Overheard at QCon 2022: Navigate complex environment and evolving relationships

By Katterine Rodriguez and Victor Souza — Specialists, Build by McKinsey

We recently had the pleasure of participating in QCon, a global conference that gathers the best engineers from top-notch innovation companies. The event covers a wide range of relevant software engineering and leadership topics related to the kind of projects that have been carried out in our region.

We have learned a lot about how we can drive innovation and create meaningful impact for our clients by networking with people that face similar challenges and are implementing the best practices in technical projects. One of the most meaningful sessions was “Navigate complex environments and evolving relationships” by Jennifer Davis, Engineering Manager at Google, who shared valuable information about how to build a team and align it to deliver business value.

Navigating complex environments and evolving relationships

It’s no secret that companies expect staff to collaborate effectively, communicate well, and focus on their missions from day one. However, in the real world, such things do not always happen without the intentional effort to create an environment that fosters autonomy, trust, diversity of opinions and recurrent learning & improvement. The first step of this intentional effort is the acknowledgment that all team members must learn and practice how to collaborate effectively. This is known as team development.

The researcher and psychologist Bruce Tuckman developed a model that described the stages through which a group of people turn into a high performing team. His model has five stages — forming, storming, norming performing, and adjourning — and it is used as a reference by agilists.

• Forming stage: This happens when the team first comes together. Most members are kind and motivated, but some of them might be anxious and they look to a group leader for direction and guidance on how to tackle problems.
• Storming stage: This begins to occur while planning and executing tasks. At this stage, team members express their own points of view and showcase their personal work styles. In addition to that, it may raise structural issues, power struggles, confusion, and unclear role definitions.
• Norming stage: At this point, team members start to create stronger relationships, cohesion, demonstrate a sense of trust, and resolve their differences. The teamwork achieves better capacity to solve problems and at the same time, the leader starts to share responsibility with the group.
• Performing stage: When teammates focus and share the same mission and vision, exchange feedback with project managers and offer positive support to each other, team leaders can delegate more tasks and give autonomy to their team players.
• Adjourning stage: This happens once the job is done and it’s time for team members to leave the project. There are often feelings of sadness and reflection. It’s the perfect opportunity to recognize team efforts and achievements.

Understanding Tuckman’s group development process can help you enhance the performance of your teams. The question is, how can you help your team to go through those stages in the most effective way? According to Jennifer there are three key areas that drive team development:

1. Functional Leadership

“Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.” — Mary Parker Follett, The Creative Experience, 1924

Awareness & Trust

It’s crucial that people feel respected for who they are, what they know and what they do. You should therefore get to know your team by learning about everyone’s motivations, objectives & concerns in order to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each team member.

Another element is ensuring you share your own core values, experiences, and vulnerabilities. This will allow the team to get to know you better and you can start building trust with one another.

Open communication

Several management tools help us to organize and formalize tasks, but that is not enough to break the ice among teammates. A lack of open communication increases the likelihood of difficult tasks failing due to team members not sharing estimations, details or scenarios and avoiding suggesting improvements or reporting risks on time.

To facilitate open communication, offer teammates face-to-face virtual or physical spaces and increase probabilities for unplanned interactions among them. In addition, provide spaces where the team and business stakeholders can share a common vision of the final product.

Team Norms

Team Norms are a basic set of agreements defined by the members of the team about how to work well together. The teammates should discuss common practices and processes and define agreed upon behaviors.

For example, the team norms could include:

• Working inside scheduled sessions
• Establishing clear goals for each work session
• Focusing on resolving problems without placing blame
• Raising the alarm if there is a potential risk
• Keeping an open mind for colleague suggestions
• Maximizing the reuse of previous workstreams

Delegate leadership

Functional leadership lies in the assumption that all individuals are capable of leading. For the team to scale, leadership should be developed to suit the pace of each team member while making the team leader’s intentions clear so that the people have the right opportunity and support required to learn over time.

This doesn’t mean that clearly defined roles and responsibilities aren’t in place. Instead, this allows all team members to hold different leadership roles and fosters ownership of different parts of the delivery. It also facilitates knowledge sharing, workload and even work life balance to be spread more fairly across the team.

