A few years back I inherited a team with low morale. As a new manager, I ran right into a wall of mistrust and indifference. Team meetings were often quiet and tense. There was no energy in the room and the team was struggling to deliver on projects. I wasn’t expecting this before I started, so the situation was initially a surprise.
I needed to turn things around, improve quality and innovation. In essence, I had to debug and fix the team. Teams don’t struggle in a vacuum. There is often historic and deeper reasons behind their challenges. Before I could consider a strategy on how to improve, I needed to first diagnose the problems.
Diagnosing the problems
Some early observations and 1-1 conversations helped me get a better picture of the challenges in the team. The 1-1s helped establish personal rapport and turn a new leaf. During each session I would discuss my observations and invite thoughts and opinions on how things could be changed or improved. Everyone I talked to had a strong desire and hunger to improve. This was encouraging. At least at an individual level, everyone had some clues and ideas on the problems.
I also noticed that the team didn’t have a lot of autonomy on how to execute. The organization followed a very religious version of agile methodology. The PM would get hyper specific on what to build, the previous dev manager laid out in detail how the feature would be built and the developer was left to estimate effort and write out the code. There wasn’t a lot of deep thinking around architecture, approaches or considerations on whether this was the right thing to build. Engineers weren’t participating in the product conversation. And therefore didn’t feel a strong sense of ownership with what they built.
In addition, the team was struggling with some basics such as slow PR cycles, and a lack of focus on quality during code reviews. I had my work cut out for me.
Lack of trust
Where there is low morale, there is often an absence of trust. Lack of trust itself is often not the root cause, rather its a symptom of the conditions the team works in. I began making direct and specific changes to how we worked. My bias towards action showed the team that things would be different going forward. It also helped me earn their trust and buy in as we improved things.
The specific changes that I made were as follows:
- Create space for greater team autonomy in building systems and software
- Deliver quick wins using the new approach to work
- Redefine the purpose and ownership of the team
- Take on a major challenge
I’ll elaborate on each of these changes.
Provide greater autonomy
“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” – thats one of my favorite quotes from Steve Jobs.
Great talent deserves a reasonable degree of autonomy. They need space to explore, experiment and think through problems towards optimum solutions. It’s a great tragedy when this is not available to highly skilled engineers and their work is watered down to simply writing out code based on the dictates of an “architect”. At this team, I encouraged the PM to focus on problem definition and let the engineers work on technical approaches. I also introduced a creative meeting that brought engineers, designers and product managers together to get deep into problems that we needed to solve for our customers.
This was a breathe of fresh air for the team and the results were immediate. The team began to think outside the box and build some innovative solutions. More importantly, they were enjoying work again. There was a buzzing energy during meetings and stand ups. We all felt a new sense of momentum in our day to day.
Deliver quick wins
Change isn’t enough if it doesn’t deliver on impact and outcomes. That said the early stages of a team turnaround is fragile. And so it’s important to line up some quick wins that gets high visibility to cement the new changes. We took a look at some of the projects in progress to reevaluate, reprioritize and rescope them. As a new manager, I had some leeway to renegotiate things with stakeholders and took full advantage of it. The goal of the rescope was to identify some clear high value, high leverage work that we can deliver quickly, usually within a 2 week sprint.
Good engineers love to build and ship. The quick wins solidified the new approach and improved the teams trust in leadership and themselves. Now that we are walking the talk, it was time to take the next steps in reshaping the culture of the team.
Redefine the purpose, standards and ownership of the team
It’s essential to be clear and explicit about the standard of performance expected in a team. These are the actions, behavior and attitude that we want to embody day in and day out. These standards are something we worked on and agreed on together. Without it a team languishes in ambiguity and fosters an indifferent attitude during execution. The new standards included things like average PR cycle goals, approach to collaborating with design and product, dealing with technical debt, approaches to meetings etc. We established a short monthly team meeting to reflect on and focus on how we worked.
All this provided a strong sense of identity and a higher standard for the team.
Taking on the next major challenge
With better ownership, autonomy and process improvements in place, the team was well positioned to take on the next major challenge. In the subsequent quarters they delivered on multiple major initiatives with high quality and innovation. The team was thriving and became an example for the rest of the organization.
To be clear the journey as outlined here likely makes the process sound smoother than it was. Rather the transition was challenging, at times messy, but we ultimately got to a better place. The sequence of execution in the turn around is important. For example, it is critical to establish trust and deliver some quick wins as a team before we can earn the confidence to tackle deeper questions such as team ownership and standards of performance. Similarly, tackling the next major project without a clear definition and establishment of the new culture of excellence can cause the team to fall back on old patterns and habits.
Resources that helped
I had some great help from within the organization in supporting me through this process. In addition two specific books really helped me during this period:
The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter: This is a great book for anyone starting a new role in a new or existing organization. In my approach of developing the strategy to match the situation was a direct implementation of the approach discussed in the book.
The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership: One of my all time favorite books on how Bill Walsh turned around the 49ers into a multi-super bowl winning franchise. The concept of standard of performance is adapted from him.
