How leaders can support high-performing engineering teams
The foundation of being a good engineering manager is getting to know your teammates and understanding what is important to them. As we explored in part one of this article, you can use several strategies to build trust on engineering teams, from asking questions to career sponsorship.
How do you go further and build support for organizational change?
Fortunately, these needs align neatly with what performance coach and trainer Paloma Medina calls the BICEPS model – representing six core needs of human beings: Belonging, improvement, choice, equality, predictability, and significance.
All six of those core human needs have an impact at the team level as well. Understanding and responding to your team members’ motivations creates the basis for them to express themselves – and provides the structure, meaning, and impact they need.
1. Build trust. The first step in creating structure is building relationships. At CircleCI, for example, we’ve built structures such as regular pair programming rotations and engineering talks to help our distributed teams do that.
2. Structure around how you collaborate. As our engineering department has expanded, we’ve moved to a more streamlined engineering delivery process. But each team decides how to implement day-to-day processes such as daily standup meetings, planning sessions, or collaboration. Every team has specific needs, and they know how to best address them.
3. Remove blockers. We all know how frustrating it is to be stuck. Building pathways – for example, setting up regular pair programming rotations, investing in self-serve information access, supporting each other across teams, and establishing knowledge-sharing – can help keep things moving forward.
4. Continuously improve. Use retrospectives to discuss and improve how your teams work together. Blameless postmortems are also a great tool to help understand problems and drive solutions. Code reviews, mentoring, and knowledge-sharing can help team members learn from each other.
How you talk about learning – especially the way you discuss mistakes – matters. These decisions will fundamentally shape the culture of your teams and determine whether people feel safe or threatened in their core needs.
5. Drive toward alignment. Communicate strategy, direction, and relevant tactical details to your teams – and remember that it’s almost impossible to over-communicate these details. Always repeat what’s important.
By creating an environment in which engineers can thrive, you are also supporting your organization.
