I’ve seen many times blog post from experienced managers sharing best practice, do’s and don’t’ on team management. Rarely I’ve seen the same coming from the other side, the team members.
I’ve worked with many people in my career, with different professional backgrounds and I’ve been led with different styles over the years. This is what I think matters the most for happy, performant team members. What follow is the product of my anecdotal experience so take it with a grain of salt.
Motivation & Recognition
This is probably at the top of every manager’s list. You want a motivated team to reach their objectives and deliver. How does motivation look like from the other side, though?
The happy team wants to work on impactful topics, with reasonable expectations and planned in a timely manner. So if you are about to set OKRs for the next quarter and 80% of the topics just dropped from above the day before, well, it is not gonna be met with enthusiasm.
The happy team doesn’t like toil as well as swift change of direction.
It goes without saying it, recognition is a strong factor in keeping your team motivated. Highlight the hard work, even if the impact was minimal, the same way you would highlight that quick config change that generated more revenue overnight.
To engineers both are important.
Involvement & Delegation
Ever felt like meetings you are not invited to have direct consequences on how you are gonna spend the next month? That is what the happy team doesn’t like.
Instead, a happy team is involved early in decisions, asked for feedback and can be ultimately delegated to.
A happy team is asked regularly for new ideas and topics that can bring value to the table.
Autonomy & Trust
It is critical that each team member can work autonomously, on their own mental model, without someone circling above their head daily. This mean no “Have you checked XY already?”, “What about Y? Is it done yet?”
Don’t like how your team organize its work? That’s a problem you want to solve organically. Micromanaging will only make things worse. Retrospectives, Peer reviews, 1:1 will help. Those are the right context for advise and course correction, everything else is often seen as a lack of trust.
Composition
This is something most team members have little control on, but the way team are put together strongly define outcome and happiness.
A football team with many forwarders and no midfielder will probably be fun to watch but deliver poorly. Same in engineering team, a heterogeneous team will probably be happier than one with three networking self-declared experts.
Wishing everyone a happy week with your happy team 😄