Arian, Author at arian-celina.com

Taking over a team, what should you do?

As team leaders, chances of us taking over a team rather than creating a new one are higher. When taking over a new team, I have found very useful to go through several steps to find out some information before moving forward.

As a baseline, I first want to state what is important for me at this stage, so the next steps make more sense to you. I believe that some characteristics must be present in a team to make teamwork possible, and one of the most crucial one for me is communication. If there is no open and clear communication, then you are opening the doors to all sorts of problems, starting with misunderstandings to not delivering any work. So let’s go through my observation points:

Communication

This is the most important one for me and the key to all the successes or failures in the team. It is of vital importance to understand and define the communication means the team feels most comfortable with. Some do prefer verbal communication (this is also my preference when the team is on site) and some do like more written communication, especially when part of the team is remote. From experience, a mix of both, a hybrid communication works pretty well. It maintains the human touch as well as leaves chance for missing or remote people to stay informed as well.

Team dynamics

I believe every team has an individual spirit. That is not individuals, but the group acting together. It is like a one way hash of the team. It is like that as if you remove one person from the team, or if you ad one, the team spirit is different, so the hash changes. The team dynamics tell you how well the currents in the team flow. How well do the team members communicate and get along with their teammates? Who dominates, who leads, and who is the strong influencer? Who is more silent and needs help to get heard and who maintains the balance of the team? Finding answers to these questions will help you determine where and how should your focus be directed to try to get the team to an optimal performance level,

Individuals in the team

Although the team spirit is super important, individuals in the team are as important as the former. Every team member has their unique personality, therefore, their influence on the team is individually different. Ignoring one team member may result in breaking the whole team dynamics. One needs to continuously foster and maintain the individual relationship with every team member. One thing that helps this a lot is having 1 on 1 meetings regularly to check how they feel about the team, is there anything that can be improved or changed that can contribute to having a better engagement or more interesting experience.

Strengths and weaknesses of team members

To take the team to an optimal performance level, I find it of utmost importance to fine-tune or calibrate the way individuals contribute to the team. Every individual has strengths and weaknesses. The importance is to engage them on things they are best at while allowing their teammates to cover on their weaknesses. This contributes to people feel better as they perform best when they do the things they feel most strong at. One might argue that we should push our teammates to improve on their weaknesses, and yes, I agree, but remember, the focus of this post is on improving team performance, there will be another post on helping individuals thrive 😉

Conclusion

When you take over a team which is already established, it is not an easy task to find out how to behave best so you improve the team performance and do not decrease it. My usual approach in these cases is to take my time, usually for a sprint, and do nothing except observe these characteristics. After I create the picture in my head, then I start approaching individuals to find out more about them and complete the picture. It is this time when I create a list of things that need to improve and start acting on improving what needs to be improved and reach a fluent delivery cycle.

Do you have a different experience or opinion? I’d like to hear about it. Please share it with us.

How to unleash employee creativity

How we do it?

This initiative firstly started as a Hack Day for developers. Then we renamed it to “10 percent time” so it can be more inclusive to other profiles that are part of our department, such as UI & UX designers, PMs, and POs. We spend every second Friday of the month by doing something other than work related stuff, something that would in one way or another help us learn something new. Sometimes we do an online course, test that new version of a library we use every day, evaluate a new framework or even learn a new programming language. Beginning of the day we do a joint stand up where we share our plans for that day with other participants. Sometimes someone likes somebody’s idea and we join forces for that day to create something awesome. By the end of the day, we gather together and share what we have created and what did we learn. Some do a demo, some showcase their code and some just summarize their learnings. During this sharing session often people get the inspiration for their next hack day, or sometimes we realize that a presented idea could be of a benefit for the company to grow as a project and we pitch it to our colleagues and management.

What did we do during these days?

During the previous Hack Day, one of my colleagues did create a simple NodeJS CRUD API as she wanted to learn NodeJS. On the other side, as I usually do backend stuff, from time to time I am quite interested to learn things about frontend. For a long time, I wanted to learn Vue.js, so I volunteered to create the frontend for that API. During those few hours of coding, we managed to do a simple Vue.js application and implement a frontend for CRUD operations of that API. The code can be found at https://github.com/acelina/books-fe GitHub repo. Of course, I didn’t become proficient in Vue.js in one day, but next time I need a frontend for my app, at least I know where to start and I value this.

In another case, me and a colleague of mine started a Hack Day project to improve the process of managing code challenges for our developer candidates. We worked on this project for three Hack Days. The result was an application that included features like managing the automatic creation of a GitHub repo for a candidate, including there her code challenge and give her the privileges to commit to that repo. It also included the feature to manage the workflow of submission, so when the candidate creates a PR of her finished code challenge, the application will remove her from project collaborators and notifies us in a Slack channel that a submission is ready to be reviewed. It was a three fun Hack Days for two of us and it resulted in a production-ready application which eliminated manual labor. There are several other successful results which came out of this 10 percent time.

What we achieved?

I understand that the projects we do during these days are never ready for production, but we achieved to create a culture of sharing the knowledge with others and by it to foster employee creativity. This 10 percent time creates space for us to experiments with things we don’t have the time to experiment during our regular work days because of deadlines or priorities. It also helps us to grow professionally and personally. Sometimes it results in a useful thing for the company as well, and most importantly it helps us to unleash our creativity while having fun. As a developer, I value this a lot in a company, and I would recommend every company to start practicing it. You never know where brilliant ideas come from!