How can you help teams change behaviours and practices?
Tess Cooper became Organisational Development Lead at FutureLearn two months ago. Her role is to make the company a more effective and enjoyable place to work. Here she shares the things that she thinks are important to do if she is to be successful in her role.
After returning from Parental Leave I took on a new role ‘Organisational Development Lead’, it gave me a refreshed perspective on the way we were operating at FutureLearn. While I love my new role because I get to work with a diverse range of people across FutureLearn, I’ve also found that moving into a role not directly embedded within a product team can be challenging — you aren’t necessarily working towards the same goal with the same group of people for an extended period of time. So I find it helps to set aside time for reflecting on behaviours I need to develop myself and encourage others to do to. Here are some of those reflections.
Set an example
In a role like mine, where you want to encourage the best ways of working, I’ve found it’s important to take time reflecting on how I personally approach things and making sure that I too am practicing what I preach. For instance if I’ve spent a lot of time with teams getting them to learn how to empathise with one another and consider each other’s perspectives when working on a project together, then I too need to be empathising with everyone that I interact with in order to make sure that I’ve understood their perspectives and not jumped to conclusions. There a whole host of things I’ve adopted to help me be more self aware. These include writing daily reflections at the end of each day, discussing my reflections with someone else, setting personal objectives, asking for feedback or advice, and taking personality tests that include information about work habits.
Master constructive feedback
Something I believe to be core to improving how we work as a company is giving timely constructive feedback to anyone you work with. So since starting my new role, at every opportunity possible, whether it’s after watching our COO do a presentation to all staff, after facilitating a team building session, or after reading a document shared by a product manager I consider what specific constructive feedback I can give them that will help them to improve for next time. It could be something a simple as ‘It was great that you structured that document with those headers because it made it really easy to read’, or ‘I noticed that you interrupted your team a couple of times and wondered if you’d noticed you had done that?’. Not only is this a way of me demonstrating the behaviour I’d love to see across the company, but the feedback I give helps to nudge people to constantly be improving the way we operate at FutureLearn. I’ve found that it’s really useful to start the conversation with ‘Would you mind if I shared some feedback with you about X?’. This is particularly important for people who are not used to receiving feedback, or for people who might not be in the right frame of mind at the time. It gives them time to mentally prepare for what you are about to say and have the option for asking you to provide it later or in another way if they are unable or unwilling to talk to you there and then.
Make time to listen
For any job involving motivating and managing people I believe your priority must first be to listen to those people who your choices will affect. In a role like mine I think this is particularly important because in order to influence people to adapt their practices or approaches you must first understand what drives people’s behaviour, and second understand what barriers they may face to implementing change. I’ve witnessed a lot of people forget this, particularly as they move into leadership roles where they should be doing more to represent and consider others but in actual fact they end up simply pushing their own agenda. The 6 tips in this article about why most leaders need to shut up and listen is pretty much everything else I would have to say on this topic.
Focus on the problems to be solved
Not many people hate process more than me (to be honest it’s surprising that I’ve had so many jobs in administration and project management in the past). But processes, when done right, can be important and valuable in ensuring a company continues to operate sustainably and effectively. However, all too often the problem that a process was trying to solve is forgotten, or people introduce processes that fix the symptoms of a problem but not the root cause. Sometimes root causes need to be addressed first, or in parallel with, implementing a suitable process to support it. An example: a front-end developer is frustrated that they are never shown designs early enough. Many companies or teams will have been culprits of jumping too quickly to processes or tools to fix this frustration. They might choose to implement a process that requires the designer to present their designs at a certain point in time/at a certain meeting or they may use tools like Trello to introduce a flow of work. But it’s far more likely that the actual problem is that designer doesn’t understand what value the front-end developer would be able to bring to their designs early on. Or the designer may have been victim to a bad experience of working with developers in the past. Or it might be that they are simply just not sitting close enough together to make it a natural daily conversation. It’s important to understand the root problem first otherwise no process or tool will change people’s behaviour.
Empower others to make changes
There are so many things that we want to improve about how we work at FutureLearn, from having more clarity around decision making through to ensuring that we communicate information in way that is accessible and useful for the people that need it. Thankfully I work with a lot of passionate, driven people with amazing ideas to make this all happen.
I’ve talked in the past about empowering people to take ownership of the product they are building. And it’s no different when it comes to building and developing our practices. Whilst there will be some initiatives I choose to lead on, often on particularly gnarly or contentious issues that might’ve taken a while to kickstart in the past. In most cases I will look to others who are particularly passionate about the issue or have some really great ideas to drive them forward. One example of this is making improvements to how we collaborate remotely. I set up one 30 minute meeting with a group of people who had expressed an interest in improving this in one way or another and since then they’ve been off experimenting with loads of ways to implement best practice, sharing ideas, communicating progress to the company and reviewing the impact, with little input from me other than a nudge here and there or as someone to champion the improvements they are making. I’m extremely proud of how driven and self-organised our teams are, and I’m hoping I can continue to encourage others to lead on changes they want to see here at FutureLearn.
I’d love to hear some more advice from others who have experience in developing organisations or teams, or answer any questions, so please do share your thoughts in the comments below.
