G’day Internet
In the past I interviewed for a Tech Lead Manager role.
I passed the first six interviews but there was one last hurdle before receiving an offer: a culture fit interview with the CPO. Unfortunately that interview did not go well. My answers were vague and I did not demonstrate how my skills are aligned with the company.
They kindly provided feedback that I failed to show the ability to build a high-performing culture. Based on this feedback, I needed to better articulate my approach of fostering a high-performance environment!
So, I decided to share my insights on building a high-performing team, drawing from my recent experiences and past successes.
How do I build a high-performing team?
First of, I am pretty sure that if you ask twenty people this question, you’ll get twenty different answers. Here is my personal take on this. I’ll begin by discussing the right environment for a high-performing team.
Setting up the environment
To build a high-performing team you need an enabling environment. The first item we’ll discuss here is how setting up goals promotes a high-performance culture.
Goals
Each individual, each team, each department and the company itself should have goals. At company level this usually derives from a north star.
An example of north star is “impact one million lives a day”. In this case, an example of goal could be “impact one life a day” on the day the company starts. That goal trickles all the way down to the team and the individual.
I quite like the Objectives and Key Results framework to set those goals up and track their results. I won’t go into all the details about OKRs here, but I recommend the book Radical Focus if you want to learn more about them.
One of the reasons I like the OKR framework is that it ties in with fostering collaboration and accountability. The objectives and key results are visible to everyone, this tends to make people more accountable.
The visibility also promotes collaboration as everyone is aware of company, teams and individuals’ goals. This usually spawns spontaneous help from peers with knowledge to achieve a goal.
With those goals and plans in place to achieve them, you can now also demand excellence from your team members.
Leader contribution to goals
As a team leader, you collaborate with the team to set up team goals and plans.
As a people leader, you work with each individual to establish their personal goals and plans. I use the Goal, Reality, Options, Way Forward (GROW) model for individual coaching.
We have seen how setting up goals fosters accountability. Let’s now uncover the importance of responsibility and accountability.
Responsibility and accountability
With goals now in place, everyone in the team shares the responsibility to achieve those goals. As a leader, I am the person accountable for the achievement, or lack thereof, of these goals.
Each individual is accountable for the achievement of their personal goals.
Accountability is often seen negatively, an enabler for the blame game. I see it differently, it’s fuel for my motivation to achieve a goal!
A team will always be responsible for the work they do. A high-performing team is one where each member takes accountability for what they do. This often translate to taking ownership of the project and/or its parts.
I’ll try to portray an accountable person and her opposite. Here is a bit of context. A pull request has been raised, on a part of the code that is usually not touched all that much:
- Vera opens the PR, skims through in two minutes, gives a green tick and a LGTM!
- Patricia on the other hand looks at the PR thoroughly, tries to understand the code, asks questions where she cannot understand. She also checks if there are any edge cases missed.
Patricia shows accountability here. Side note: in real life, Jon, who raised the PR, takes the team through the PR before they individually review.
Leader contribution to accountability and responsibility
Set high expectations and demand excellence from your team members. The high expectations must be well placed though, for example, you cannot expect from a junior developer that they are as efficient and fast as a senior. They might, but you can’t expect it.
When accountability is missing, one thing that the you can do is assign ownership of parts of the project to team members. Start small.
Increasing responsibilities can also be achieved with delegating tasks to your team members. They will be responsible for those task, the accountability will likely remain on the leader.
The next piece of the high-performance puzzle is communication and collaboration
Communication and Collaboration
Let me start with what is not a high-performing culture. It’s a culture of us vs them. A culture of engineering vs product vs sales vs marketing. A culture where your voice is not heard. A culture where the most senior people don’t acknowledge or consider feedback. This type of environment is toxic.
In contrast, a high-performing culture is one where everyone is aligned, working hands in hands to achieve the company objectives! It’s all of us vs the goal.
Earlier I touched on feedback. A high-performing culture is a culture that places feedback at its center. But what is good feedback?
Good feedback is given promptly, the closer to what prompted the feedback as possible. And no, six months later during the yearly review is definitely not the moment for feedback. There should be no surprises at a yearly review.
Good feedback is specific, points to a particular behaviour, is articulated clearly and is supported by examples.
Good feedback is sincere, it shows that you care deeply about the person you give the feedback to. Radical Candor by Kim Scott explains that better than I ever will.
On praise and criticism, the rule is to praise publicly and to criticise privately. I agree with the latter, but prefer to leave the first one to individual preference. I usually ask my team member in our first ever one-on-one how they prefer receiving praise, in private or in public. Regardless of their answer they’ll be included in shoutouts for the whole team though.
Genuine feedback builds trust between team members. When trust levels are high, collaboration is fruitful.
As a leader, consider all opinions and solutions from junior to senior members. Acknowledge them. Explain your reasoning for dismissing a solution and document this as well. What’s important is that everyone feels heard.
To thrive a team needs a psychologically safe environment. No good work happens when no feedback is given or when solutions are not proposed because they’d be shut down. Building such an environment can be challenging. My advice here is to engage in some team bonding. Get everyone to know a bit more about each other.
Good collaboration happens when there is good communication. At some point I recall saying:
“Private messages are the bane of my existence” - Jonathan Noé
Information and decisions are better shared in public rather than kept in private messages.
At that time I set my status to “I won’t respond to PMs. If you have a question to ask about the project ask in a relevant channel”. This was bad communication on my end because I offended both Product Managers and Project Managers, when the only thing I wanted to offend was Private Messages.
