Simple Team Management Practices

Hi,
Let me tell you the simple things which I see are important for team management.

Communication

Programming involves human and human interaction is critical while building new things. When you see the communication keyword not just simply think about talking to a team member. There are several ways for improving communication quality like active listening, feedback mechanisms.

I would like to underline asynchronous communication tools instead of synchronous one. This will help you to track the communication backward and will guarantee the ideas coming with data. It will be easier to understand the goal of the speaker.

Always delay the discussions which seems that it will not end with a negotiation at that time and ask stakeholders to use narratives for better telling their ideas.

Improve the collaboration by collaborative development tools. Consider pair programming. Document your architectural decisions in ADR format. Don’t write your wiki in a static way instead use Asciidoc integrated with the code base.

Trust

Trust is critical but consider this principle with transparency and always relay the data of topic or calculated risk. The trick here is sharing the knowledge base within the team and expect to show commitment and ownership for the decisions which will affect the team or product. Also teams should have goals which can be achievable. Not set long and complex goals for short terms especially. Maximize the usage of collaboration tools and make everyone in the team can access these.

In the decision making process if you use data and show this way to team members, trust will come and the team can adapt the changes and show commitment.

Work life balance

Take it easy. Do not call a team member after 8 hours of work :) Be respectful to the private life of people and don’t expect them to work.

Motivation

This is hard. You need to give energy to the team and you should be a strong believer of the product.
To improve the motivation of the team , always try to share the impacts which occur on the customer side. Show deliverables and their effects.
Soft skills also play a role here and team building practices should be followed.

I believe endless meetings kill motivation. There should be a time range in a working day for the things we want to build for. Too many notifications and interruptions creates context switching which decreases the efficiency.

Of course the principles above are not the whole story but they are crucial and critical.

Have a good day!