The Culture of Healthy, Happy, High-Performing, Global Teams
The following is a collaboration between Irina Tsyganok, Global Director of Engineering for Vogue and myself (Tessa Ann Taylor, Director of Engineering for The New Yorker) and is part of a series on creating happy, healthy, high-performing, global teams.
In this series — The Culture (below), The People, The Work, and Taking it Global.
The Culture
Cultural and behavioural health is the foundation of success for any team in any organization. A healthy environment emerges when each team member has psychological safety, autonomy, accountability, and a clear understanding of goals.
In a team with a healthy culture, each team member eagerly contributes their unique perspective, grows their skills, and ensures that the project is on track. By creating a healthy team, you are ensuring that each team member develops a sense of belonging and does their best work even in the face of challenge and change. Lastly, great teams attract great people, as we’ll discuss in a later section.
Below are some key principles and practices of defining and sustaining healthy team culture.
What: Set Clear Goals
Clear goals enable a group of individuals to perform as a team. Continuously check with your team members that the near-term and long-term vision of the business and the product is clear and that they believe in it.
How: Ensuring clear goals are set and understood is more important than the methodology you choose to follow. Start by asking clarifying questions both in shared sessions and individually. Do the members of your team know how today’s work contributes to the bigger picture, and does it resonate with them? If not, work together to establish clarity of vision.
Make the goal setting process collaborative. Promote accountability-creating opportunities for the engineering team to contribute to shaping the product vision and encourage purely engineering initiatives into the roadmap.
Toolbox: Cross-functional ideation workshops with Product, Design, Engineering, and Editorial. Team-wide roadmap planning and review sessions. 1:2:1 meetings.
What: Happiness of Individuals
Organizational health and team health are a collective representation of happiness and fulfillment of each individual in that team. A manager who wants to establish a healthy, happy culture and high performance in their team must first ensure that each individual on their team feels valued, appreciated, and happy.
How: Find the time to connect with each team member individually at a consistent cadence. Meetings with direct reports and skip-levels are table stakes, and the primary goal of these meetings is relationship-building. Ideally, a manager would engage with their direct reports at least once a week. The frequency and length of skip-levels can vary depending on the team size, but they must be recurring and predictable. Even monthly 15-minute skip-levels are powerful as managers receive unique actionable insight by making themselves available to listen in a 1:2:1 setting.
Toolbox: 1:2:1 meetings. Pay attention to personality types and use techniques such as active listening and push/pull to make sure you really build a connection.
What: Self-actualization
Servant leadership or altruistic empowerment of others is a popular modern management approach. It can be very effective, however, human nature has decided that all people must be inherently selfish, so there needs to be some reward for the work we do. Numerous studies in the field of organisational behaviour have shown that intrinsic motivation is more powerful than extrinsic motivators, i.e meaningful work and personal development are better drivers of loyalty, engagement, and happiness in the workplace than high salary alone. An effective manager must therefore ensure that each individual on the team finds meaning in their work and understands how it helps them grow professionally.
How: Start with yourself, because unhappy managers cannot build happy teams. When it comes to your team members, make a habit of discussing their professional growth and aspirations regularly. Teach them to drive their own growth and create opportunities for them to achieve their goals.
Set near-term and long-term goals, and ensure these are written down, monitored and followed up on throughout the year. In more regular conversations, ask questions along the lines of: “what do you enjoy about this project most, what have you learned, what do you find most challenging, what opportunities do you see for taking more responsibility/align to your growth goals..?”, and our favourite: “where do you see yourself in 5 years time?”.
Toolbox: Set individual goals. Identify growth opportunities.
What: Reduce cognitive load
Software engineering is a highly cognitive profession. High-performing teams are known for being able to focus on solving problems that matter. By reducing the number of things to think about, a manager reduces cognitive load and allows the team to focus on making an impact.
How: Make as much information as possible explicit and accessible — don’t make your teams expend unnecessary energy figuring out something that is known. Create and update artifacts that describe ways of working, coding standards, expectations around hours worked, principles, and processes.
Toolbox: Confluence, GSuite, Miro, etc. Run workshops to discuss and document ways of working (we call them How We Team workshops).
We hope this helps, and would love to hear your strategies for building good culture on your teams.
