Engineering Your Team Culture

A method to measure & drive cultural change in your team

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

For many years, I saw team culture as something to work in and not something to work on. For example, I noticed some of the teams that I worked with were excited to learn new technologies while other teams were eager to keep the status quo. So, I flexed my management style to accommodate the differences. When working with a team excited by new technologies, I might encourage an individual engineer to experiment with the latest programming language. On the other hand, when working with a team less excited by new technologies, I might help them put in place a selection criteria so onerous that it eliminated the option of introducing a new programming language. Thus, as a fresh engineering leader I learned to flex myself to work within the team culture.

And then, one day I was given a team with a dysfunctional culture. Speculation was rampant, nobody validated projects and bullying was how the team made decisions. This new problem couldn’t be solved by flexing myself. I needed to work on the team culture itself. It was around this time that I read Ben Horowitz’s book The hard thing about hard things. One chapter in particular claims that our job as leaders is “[to] take care of people, product and profits — in that order”. This adage is a profound shift in thinking to engineering leaders who have a tendency to fixate on product, to feel obligated in talks about profits and to get to the people stuff if there is some time left over. The same chapter then goes on to point out that:

“You must recognise that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviours”.

This statement is not immediately obvious until you start diverting your leadership focus to people before product and you start to work on team culture. As soon as you do that, you will realise that most engineering teams operate on hidden measures that are not well understood and are usually ambiguous in conception. And this is what is driving your team culture! If you want to engineer your team culture, you are going to need to design your measurement system.

Confounding the problem is the fact that engineering leaders also tend to rely on one-on-one meetings to address team culture. This is certainly a tool but it has at least two severe limitations when dealing with team culture:

1. One-on-one meetings rely on personal integrity to uphold culture because there is no public consensus. We all like to believe that our co-workers have infinite personal integrity and will always do the right thing. Unfortunately, even the most noble of us have very human limits to our integrity. Imagine the situation of your most senior engineer who knows unit tests are important and consistently insists on them to be present in pull requests from the team. Under normal conditions, the personal integrity of that senior engineer keeps the team culture in place because they will speak up each time. But what happens when they are sick, forgotten from the reviewer list or simply focused elsewhere as this humorous video teaches us is all too easy to happen in a large organisation? In these situations, having a public consensus in place is a safety net to personal integrity. A public consensus also gives others an opportunity to provide ally-ship in team culture situations. For this reason, don’t only rely on one-on-one meetings to address team culture.
2. The second limitation to one-on-one meetings in addressing team culture situations is that coaching often fails when evaluation is unclear. Each of us takes coaching in different ways. For some people, it is deeply satisfying. But, for some people coaching is a source of anxiety that sends us into a frantic mental state of constantly trying to find hidden meaning. On top of that, it is all too easy for well-intended and thoughtful feedback to come across as criticism due to poor communication or plain old implicit competing commitments within the individual (ie: work-life balance vs. career progression). To increase the effectiveness of coaching, the coach needs to make clear their overall evaluation of the team. This allows individuals to put coaching into perspective. Furthermore, you can increase the effectiveness of coaching if you base it on peer evaluation and not just your own evaluation. Again, this is best handled outside a one-on-one meeting.

So, we know that to engineer team culture we need to make clear what we measure automatically and at the same time gain public consensus on what is important. I would like to share a tool that I have used to do that.

The Team Culture Workshop

I would firstly like to give credit to Hyper Island for the well designed workshop they published on SessionLab. The workshop starts by focusing your team on the purpose behind its existence and then collaboratively builds an understanding of the team culture needed to achieve that purpose. It is a brilliant workshop if your team purpose is clear and you can accommodate your team in one group. However, if your team is large, or is not co-located (I once ran this session during the COVID-19 pandemic across five timezones) or your purpose is not clear (like when I started a greenfield team), then the format of that session is restrictive.

The workshop design I finalised on was two separate sessions with different objectives. The reason for this was because my team was spread out across the world and it wasn’t possible to block out a longer period of time with everybody available. If your team is working closer together and you want to run both workshops back-to-back, that will work too and might allow additional focus. The two workshop I designed was the following:

1. Brainstorming with the group. The objective of this session is to give everybody a chance to share the values they think will lead to a team culture that sets you all up for success in your goals. There is no need to be clear in this session, it is about casting the net wide. As an example to how important this step is, I will share an anecdote. Last time I ran this workshop, I had run this session several times with dozens of people and there were common patterns emerging. However, the last person on the last session called out a value that nobody else had and it ended up becoming a fundamental principle to how the team operates now. Keep the net wide!
2. Synthesising with the group. In many creative problem solving techniques, you will come across the concept of multiple diverging-converging cycles to achieve optimum results. It allows both hemispheres of the brain to be engaged in problem solving. This workshop used that principle to split the two sessions. After the first session, the ideas should have diverged. The next step is to work with the group to converge the ideas back down to a manifest document. This is important to allow you all to focus on the key values that will lead you to success in your goals. As an aside, we didn’t achieve complete convergence in a group setting. We ended up splitting off a smaller focus group to do the final word-smithing and editing. That focus group then presented back to our wider team.

After following this process, you will have a team consensus on the values needed to drive successful team culture. Here are our team values.

Our values charter. This charter is the output of the process described above. These are the seven core values we know will enable us to achieve our mission statement.

Having this document will allow you to start to measure your culture. The next step is the most challenging. Executing on it.

Using Your New Team Values

You now know your team values and what dimensions to measure team culture on, but you don’t have a quantitative number system or plan on how to do that. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix or silver bullet here. I will share with you some of the ways we used our values charter in our team:

• In our team quarterly updates, I called out specific examples of individuals in our team demonstrating our culture. This is positive re-enforcement but can be converted into quantitative data if you crowd-source and measure recognition. More people giving feedback on culture metrics means more deeply engrained culture.
• Spotify talk about their Squad Health Check and it’s likely that you do something similar on your team. Take that idea and survey your team against your values. You can even get quite granular with the way this is measured by putting specific examples of behavior and asking if people are seeing these. Example from above values document: Did you spend enough time sharing knowledge this quarter?
• Some culture data can be implied by automated tools. This can be risky but is a signal that you should consider. As an example, the value of communication often includes something about clarification — well do your Jira tickets include specific fields or is the team skipping details there? This metric can be automated and measured back against your team values document in retrospectives.

Again, there is no right or wrong answer on how to measure your team against your values. The important thing is that you are measuring it to avoid the trap of implicit culture change or, sometimes even more damaging, the lack of culture change.

Conclusion

Creating a public consensus on what culture is needed to achieve your team objectives should not be left to HR alone. Developing a values charter and executing against that is an important skill for an engineering leadership who wants to demonstrate “people first” management towards a goal. By avoiding 1:1 interventions and working with your whole team, the method presented here will allow active management towards a shared culture of integrity and trust — which will be a key foundation of every high-performing teams you work with.