thinking about building or restructuring a team.

Mind the Gap

The hardest step in building great teams is to identify the gaps that exist within them. For example: if you are looking to build a new website and there aren’t engineers who have a full picture of all the pieces that go into powering a new website then there will definitely be some challenges. Additionally, in the case of building a new website you’d want to make sure that the team includes designers, UX & API developers, database architects, network & security engineers, etc. If there are missing skills, you’d want to augment those skills either by:

• Hiring new talent
• Borrowing team members
• Stretching a current team into that new role

If you took the time to know your team, you’d be able to identify the individuals who are willing and able to stretch into this new territory. It will allow you to connect them with additional coaches, mentors and SMEs across the organization. In this scenario, not only does the team member gain new expertise, but it allows us to grow our talent while improving employee satisfaction and team morale.

Let’s say you have all the right technical talent but see a need for someone to manage the work. In this scenario, finding a technical leader who can identify, chunk and prioritize the tasks in a sequence that leads to delivering a usable feature within a product will be important. This individual can take on the responsibility of managing the work while collaborating with partners. In an ideal scenario, a technical team has a leader who understands the product and its complexities and is able remove internal and external impediments as they arise. This is all possible when a leader is able to articulate and communicate clear roles and accountability.

Build a Family

Team Norms: If you’ve taken the time to know your team, this should already start to come together. Identifying and setting house rules such as being respectful, active listening and caring for each other are important values within a home and workplace. These values are a vital aspect of building an excellent team. Here is a question: What does your team’s “Sunday dinner” look like? Do they complain and share all the things which aren’t going right, or are they swapping fun stories and sharing new ideas to build a better future? Building a culture where team members can share freely in a constructive manner and discuss how they can do better next time is a game changer in many organizations.

Team interactions: A great culture is dependent on healthy team interactions. Think about these questions:

• Are the team members able to work with each other on complex challenges on a weekly basis?
• If there is an issue with an internal team member or external partner, do they feel empowered to talk about it?
• What is the maturity of your team? Do they come to you with every issue, or do they try to work amongst themselves and escalate only when needed?

Another difficult question for many leaders (but an important one): Are you allowing them to make tough decisions and supporting them if it doesn’t go as planned, or do you require them to come to you for every decision?

Trust and Support: Most technical teams require a support model either 24/7 or during usual business hours. This can come in the shape of subject-matter-experts on specific tools & technologies or supporting the current systems in production or production-like environments. Usually, the burden of these responsibilities falls on a few people. However, overall morale can be greatly increased if the tedious and not-so-fun part of the role is shared among the team members.

An important mindset in any technology team should be the ability to support what they’ve built. Stated differently, is the product or system stable enough for an engineer to support it single-handedly? Having a set up where each engineer can be on a rotation to take on that responsibility and learn over a period of time will drive a learning culture. Most likely it will take up to 3 months before everyone on the team is trained, however, setting up each team member to learn and grow will be crucial to its success. An added benefit of this will be a sense of community, trust, and partnership among the engineering talent.

Learning Culture: Most of us like to learn new skills and tips to do things more efficiently. This can be fundamental for a technical teams’ success to do their job effectively. So, another important question to the leaders: Are we providing our engineers enough time to gain new skills and allowing space where they can share those skills? Continuous learning usually gets neglected within a technical team as there is always one more production issue and one more fire to tackle. Let’s work with our business partners to prioritize new work while protecting learning time.

Bringing it all Together

Building a great team is just as much science as it is an art. By thinking about your collective why, learning about your team while identifying gaps, and building a community to support their vision you will be set in the right direction. If you have the luxury of building new teams, then it’s important to identify the key responsibilities for each role and what they will be accountable for. Additionally, to build trust and support within a team, identify key rotating responsibilities that each member can share.

Whether you are new to leadership or taking on a new team, the following questions will get you in the right mindset:

• Does every person share the same vision?
• Is each person’s role aligned with their strengths?
• What key skills are missing?
• What behaviors do you notice within their interactions?

These questions and four steps will help you identify key aspects of building great technical teams and can be extended to other groups. Each individual brings their strengths and skills to the organization, and it’s our responsibility to harness them into the right roles.