Communicating about the project in private chats is better than no communication, but it can have a bad effect on your culture. Information is siloed, other team members can feel alienated.
Nevertheless there is also the chance of missing out on someone else’s knowledge. By reaching out to a group you increase your chances to get to a solution quicker. However with a caveat on the size of the group, too many cooks can spoil the broth.
Learning
Encourage your team members to constantly learn, stay up-to-date, and improve. Supporting their growth by encouraging them to use their learning credits, to take some time during work hours to focus on personal development.
Create forums to foster knowledge sharing, such as guild meetings, tech channels or book/courses/videos database in your documentation tool. Lead by example and share articles you read (is this the moment I tell you subscribe, hit the bell, leave a comment and share?).
Invite your team to attend relevant conferences. Just be careful not to shift your culture to Conference Driven Development.
Innovation
Leave some wiggle room for innovation. Innovation is crucial in a high-performance culture as it fosters collaboration and promotes ownership of those innovations.
While my personal experience with Hackathons has been average, what really worked well for my teams in the past few years were innovation sprints. These are full two-weeks periods where the team collaborates on creating software or processes to improve the day to day operations.
Be careful not to turn them into just another sprint by imposing what must be innovated. Allow the team to work on projects they propose or are genuinely interested in.
Celebration
Make sure you celebrate wins! Whether you’ve won an important tender or released a significant feature, it’s time for a celebration!
Celebrate the teams that contributed to these achievements! Give them a shoutout! Nominate them for whatever recognition your company has in place whether bonuses, cash awards or other forms of appreciation!
If the team has spent many months on something tangible, celebrate by giving the team an innovation sprint! Or a party! Or both!
Sometimes people with a strong sense of ownership will go above and beyond to meet an important deadline. Acknowledge their efforts and ensure they take time in lieu or wellbeing leaves to recharge. Note, though, that this is not about celebrating overtime; Overtime should never be celebrated!
Celebrating wins touches on many things that were mentioned earlier. It boosts morale and motivation, strengthens team bonding, makes team members feel valued and acknowledges their hard work. All of which fosters a positive work environment.
Hiring
My first piece of advice is not to hire solely based on technical skills. An average engineer will be able to switch between technologies and languages fairly easily. Instead, prioritise looking for someone who fits the team culture.
During the culture fit interview ask questions to assess responsibility. Enquire about their team work experiences and how they handle mistakes. You’ll get a sense if that person is a match for your culture.
To gauge accountability, ask candidates to describe a project they are proud of. This will reveal if they took ownership and drove the project’s success.
Hiring someone whose values align with the culture is crucial to maintaining a high performing culture.
For example, the feedback I received from the interview highlights this: they were correct not to proceed with me, as I didn’t sufficiently demonstrate a fit with their culture.
Before initiating the hiring process, identify gaps in your team. If your team full of senior people who value mentoring, consider hiring someone more junior.
If you have a team of mid-level engineers who need guidance, look for a senior engineer who excels at mentoring.
If your team tends to go by the book and seeks gold-plated solutions, hire someone who is more agile and pragmatic.
Now that you hired a new starter, make sure that their onboarding is well structured, welcoming and comprehensive.
Onboarding
How effectively you onboard someone can significantly impact their success:
- David starts a new job. He does not get a laptop for one week and his first meeting with is manager is on his third day.
- Ken starts a new job. He receives his laptop the week before starting. He meets with all the relevant people (P&C, his manager, IT) on his first day and has his machine his setup by the end of the day. He is expected to raise a PR on his second day.
Who do you think will gain confidence, start on the right foot and be able to perform well?
Provide new starters with clear expectations, all the resources they need and all the support for a smooth integration to the team. Over the years I have created a manager checklist to prepare and follow up well during onboarding, I will share that at a later stage, but here are some initial tips:
- Maintain an onboarding page that is regularly updated.
- Encourage new starters to contribute to and improve the onboarding page.
- Ask them for feedback on the onboarding process.
- Organise a welcome lunch on their first or second day.
- Make sure you invite them to all relevant meetings.
- Follow up regularly with them to see whether they are settling in well or not.
- Set a calendar reminder for yourself to congratulate them on passing their probation period.
Monitoring
When team productivity takes a nosedive, identifying the issue early is primordial. The sooner you take remedial actions, the better the outcome.
Be mindful of each team member’s of strengths and weaknesses. Some excel at debugging, others at investigating, while some shine at creating something new. Some might get lost into rabbit holes (I’ll show you my burrow some day), some need breaks, and others thrive on new challenges.
When a someone leaves or someone joins an existing team, that team essentially transforms into a new entity. The new team is not guaranteed to be as high-performing from the start.
Letting go
This is the least enjoyable aspect of being in a managerial position. If someone in your team is under-performing or no longer fits the culture, it’s best for both parties is to severe the ties.
In my early experience as a leader, we hired a developer who did not meet the standards. I was overly accommodating, spending a month pairing with him daily, which hindered my own responsibilities. My CEO eventually decided to let him go and that was a huge relief, teaching me a valuable lesson.
Similarly, a team is only as effective as how well its members work together. An employee, regardless of their brilliance, who is not a team player, or does not accept feedback is detrimental to both the team and the company.
Sometimes someone who initially fit well with the culture may become misaligned following a change in the company culture. A culture is a moving piece, it will change as the company grows, as it scales, as its management style changes, as it faces hardship. When misalignment happens, it is often best to part ways, benefiting both the team and the individual.
This ended up much longer than what I expected. This will serve me as guide for future interviews until I come up with the version 2.0 of this document.
That’s all folks.
Jon