Leadership

Measuring the temperature of the team

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We are at the time that software development is such a crucial part of the business that almost everyone is lost on the river of “feature delivery” in such a way that we even forget that we have to stop and pay attention how our teams are functioning and how is our team dynamics.

The feature requests are way more in number than we technically can achieve to address. Our user base is getting smarter and smarter every day as well as they get more tech savvy, so they know more and more what they want. This makes addressing their requests a daily challenge, but this is only one side of the story 😉

When developing software, one side of the story comes from the users and key account users, but the other side comes from the business management and the leadership. Quite often, the perspective of these two groups may not end up to be the same, leading to stressful situations.

One of my favorite “soft tools” for leading teams is having regular 1 on 1s. Even though sometimes they feel unnecessary and too obvious, I religiously follow the cycle and never miss them. But why?

The reason is, for me these 1 on 1s are just like thermometers for fever. They tell me how my teammates feel, as well as answer the questions like is anything bothering them, is there anything that can be improved? These kind of questions may sound very basic and too simple, but they are amazing to identify the small-to-grow problems at their infancy phase and address them before they grow to the scale that pushes employees to leave the company.

I’m in the IT industry for ~15 years now, and if I can name one universal rule that I could identify between all the people groups I have been working together with, it’s that people don’t tell that they will leave. They just get fed up and start looking for another opportunity before they start giving you open feedback that something is going WRONG. So, what can we as leaders/managers do to prevent the situation to come to this point. In my opinion, we should on a regular basis measure the “temperature” of the team. How is the team dynamics? How do the individuals feel? Has the performance had any variations recently? These are the questions that we need to ask ourselves regularly and be wary in any of the changes, as any change to the answers to these questions is an alarm in itself that we should address as soon as possible before it is too late.

The other VERY VERY IMPORTANT topic to discuss in these meetings is, what do the team mates want to learn and further advance their skills! Continuous learning is extremely important for performing teams and the leader has to make sure they understands who wants to learn what, so one can match the daily business priorities to the interests of the team members, so they can grow personally and professionally while solving the most crucial business challenges. We must create WIN/WIN situations for our colleagues so everyone feels happy and benefits from the daily work we do!

As the saying goes, “people leave managers and not jobs”, it is our ultimate responsibility to realize if a team member is unhappy and going to leave before they make their unhappiness official, because when they do, it’s already too late!

Leadership Self development

Supporting the professional growth of the team

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As an Engineering Manager I take the personal and professional growth of my direct reports very seriously. It is one of my core duties to make sure that, in my capacity, I have enabled them to learn continuously and advance their professional and soft skills. In this blog post I will share with you my formula how I support the professional growth of the team.

Understand who wants what

Every person is unique. Just admitting that defines the level of attention required to individualize the learning and growth experience. What exactly do I mean by that? Let us suppose you have a team member who is very much into data solutions. But, in their daily job, you constantly assign them frontend tasks. Maybe they will do the job, but I’m sure they will not operate at their optimal level if they don’t like frontend development.

With every one of my team members I do regular monthly (sometimes more often) 1:1 meetings. These meetings usually are for me to listen and them to talk. They are for me to understand what excites them, what bothers them, what makes them tick. I take notes and with every meeting I review my notes to check for deviations or changes. I also use these meetings to understand what interests them to understand them better personally and their professional interests.

Understanding the industry and market trends

I think it is of utmost importance for an Engineering Manager to be well acquainted with the trends in the industry and the market. In our vibrant industry, it is at the same time very difficult for us to be able to catch everything what is happening around us. Everyday we have a new framework coming up, a new cloud service, a new programming language update, and keeping up is a real challenge, so we do need to be able to filter critically the information that will be important for our future.

What has worked for me so far is to organise and classify information digestion. I use Twitter and LinkeIn to follow people behind the technologies of interest. I also follow the companies and communities behind the technologies that are in my and my teams area of interest.

This way I can keep myself up to date with what is in trend, what is being pushed and developed from big companies, therefore worth to invest time in.

Finding synergies with our company projects

Of course just knowing what are the trends and what the team members want to learn does not lead us anywhere. We have to match these two to create growth. So, how can we make these two ends meet?

We are lucky that the part of business we work in is very vibrant. We have more projects and backlog that we can manage to complete. In this backlog I constantly look to find opportunities where we can solve our business problems with innovative cutting edge solutions. I try to create opportunities where our important business goals are achieved by team mates implementing solutions with the latest technologies they enjoy. This way, a growth opportunity for the developers is created as well as our company benefits from innovative and up to date technical solutions. Win-win situation 🙂

Enabling the team to jump on these opportunities

Of course, when adopting a new technology, being a new version of a language, of a framework, or a new tool, this would mean that the team has to spend time learning it. Therefore, I as a manager have to critically evaluate these opportunities to see if this makes sense. If that new thing we want to adopt help us move faster, safer or further in our work. It should make sense from the business perspective and it should make sense from the professional growth perspective as well. When these two ends meet, I seize these opportunities.

Conclusion

As managers we should help our colleagues to be very attractive for the market, but also should create an environment that the employees would not like to leave.

As employees, we always have to think from the perspective that we are hired to solve the business problems and bring value to the company. But also we have to keep in mind that without continuous learning and improvement our value bringing capabilities diminish by time.

As the famous quote goes:

CFO asks CEO: “What happens if we invest in developing our people and then they leave us?” CEO: “ What happens if we don’t, and they stay?”

Leadership

Taking over a team, what should you do?

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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.

Leadership Self development Software practices

How to unleash employee creativity

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How to unleash employee creativity

At my current company, Springer Nature, we have a great benefit of having the freedom to dedicate 10 percent of our work time working for a side project, learn something new, or on anything that can help us learn something new. Our employer gave us this freedom so we can grow personally and professionally, but one observation I have had during these months that we are practicing this was that it also helps 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!