The number one trait of high-performance teams is psychological safety. If you can establish that within your company, it's easier for everyone to work together and build a high quality engineering product.
2. Evaluate objectively
It's hard to pinpoint what's going wrong in your company. Reflecting on how your teams operate, why they follow certain rituals and how they interact with each other is a good way to start.
3. Trust your employees
Sometimes you don't even need an IT audit to find out what the problem is, because your employees already know it. Be humble, listen to them, and focus on finding a solution together.
And then, give them enough space to do the best work they can.
If you want to learn more about productive IT audit sessions, check out the full article through the link below!
The biggest takeaway from the pandemic is that people stick around at a company for the community. Your best bet to improve retention is to work on building a community.
2. Utilize hybrid teams
Take advantage of the time you spend in the office by prioritizing collaborative work. This makes collaboration more efficient and supports everyone in building relationships, strengthening your community. You can maximize focus time in the home office.
Everything we do goes through software. Lives constantly depend on software and by extension, engineers. This is plenty of reason to start thinking about a universal set of ethics and quality standards.
2. Own your responsibility
Machines can’t take responsibility for their malfunctions. It always has to be the people programming and supervising them. There is no place to deflect responsibility for the consequences of our work to our managers or our companies.
You’d think this goes without saying, but teams and companies often fall into the mindset of adjusting the work to their own preferences over the customer’s. Always keep your customer in mind.
2. Drive decision making down
The people in the frontline are closer to the customer than executive leadership, so they can often make better decisions regarding the frontline work. Empower them to do so, minimize executive involvement and watch productivity go way up.
Looking to put customer obsession into action? We bring you a case study from @minarets, VPE at @Mailchimp about doing just that via an engineering event.
Amazon made this a well-known company value. The idea is simple: prioritize the customer’s needs and experience, then work your way backwards through the product and the teams, all the way to yourself.
2. Getting buy-in from leadership
Selling your initiatives internally is a key part of a leadership job. When you’re planning a customer obsession event, the first people you need to involve are your cross-functional peers. Make sure they understand the goals.
A director's job is very different from a frontline manager. Many fail the transition, and it can take years to master the role even for those who succeed. Prepare by learning about the expectations and count on a bumpy journey.
2. Examine your motivations
Be honest with yourself about your motivation for getting this promotion. Chasing a paycheck or more control aren’t bad things, but they can lead to a negative mindset. However, the best motivation is looking to unlock more of your team’s potential.
Here’s a taste of Joseph’s priority list about standardizing processes:
1. Deployment process
Make sure that your deployment is repeatable and consistent regardless of which developer is doing it. Document it first, and when it’s done, you can automate it in large parts.
2. Monitoring
Monitoring gives your engineers metrics about the code’s performance in production. There are great tools out there that are easy to set up, and save you a lot of time and energy in the long run. Make sure to have it send your team a message when something breaks.