Building A Winning Technology Team

Building a Strong Technology Team

As a manager you have many responsibilities like building relationships, removing barriers to production, reporting on progress, following up on problems and the like.

You are tasked with bringing together a group of people with their own culture, problems, and self-interest. You are expected to pull this group together to work in harmony to achieve a goal assigned to you by your organization. Here are a few ideas to help you pull those individuals together into a strong unified team.

Hiring: When building a team I must add a few comments about hiring. You have a very short time in an interview to learn something about an individual. I cannot cover all the nuances about an interview, but I will tell you the key is in your questions. I craft my questions in a way to answer the following.

1. Do they love what they do?
2. Are they interested in advancing their career or improving their skills?
3. Do they have a strong list of achievements?
4. Is there energy and interest in the position?

Getting positive answers to these 4 questions is a good sign for a potential hire.

Project Management: Most environments are fast paced today with phased implementations, short time frames, incomplete requirements, and critical due dates. This means you need to review your task list frequently. Today Agile methodologies and stand-up Scrums are the norm. I have on occasion used a traditional waterfall approach if the requirements and goals are clear.

If you use Agile, Scrum every day. Short meetings no more than 15 minutes. Discuss what was completed yesterday, what will be completed today and is anything getting in the way of production. If something is off track schedule a meeting to address the issues. Find a good tool that will help with the project artifacts, back logs, sprints, Kanban’s, burn down reports and the like.

Team Meetings: Due to remote work and distributed teams, we don’t have the ability to have casual conversations over the top of the cubes like we did in the past. As a result, I try to integrate those types of conversations into my team meetings. Perhaps starting out with general discussions like sports, covid, new babies and even the weather. The objective being to grow the team together building trust and camaraderie.

You need to build your meetings with “Psychological Safety”. Psychological safety is a term meaning everyone on the team feels comfortable speaking. There is no negative, condescending, or critical talk allowed. No one hogs the spotlight doing all the talking or interrupting other speakers, everyone participates. That doesn’t mean everyone agrees, it just means we disagree in a productive way. If you are lucky your team will turn into a master mind group. When this happens, your team will come together in harmony to work on tough issues. The result will be better ideas from the combination of everyone’s input.

One on One Meetings: Your relationship with each of your team members is important. I read somewhere you should know at least two personal things about everyone on your team. This will evolve normally if you are conducting proper one on one meetings. The one on one is the employees meeting so they can discuss whatever is on their mind. The manager should also use this meeting to get to know the individual and their career aspirations. Give guidance how the individual can improve and get to the next step in their career. Give honest feedback on current performance. This way the end of year review won’t be a surprise. Genuine mentorship and care about the individual will build a loyal team member and improve employee retention.

Recognition and Rewards: Recognition and rewards are different things. Recognition should be handled publicly and initiated by the manager when a significant achievement has been completed. But not only the manager. Co worker recognition should be encouraged and in some cases is more rewarding to the individual receiving the praise.

Rewards on the other hand I have seen handled many different ways. In some cases, hurting the overall team morale. In one company, everyone voted who would get the reward this month. Frequently the winner was determined by who washed the dishes or took out the garbage. While others driving sales and revenue sat and watched.

I prefer rewards handled on a personal basis. Like a small gift card given in a one on one. While being cognizant to spread the rewards to all deserving individuals. This way there is no jealousy and only gratification.

Distributed Teams: For several ideas about managing distributed teams read my blog post Managing Remote Teams.

Miscellaneous Items: Provide a safe, comfortable, ergonomic environment. Once I had to work in a garage, when I typed the desk shook and when the wind blew papers flew off my desk. Ok, an extreme example I know.

Don’t tolerate toxic behavior from anyone on your team or outside of it. Confront it when it occurs. It can undo a lot of the positive productive energy you have created.

If you have any questions about these postings. Please reach out to me. I am happy to help.

Regards,
Scott Matson
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