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There’s a joke in engineering management: “You become really good at bridges . . . so they promote you to be a baker.”
This entails interruption-driven work so that your team can be flow-driven.
Now your job affects people’s daily lives in a tangible way that you see reflected back on the faces in front of you.
More often, conflicts are the result of a misalignment of values, and neither person is attempting malice against the other.
The act of sharing values can also have a side effect of building trust and vulnerability on a team.
One way to run a values exercise is to give team members a few minutes to pick five values from a list like what we just saw. Once everyone has picked, go around and ask each individual to discuss why those five values resonate with them.
I suggest doing this values exercise with your peers as well.
Values provide context to a person’s mental state, needs, and motivations.
The values workshop is a tool to understand one another better, and not to be weaponized.
Do you value humor and learning? You may find you start standups with a “dad joke” and something you’ve been pondering. Do you value family? You may find you put all of your effort into making sure parental leave at your company is equitable for all.
Companies also have values (explicit or not), and it’s pretty crucial that those values align at least in part with your own.
At Netlify, one of the company values was: “The best idea can come from anywhere.”
The interesting thing about values is there’s not necessarily a right answer. Rather, there are values that are congruent with the type of team we want to build, and some that are not.
misalignment with too many fundamental values can lead to burnout. And this type of burnout can build slowly over time.
When people talk about “good” managers, they are likely referring to people who show care and appreciation for people’s values, and also respect their boundaries.
No way around it, trust is the thing you will want most to build with a team. But trust evolves slowly, takes care and attention, and is easy to lose. Trust is delicate and valuable and should be treated that way.
to enable the people around me to do their best work . . . together.
Trust isn’t just a fuzzy, feel-good word. In a working environment, trust improves the strength of the systems we build.
We are at our jobs for a large percentage of our waking hours. There’s zero chance that you’ll make no mistakes with all that time and effort. If a group trusts one another, it recovers from a mistake, acknowledges it, learns, and moves on.
Let’s say something is going wrong. Are you more likely to unpack what’s happening with a manager who is always put together, or a manager who owns their mistakes? The truth is, your team needs to know you’re human. You can’t fix problems if you don’t know about them, and no one will tell you about them unless you make space for them.
in our role as a leader, we have to try our best to connect to folks no matter how similar or different they are to us.
when you force yourself out of small talk and into subjects that matter to you, people tend to build trust faster.
Humor is also a way to build trust, and one that many overlook. If you are able to laugh together, it’s much easier to have mutual vulnerability.
Ask questions about their current state, and listen truthfully and with your whole self.
Trust and misalignment may happen when individuals haven’t felt seen or valued.
If you see any of these behaviors, you can gently guide your team toward a more positive place, by suggesting they raise issues in the team meeting instead of with you alone, or set up a 1:1 with a peer.
The first thing you can suggest is that they bring this issue to a weekly team meeting, and you can facilitate an open discussion. It’s important to reinforce that you’ll be there to support them, but also align them with the why:
where the standups alter: one for triaging issues, one for discussion.
Teams that can joke around together are often a bit better at admitting mistakes and disagreeing without taking offense. Besides, it makes work more fun.
you’re working in an in-person environment and your team goes to lunch, they don’t take the whole company with them. They have time and space to chat among themselves. This gives a certain psychological safety that’s tough to have if they feel the whole company is watching them.
I recommend making a private chat group for the team.
bit lighter: some dorky memes, a “Have a great weekend!” here and there, celebrating some small team wins or an individual’s hard work. After a while, other folks begin to follow suit.
When you speak about your team, include yourself in the statement. When your team succeeds in something, though, praise them and leave yourself out of it.
A company is composed of groups, but those groups can only be successful if they’re working together, not if they are protecting their own group at all costs.
conveying a decision at the leadership level to the people who report to you: “The leadership team decided that we need to ship at least three features this quarter, so I guess that’s what we have to figure out how to do.” versus: “One of the key OKRs (objectives and key results) this quarter is that we as a company need to double the signups to our platform. We’ve done some calculations that show we can almost certainly get there by shipping three features, so let’s all talk about what we can do within our group to make that possible. If you’re curious, we can chat through what initiatives
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The culture and morale on your team is a large part of your responsibility.
teams that are able to express joy and humor together are often the most productive,
A few conditions need to be met for your engineers to get into flow state in their work: You are aligned on the base premises of the work. Your work is challenging, but not impossible. You feel a sense of togetherness with your team and peers, that you’re all building something together and have each other’s backs. Your moral values are not at odds with the work at hand. You feel respected. You get fair and timely feedback on your tasks. This does not necessarily have to be human feedback. It can also come in the form of compilation success, tests passing, or PRs (pull requests) going through.
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Remember to celebrate your team members when they do well, as soon as possible. Engineering is tough. It’s critical to be there, cheering for them at that finish line.
working with the company’s people (Human Resources) team, or with other stakeholders to understand the process for raises or promotions.
People even report that strong social connections with peers makes work feel less like work overall, even when they’re tasked with longer hours and difficult conditions. Positive social interactions raise oxytocin, which lowers anxiety. Social support has even been shown to extend one’s lifespan.
Have everyone on the team do a short (five-minute) presentation on something that interests them, not work-related.
Have everyone talk about something a bit personal: When they were small, what did they want to be when they grew up? If they could have any superpower, what would it be and why? What was their greatest challenge growing up?
Someone who is good at separating their self-worth from their work will be a good person to lead pairing sessions.
Check in with facts. Sometimes we react to an event without checking that we understand exactly what’s going on.
Find and rally around the positive. Since your brain is actively pulling you and others into fear mode, looking for the positive elements of a situation and saying them out loud can help balance what’s naturally imbalanced.
What are the real risks? State them clearly, or let someone else voice them,
This ratio, called the “Losada coefficient,”2 suggests a 2.9 times positive-to-negative interaction (i.e. praises: reproach), with a 6:1 ratio for optimal happiness.
For someone who might be trying to grow, breaking tasks down and focusing on the smallest, most doable bits first can help a ton.
The more we can break things down into incremental habits for our employees, the higher the chance that they can get into “flow,”
