Well Performed Engineering Team

Well performed team does not come from recruiting best people from the organization. It is a continuous effort to reach to the level, so one day you claim the best performing team.

Based on my year journey in M&T bank, I derived a few points that need to be outlined to get the best performing engineering team.

Define “What is best performance means for you and your team?”

A leader should define what the performance means for him and the same he can convey the message to his team. Well performed engineering teams have their own definition of high performance outlined and that of course will be inspired by company expectation. Without your own definition, a team can not achieve its objectives.

This sets up the goal for the entire team to keep the pace on and at the same time that also gives you some pointer to figure out where those objectives got failed.

Good Hire, Bad Hire

Hiring a good candidate does not mean you are building a high performance engineering team, rather hiring a good candidate who can match with company culture and constantly enjoy it. Good hire for a Software Engineering team does not mean super talented engineer, how much java he/she knows or how many algorithms he has written so far. Implicitly all those are important factors but we have a rather more important factor to understand if a new hire is diverse, he is going to understand your definition about the best performing engineering team. Best engineer has to work with another team of the best engineers who are diverse in terms of their language, understanding, country they belong to.

At the same time a bad hire can be super talented but has no team work skill set, he can come and destroy the culture of your team, damage the definition you derived for your team high performance as well as integrity of your company.

Leader is a member of the team, not boss

Once you define the goals of a high performing engineering team and share with your team members and everyone knows how they can be the member of the best performing engineering team. You are not supposed to interfere too much, how they are implementing those goals i.e. no micromanagement.

You need to rely on your team member strength and if few of your team members are blessed with more skills than you, then enjoy it. You should hire people more talented than you, always hire people who have more or a sort of different skill set than you so that you can have a totally diverse team.

You team member may know more than you and that is you should be proud of instead of feeling a threat.

Successful Culture

Create successful Culture, give lots of freedom to your team members. Many companies from giants like Google and Amazon or mid size market leaders like Github, Buffer, Basecamp, Etsy, always try to make their employees happy, healthy and not overworked.

After all, your brain’s resistance can work productively at a certain time if you work consistently. Healthy brains produce healthy products and tired brains deliver lethargic entities.

Setting a high bar does not mean setting a goal that is hard to achieve, don’t ever create a goal and when your engineer does not reach that goal, you are either creating inferiority complex for him or labeling him non productive for an immature estimated goal.

Room for Error

When you build your team, you should create a climate to have room for error and no one should blame each other for error but should learn from each other’s mistakes. It was well said that failures are pillars of success, failures are opportunities to learn and don’t repeat that mistake in future. Once you have made a mistake with any member of your team, lets scan the entire ecosystem and find the reason for that mistake, sit down with the entire team for not to blame one person but to introspect with all so that everyone realizes and is aware how we can avoid that mistake in future.

Collaboration is vital part of successful team

Based on my experience so far as a technical lead, It is important to create an aura where every engineer can trust each other and engineers are motivated to make decisions especially about their work. As their communication is vital among each other, other than communication with business, I would like to make sure their soft skills are excellent. I would love to focus on soft skills during the interview process since without soft skills, it is going to be a tough challenge for a team to develop collaboration.

What motivates team

After all, without a motivated team, it’s almost impossible to deliver a successful product or project. There are certain ceremonies you always need to celebrate with your team, like

Crystal Clear Goals

Positive Feedback

Equal Opportunity for development

Healthy Environment

Team Building Activities

There are many more to go, your team is like a family, however you don’t pick and choose members of the family, you get what to have now. But the Enterprise Engineering Team you choose, you build, you nurture them, you learn from them, you enjoy with them!