I have been working with engineering teams that do both consumer-facing product development and engineers-facing internal tool development and gained experience right from working as an entry-level engineer to lead a small team and build a team from scratch. I thought it is worth sharing my experiences in building teams, fostering a team culture, and ultimately delivering high-performance execution. To build a successful team, as a leader it is essential to understand the business first, this covers the ‘Why’ part and then ‘What’ it takes to accomplish the business results. ‘What’ and all have to be done takes more precedence over “How”, because ‘How’ is something you should be able to trust your teams to act upon independently and responsibly. This blog is about my experiences in building such teams that you can trust by default to take care of the ‘How’ in your execution.
Start with the mission statement
This statement essentially explains the purpose of the existence of the team. This statement must be concise in its explanation and must align with the vision of the organization. One of the most challenging and very important roles of a leader is to convey this mission statement clearly to people at all levels in the team. Mission explains the ultimate result that is expected from the team. Inculcate a sense of responsibility and make your team think about what can they do to make this mission successful.
Define SMART goals
Once the mission statement is ready, the next step is to break down things to do precisely,
I’d like to explain my shortcut to define Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Time-bound goals. All the goals that I define will go through the WHY loop that I have placed below. As a result, I get goals that satisfy the SMART standard.
The WHY loop
do ask WHY
{
refine “goal definition”
}
while (desiredResult = derived)
KPIs / Metrics
Identify strategies to accomplish your goals and metrics to monitor your progress and performance continuously. Set metrics that act as drivers to keep your executions on track. Sometimes these are available in the form of Signals and Indicators,
For instance, Burndown is a straightforward indicator that you can assess to understand if the execution is healthy or if there is burnout in the team. Monday blues are signals that tell you something about the engagement.
In addition to metrics for monitoring, Identify metrics for mentoring that give insights about the quality of work and the craftsmanship of the engineers. Coach your team continuously towards mastering software craftsmanship.
At the same time, create necessary abstractions of metrics for different levels, not everyone at every level in your team has to understand all your metrics. Abstract metrics in such a way that people at the different levels are measured not just by metrics but by what they do and how they do it, ensure your metrics are celebrated in terms of quality of work and teamwork but not by mere numbers.
The below chart has some of the topics around which metrics are collected for an engineering team. Engineers have to be made aware and accountable for the metrics that apply to them at their level. This sets a clear focus and helps the team implicitly align to the overall execution of the mission.
Note: The chart placed below is not very comprehensive and is with high-level metrics for demonstration only. The depth of metrics might differ for different organizations.
Career Path and Growth
Everyone aspires to have a career that drives them on a promising path of industrial relevance, sustained growth, and balanced compensation. As a leader, you should have a clear definition of growth for your team. What is the game all about and what one can become in the next 3 years, 5 years,10 years, and in the long run? What are your plans to evolve the role as the industry evolves? When defining the career matrix, keep both the business demands from that role and what the industry in general demands from that role. Define a role that is both closely relevant to the industrial evolution and the business demands. Growth means being both relevant to the industry and the business needs at the same time and being able to adapt to the changes happening around. An imbalanced role definition might end up creating people who might become successful players of very selective games. A balanced role definition and career matrix should make people learn the game stage by stage and play at successive levels successfully.
Fostering a team culture
What gets often appreciated in a team becomes the team culture. Often appreciate things that you want to become the team’s culture. Publish failures, encourage continuous learning, celebrate success, peer appreciations, and above all everyone in the team should be able to criticize and point out if something could have been handled better. Accepting failures and setbacks as a learning opportunity should be finely ingrained in everyone’s mindset. Culture largely depends on mindset-related traits and it is very tricky to train an entire team towards having a common mindset, personally, everyone may be different but when it comes to a team all must be aligned to the growth mindset.
Set the team for synergy — Synergy happens when strengths in the team are compounded and weaknesses in the team are compensated by each other.
Set up a clear workflow, work protocols, and work status ownership
Find strengths and make your team play to their strengths
Communication and decision are the key responsibilities
Align the priorities across stakeholders
Construct a comprehensive feedback loop within the team and across teams
Keep Focusing on Results
All of the above arrangements achieve the desired results and keep continuously aligning the execution towards results. Results are not one time, if you start making results then keep focusing on improving it and sustaining it.
Psychological Safety
Do not hesitate to make your people uncomfortable, because you have to do it to strengthen them just like how a trainer in the gym would do. A gym trainer’s duty is to make you uncomfortable and strengthen you, but the trainer also ensures that you are ‘safe’. There is a clear difference between keeping people comfortable and safe. As a people manager, it becomes your responsibility to ensure your people are psychologically safe while going through several uncomfortable learning curves.
Encourage a deep learning culture, no urge to prove oneself, understanding the game, and the level play. Growth happens automatically.
To ensure psychological safety for the team, in the first place the leader should be an expert practitioner of it. How can one practice it effectively, the idea is simple “whatever you need in life are things most of the people would need and whatever you don’t need are things most of the people also wouldn’t need” If you want sustained growth in the career, wealth, prosperity and good health, make efforts to earn them constructively and also ensure the same for your team members. If you do not want failures, frustrations then your team members also do not want them.
Take genuine care of your people and put people first. It is not a coach’s primary responsibility to chase results, the primary thing is to coach your team about the game, equip them with all the resources to win the game, and let your team take the responsibility of winning the results. In this way, you can actually build long-lasting teams.
Nothing is personal
When it comes to management, nothing is personal! Agreements, disagreements, negotiations, conflicts, quarrels, disappointments, excitements, nothing should be taken personally. Everything is conducted for the sake of business and the business is what ultimately binds everyone together as a team or as an org or as whatever group that matters. It’s much easier said than done, but make conscious efforts to keep all emotions outside business communications.
Never judge anyone, always give the benefit of the doubt.
At the same time, you don’t always have to try to be nice to everyone around you. When there are people problems and complaints, always look at all sides of the problem, actively listen to everyone involved, take time to understand what went wrong and what could have been done better, communicate the gaps clearly to everyone involved, talk to people involved one-on-one, try to understand things from every single person’s perspective and give feedback about their mistake constructively and assertively. Create opportunities to learn from their mistakes. Despite, there is no improvement, do not hesitate to let go of people who aren’t aligning and sharing the same level of enthusiasm and team spirit. Because unhappy people in the team create ripple effects and it’s very unsafe for the synergy of the team.
Lead from your heart!
The most important responsibility of leadership is ‘decisions and communications’. And these two become costlier as you move up the ladder i.e., every decision and communication a leader makes has a huge impact on people at different levels below. (Though flat hierarchies are being practiced by organizations, let’s assume that there are still levels based on responsibilities and span of control) Being or becoming a leader is totally based on how responsible you are and the titles, entitlements, designations, etc. have no value if you’re not in a position to make informed decisions and directions on time. Having set up all of the above, the next greatest challenge is sustaining this setup and showing continuous success! Believe it or not, you are creating a lifetime impression in everyone who is reporting to you. I don’t think people will easily forget a manager who they worked with. I have never forgotten any of my good and bad times with my managers. So create good times and everlasting impressions that one could definitely remember and cherish forever!
I have been fortunate to work with many best minds in my present and past experiences. I owe the entire learning and several philosophies that I discussed here to my leaders and my team members whom I have worked with so far. Freshworks gave me the first opportunity to be a manager and I’ve had several opportunities to work with many best leaders who inspired and groomed me to be what I am today at Freshworks largely.
Disclaimer: This is a personal blog. All the views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of organizations that I am associated with.
