High Performance Teams: How a Shared Purpose Empowers Every Member to be a Leader

As an organization we have always strived to take two responsibilities very seriously:?

1. First, to bring in people to Soliton who share our focus on values, and
2. two, to create an environment that nurtures, encourages and empowers all to become well-rounded engineers and individuals.?

However, maximizing the potential of each individual goes beyond these two actions, especially in a hybrid, remote work environment. Our premise is that if we can identify, encourage and celebrate the conditions conducive to a high-performing team, we maximize the potential of every Soliton.?

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Meet Team Magnum Nexus?

Team Magnum Nexus has been working to improve and provide support for tools that enhance efficiency and address problems that engineers face during the post-silicon validation workflow. Since 2023, the team has been growing in size and has consistently delivered great value and delight to the customer. The team has always displayed a great sense of camaraderie and displayed not only a great level of commitment to their work, but also great satisfaction with their work. And so begs the question... what is that one big factor that has helped make this possible.?

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Clear, Shared Purpose and Goals?

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry?

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For the team, each sprint or goal must be aligned to the shared purpose. Says Tharun Sundar Balasubramanian, the Project Lead, “It’s my responsibility to take priorities from the customer and create monthly goals for the team. But when I take these monthly goals to the team, I have to explain why and how the monthly goals are aligned with our team’s shared purpose. If I can’t answer that, the meeting will have no meaning.”?

Getting to this level of clarity required the team to spend time defining the purpose till they could all agree on one shared definition of their purpose. “We still schedule a learning-cum-alignment session once a week to discuss how our monthly goals or milestones contribute towards our purpose. Why it is important, what makes more impact, etc. The idea is that the team can feel connected to the work when they can see their day-to-day tasks translating into the purpose,” says Teena Haldorai, the Project Manager and Soliton extraordinaire of the last 11 years.?

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An Empowered Team?

When every member of a team understands the larger purpose of the work they do, the team feels connected to not only their work but to their team members as well. The argument for a shared purpose to enhance team collaboration is not new. A clear and shared purpose allows members of a team to see how working together helps them achieve their shared purpose.???

We find that in the context of software development, while there is greater collaboration in teams that articulate a clear purpose, there’s also another impact that truly allows for each member to maximize their potential. Every member of the team feels empowered to make and question decisions. Says Teena, “If I lack a shared vision, it means that in the course of my work, I am dependent on someone else to make decisions for me. With a shared purpose, each member feels empowered to make decisions.”?

This empowerment of self raises every individual’s own participation in the project. The shared purpose is equally owned by all members of the team and so while everyone takes on a role and has their own expertise, each member shares an equal responsibility for the fulfillment of the purpose. Says Teena, summing it up quite nicely, “Every task or goal is validated by the whole team, not just one individual that is the Team Lead. And if I am deviating from that purpose, there is an empowered team who will highlight that I am deviating.”?

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This is the first of a series of articles we shall be covering within Soliton to explore different aspects that teams identify as a strong contributing factor to performing well, consistently. In our next article we explore how dedicating time to Innovation helped the team feel appreciated and collaborate well together.?