2. Boundary setting

Team rituals

In all dimensions of life, people have rituals, such as enjoying a cup of coffee to start the day with your coworkers or eating pizza each Friday to spend time with your family.

A ritual can create a strong, long-lasting personal connection so it’s a powerful tool to boost your team’s performance. If you promote some rituals in daily routines, you can help to promote an overarching team identity. A practical example is sharing a common playlist which all team members feed into that marks the start of each work session. Similarly, you could use an online wheel in order to randomly assign the order in which each team member participates during the daily ceremony session.

And at McKinsey, we also have wonderful team rituals. In our projects, it’s common to take a five-minute personal KPI (Key Performance Indicator) session before a daily check-in to keep track of everyone’s personal development points like “do exercises three times a week” or “only drink zero sugar soft drinks”. Another good example is to schedule a dinner from time to time to reinforce connections between the team members. And with that, everyone can motivate their colleagues to accomplish their personal KPIs and create strong relationships.

It’s important to select and define the team rituals with everyone so they can suggest what they want to include, engage, and enjoy each session. This isn’t something that should be dictated by the team leader, instead it should become part of the team’s ways of working.

Set and uphold boundaries

Setting boundaries allows us to get control over our family, friendships, projects, work life and how we effectively split our time and effort. If we are talking about our work, it’s important to establish boundaries ahead of team collaboration.

Team members should agree on the boundaries they need to adhere to so everyone feels comfortable working together. So, identify roles and responsibilities for each member of the team, the amount of time they should spend at work, their main priorities, when and how they communicate with each other, what the official channels of communications are, and determine capacity and speed of each member of the team. Offer alternatives to find win-win solutions and maintain a friendly work environment while supporting each other’s boundaries.

Here’s an example Jennifer shared on how she documents boundaries and set expectations with her team:

3. Learning and Adaptability

Individual feedback sessions (1:1)

This is a session between two members of the team where they both can look back on previous stages of the project, to evaluate and share their thoughts about the progress made. These feedback sessions allow people to reflect, encourage, recognize, learn, and seek ways to help their peers in their personal and professional growth. It’s also vitally important that these sessions are free of judgement so team members can express opinions openly, to strengthen communication, trust and remove the fear of making mistakes.

Learning opportunities

Change is constant, so it’s important to prepare you and your team to adapt and overcome challenges as they emerge. Jennifer believes that each team should dedicate time to training and learning during their planning sessions.

Discuss this with your team as well as team leaders. Your team’s ability to tackle problems depends on their knowledge and motivation, so having both training and learning sessions is essential to foster innovation, create business differentiators and should be seen as an investment.

Attending conferences can be a great way to keep your team updated on current tech trends and emerging technologies but also taking the time to attend technical leadership training can help develop your team members’ skills.

Implement Decision Records

This is a technique that has been increasingly adopted over the last few years, whereby using simple text-based documents describing each technical decision allowed users and other engineers to understand the rationale behind any decision that shaped the product or software.

These documents should consider things like:

• Purpose, definition, and consequences of this technical decision
• Urgency of this decision
• Who is making this decision — an individual or a group?
• How is this decision going to be enforced?
• Who needs to be made aware of and align with this decision?

Jennifer also shared a link to her team’s decisions records here (https://bit.ly/emblem-decisions) and we’d like to also share with you the Architecture Decisions Record (ADR) GitHub repository (https://adr.github.io/) where you can find more details about this technique and find other examples and templates to use with your team.

To sum up, Jennifer explained how difficult it is to navigate complex environments and evolving relationships in development teams, while also giving us a set of tools to build strong team relationships through open communication, and incredible teamwork.

We believe that being able to foster a trustful, knowledgeable, and balanced environment is essential for a healthy work environment. It is vital to identify what stage our team is at, and the key areas that drive its development to propose appropriate strategies that support rapid evolution to ensure high performance. Remember that a team’s culture and ability to operate properly takes time. Include people at all levels when making an action plan to help create healthy and efficient teams.