Building Strong Teams and Creating Leaders — What I’ve Learned
Over the course of my extended career in technology I’ve learned a lot about managing large teams or building them from scratch. Here are a few pointers.
By Cameron Sim, Engineering Director, BCGDV
Over an extended career in technology, I’ve worked within large organizations and startups managing large teams or building them from scratch. With this experience in mind, I put together a punch list of some of the best practices in team management and growth strategy that I’ve come across or learned that work effectively in creating healthy and highly functioning teams.
I’m still learning, and these are my own opinions. But I love building teams and growing organizations and I’m always happy to answer questions, so feel free to get in touch.
Facilitate Autonomy
The ability to operate with a sense of self-management extracts the best out of a team member and typically enables them to demonstrate the core reasons why you hired them. Organizations with employees that are able to define their own day without undue input tend to produce higher quality of work and are set up to succeed as leaders in the long term.
Top tip: Be conscious of where aspects of micro-management are creeping into employees’ day-to-day activities and potentially infringing on productivity. Actively take steps to alleviate undue tasks or inputs ensure a team member is free to achieve their holistic objectives.
Make Sure Everyone Understands the Business
Understanding the business is absolute table stakes for any employee. With the goal of hiring and fostering both objectivity and productivity within a team, it’s imperative that everyone understands the core business model of their organization.
Top tip: At a minimum, organize lunch-and-learns to walkthrough how the organization makes money and shed light on the markets in which it operates. Outline who the main competitors and the KPIs that individuals, teams and the organization can strive towards that move the needle.
Operate at a Level Above
At performance review time, the ideal outcome for managers when considering promotions is to be able to point to demonstrable performance metrics and behaviors of someone already operating at a more senior level.
The decision to promote should be easy.
Top tip: An effective strategy to ensure that there is enough opportunity for a colleague’s growth is to ask them to visualize and operate at the level above where they currently are in the organization. Actively walkthrough the expectations of the role one level above their level and use that as the goal post for assessing performance.
Managing for Growth
Every person in a company has a career trajectory and knowing how best to compliment a team member’s path takes a degree of strategy and careful communication. Not getting this right will ensure that new hire won’t be around for long.
Top tip: Have a short (~3–6 month) and long term (~1–2 years) strategy for each team member in your organization that compliments a formal HR personal growth document and enables team members to thrive within a team. Include soft skills and core capabilities that that team member should strive to gain or become an expert in within those timeframes.
Ensure an Excellent First Impression
Onboarding new employees really well requires a well executed strategy. Ensuring an excellent first impression for a new team member is no different to meeting someone for the first time. First impressions are everything, even for companies.
Top tip: A very high-level plan should include:
- A plan for each new team member across increasingly growing granularities from day 1 through to 6 months.
- A ‘buddy’ team member to help that person through common tasks as they start to become more capable
- An informal meeting, scheduled weekly with an open agenda where both boss and new team member can use the time to build rapport and navigate through any questions as they come up.
This tip could be whole post on its own, but one must-have is to monitor and collect feedback from each new team member as they complete their 1-month and 6-month journeys to ensure a consistent experience, but to also improve your process as you go.
Maintain a Cross-Functional Environment
The ability for any team member to gain exposure to working with colleagues from other business domains or cohorts is an important growth ingredient and greatly expands perspective, driving understanding and empathy outside of their own domain.
Top tip: Where possible, design work objectives around a cross-functional team structure and be thoughtful about what the team member is going to get out of each experience working on a certain project or initiative. Over the long run, your organization will be greatly empowered by colleagues with multiple domain perspectives.
Freedom From Fear
It goes without saying that extracting the most value and effective collaboration from team members works in conjunction with ensuring that they feel psychologically safe in the work environment, which includes the freedom to express themselves professionally and even make mistakes. You’ll never get the best out of a team if there is a lingering fear or vulnerability.
“We can easily forgive a child when they are afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light” — Plato
Top tip: In the same arena as ensuring role autonomy, take active steps to build camaraderie and general rapport across the team by organizing team social events and work-related presentations where colleagues can build confidence and trust through smaller group audience participation. For software engineers, this might be presenting technical solutions to one another, or, for designers, holding walkthroughs of a creative brief without the client in the room.
Built-In Variation
The sense of being pigeonholed or work inflexibility can often drive talent away, leave projects open to resource constraints and limit the talent pool within any organization.
Great talent is hard to find, don’t drive it away.
Top-tip: Look for avenues to vary what individuals work on over time, even when impending key deliverables make that more difficult. One method is to allocate major and minor responsibilities (with real accountability and deliverables) to each team member or allocate time for people to shadow each other, learning new areas of the business, up-skilling in a new technology or domain as they go.
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