Building Strong Teams and Creating Leaders

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Over an extended career in technology, I've worked within large organizations and startups managing large teams or building them from scratch...below is a punch list of some of the best practices in team management and growth strategy that I've come across or learned that work effectively in creating healthy and highly functioning teams.

All opinions are my own and I'm still learning. I love building teams, growing organizations and am always ready for a coffee meeting!

Autonomy

The ability to operate with a sense of self-management extracts the best out of a team member and typically enables them to demonstrate the core reasons why you hired them. Organizations with employees that are able to define their own day without undue input tend to produce higher quality of work and are setup to succeed as leaders in the long term.

Top Tip: Be conscious of where aspects of micro-management are creeping into the employee’s day to day and potentially infringing on productivity. Actively take steps to alleviate undue tasks or inputs ensure a team member is free to achieve their holistic objectives.

Understand the business

Absolute table-stakes for any employee. With the goal of hiring and fostering both objectivity and productivity within a team, it’s imperative that everyone understands the core business model of their organization.

Top-Tip: At a minimum, organize lunch and learns to walkthrough how the organization makes money and the markets at which it operates in. Outline who the main competitors and what are the KPIs that individuals, teams and the organization can strive towards that moves the needle.

Operate at a level above

At performance review time, the ideal outcome for managers when considering promotions is to be able to point to demonstrable performance metrics and behaviors of someone already operating at a more senior level.

The decision to promote should be easy.

Top-Tip: An effective strategy to ensure that there is enough opportunity for a colleague’s growth is to ask them to visualize and operate at the level above where they currently are in the organization. Actively walkthrough the expectations of. the role one level above their level and use that as the goal post for assessing performance.

Managing for growth

Every person in a company has a career trajectory and knowing how to best compliment that for a team member takes a degree of strategy and careful communication. Not getting this right will ensure that new hire won’t be around for long. 

Top-Tip: Have a short (~3-6 month) and long term (~1-2 years) strategy for each team member in your organization that compliments a formal HR personal growth document and enables team members to thrive within a team. Include soft skills and core capabilities that that team member should strive to gain or become an expert in within those timeframes.

Don’t skimp on ensuring an excellent first impression

On-boarding new employees really well requires a well executed strategy and ensuring an excellent first impression for a new team member is no different than meeting someone for the first time. First impressions are everything, even for companies.

Top-Tip: A very high level plan should include:-

• A plan for each new team member across increasingly growing granularities from day 1 through to 6 months.
• A ‘buddy’ team member to help that person through common tasks as they start to become more capable
• An informal meeting, scheduled weekly with an open-agenda where both boss and new team member can use the time to build rapport and navigate through any questions as they come up.

* This tip could be whole post on its own but one must have is to monitor and collect feedback from each new team member as they complete that 1 month and 6 month journeys to ensure a consistent experience but to also improve as you go.

Maintain a cross-functional environment

The ability for any team member to gain exposure to working with colleagues from other business domains or cohorts is an important growth ingredient and greatly expands perspective, driving understanding and empathy outside of their own domain. 

Top-Tip: Where possible design work objectives around a cross-functional team structure and be thoughtful about what the team member is going to get out of each experience working on a certain project or initiative. Over the long run, your organization will be greatly empowered by colleagues with multiple domain perspectives.

Freedom from fear

It goes without saying that extracting the most value and effective collaboration from team members works in conjunction with ensuring that they feel psychologically safe in the work environment which includes the freedom to express themselves professionally and even make mistakes. You’ll never get the best out of a team if there is a lingering fear or vulnerability.

"We can easily forgive a child when they are afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light" - Plato

Top-Tip: In the same arena as ensuring role autonomy, take active steps to build camaraderie and general rapport across the team by organizing team social events and work-related presentations where colleagues can build confidence and trust through smaller group audience participation. For Software Engineers this might be presenting technical solutions to one another or for Designers holding walkthroughs of a creative brief without the client in the room.

Built-in variation

The sense of being pigeon-holed or work inflexibility can often drive talent away, leave projects open to resource constraints and limit the talent pool within any organization.

Great talent is hard to find, don't drive them away.

Top-Tip: Look for avenues to vary what individuals work on over time, even when impending key deliverables make that more difficult. One method is to allocate major and minor responsibilities (with real accountability and deliverables) to each team member or allocate time for people to shadow each other, learning new areas of the business, up-skilling in a new technology or domain as they go. 

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Thanks for taking the time to read this...always interested in sharing thoughts and continuous learning, especially in the area of building more effective teams and organizations.

Let's grab coffee!