Evolving and Devolving Teams

Every team player works different in each environment and in a different project. This is a very simple statement that we claim to know but it’s not take in count very often.

I been leading teams for the last 8 years. As a team player I was also affected by the environment. This is a key lessons I learned from all that.

A team that evolves is the one that creates the right environment. There are many ingredients to this recipe:

Clear Goals:

Defining the right set of goals is crucial for a team to succeed. This seams obvious but many times. It wont happen. One common example would be defect resolution. There are teams that only do maintenance. This is an awful task it lacks creativity and excitement. But it is a dirty job someone has to do. The goal is to fix all the defects. And that’s it… There is no way to trick this. A good leader could try to rotate the team members to different teams. But the goal for that team is: to fix defects to triage production defects. That’s it: Clear Goals will keep things honest.

Empathy:

This is another obvious point. But not all the team members performs all the time in the same way. We are humans, humans are fragile by default. There are high performance players that eventually go down on the performance. There are others that are more steady but not as fast or high performant than the others. Every case is different. Empathy is the key in understanding each human fragility. Being empathic you grow loyalty in your team members. Giving days off, or even helping or doing an advance payment would be a very small thing to do in a large company or a medium one but it’s a huge benefit for a person. Or even having a coffee and a talk. Leaders work more as Therapists than people that follow up on tasks and oversees risks.

Fluent Communication:

Evolving teams has a fluent communication, they consider each others pairs and sometimes friends. That takes the burden of complex tasks out. Since they enjoy working together creating and thinking together. Whiteboards are in those cases as fun as a football field. Detecting early problems in the communication, will prevent devolving teams. When the communication is not fluent, noise is introduce that will generate: unhealthy competition, wrong implementations, frustration along with other factors that will make a team devolve.

Setting the right expectations:

There should be a conversation for each new member of the team. Setting the expectations both ways, helps as a checkpoint. For some members would be how they can grow. For others learning new technologies. And as a Leader you have to be clear of what you are looking. My requests are always the same: honestly, quality, detail oriented and driven.

Conclusion:

keeping track of the 4 ingredients in every step that the team do is a way to keep the team evolving and prevent teams to devolve.

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