Remotely managing high-performance teams

Preface: Many get asked how they remotely manage high-performance teams, so I wanted to collect some thoughts down for sharing after a recent interview. This is my approach to leading highly technical teams performing close to their peak and how to help them become the best team they can be.

Managing a high-performance team, in general, comes with its challenges, from team culture, integration, productivity, and more, but compounded by the fact that for the majority of leaders, the team they are leading are now all sitting remotely and working from home. Here are some of my thoughts on how to remotely manage high-performance teams.

Engagement

Above all understanding, the level of engagement is critical for remote teams, but knowledge preferences for communications channels from the team members are also vital. I would recommend working with the team to develop a consensus on the best channels/mediums for engagement/communications at the team and individual levels.?

Do they preference video sessions, voice sessions, chat sessions?

Do they prefer structured vs. unstructured meetings??

What frequency do they prefer communicating at??

Outsides of meetings and one-on-one communication, thinking about how the group functions together are next. Work on developing collaborative practices for?documentation?and repositories to capture group practices, processes, tribal knowledge, etc. It should all be accessible in a centralized place, as looking over the shoulder or rolling the chair over is impossible remotely. While having multiple google sheets or documents that capture these things can be helpful initially, it soon becomes difficult to manage. I recommend something that can capture but the knowledge and practices while pointing out to other documentation. Some examples include confluence sites, OneNotebooks, Notion, and other knowledge base solutions.?

Another way to drive engagement is to enable group/individual?ownership?in initiatives. Develop a continuous improvement process so that team members can suggest improvements for team buy-in, individual/team group, and accountability for implementation. Ensure that there is follow-through on the projects and if they don't work as intended, use the?post-mortem process?to gather lessons learned for future process improvement.

Measuring Effectiveness

Delivering on business process requests and projects are a required part of the job, but can you demonstrate to business leaders how your helped enable their business projects? How is security working with other groups to become part of their processes vs. a last-minute requirement?

• Engagement from security groups in the business processes (i.e., does it help shorten the ideation or development time by having security engagement from the beginning vs. coming in later in the cycle)
• Number of items (tasks, stories, projects)completed in a given period (spring, month, quarter) scored by person and/or averaged by team size
• Number of outstanding vulnerabilities and exception, plus trend over time

Look for ways to measure the impact/improvements on the business processes instead of just counting the number of tasks that the team might have completed or the time used.?

Balancing innovation/experimentation in an productionalization environment?

Another aspect of helping to drive improvements is the ability to deliver innovations into the business or experiment with new solutions. While some environments might have the flexibility of having separate production and staging environments, those running in a DevOps like Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) focus on delivering incremental changes fast while detecting and recovering from failures quickly.?

In DevOps environments, this can allow your team to find new ways to innovate and drive process improvements. However, they should understand the impact of the changes (upstream/downstream), think about critical systems and processes and potential customer impacts. As part of this, they should have developed strategies for testing/rollback plans, and if the risks are too high, ensure it is tested and validated in another environment first or can be rolled back rather quickly.

Balancing leading, inspiring, and experienced engineers

As a leader, you will have the honor of working with highly talented individuals. While it is your responsibility to drive the strategies for delivering on the team mission, it will be the responsibility of your team and their skills and expertise to accomplish that.?

Work to find ways to remove the blockers for your team and the individuals on your team. These blockers could affect their performance or occupy their time on less productive tasks.?

Understand their action plan for tackling challenging problems rather than defining how they are to be done. Ensure that you ask clarifying questions if you are unsure why they choose to do something or are uncomfortable with the approach. Continually becoming a micromanager or dictator is likely to decrease team performance and morale in the long run.?

By thoroughly understanding their plans, actions, and rationale, you can provide top cover from other leaders who might question their approach. Ensure that the team is also aware of the macro events occurring throughout the company. Macro knowledge of the company provides them with an increased contextualized understanding of the environment and any potential optics of an internal project on other groups.?

Each team dynamic and composition is unique; while some recommendations might apply to some teams or environments, they might not be suited for all. Use your leadership to determine how you want to lead your team.?

Additional resources to consider

https://www.stepsize.com/blog/3-most-important-metrics-for-engineering-team-performance

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/08/27/measuring-engineering-productivity-at-gitlab/

https://ctocraft.com/blog/want-to-measure-the-performance-of-your-engineering-team-heres-how/

https://venturebeat.com/2021/07/18/use-these-metrics-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-engineering-team/

https://www.cloudbees.com/blog/measuring-engineering-efficiency