Growing Team Culture

This desk is part of the attendee preparation for our workshop Leading Engineering Teams For New Managers.

It's the context for Day 1: Growing Team Culture. For the video and transcript to go with these slides, check out its resources page on our site.

Transcript

1. Growing team culture
   

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2. Your culture is a living thing
   

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3. Culture fit?
   

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4. Culture fit is static
   

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5. Focus on culture growth
   

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6. Healthy cultures take work
   

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7. Healthy cultures communicate
   • Nonviolent communication
   • Lack of bike shedding
   • Open discussions on how to do stuff
   • Social interactions
   

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8. Healthy cultures trust
   • Autonomy
   • Members are responsible and mature
   • Feeling of security in position
   • Support by management
   

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9. Healthy cultures respect
   • Psychological safety
   • Being able to admit you're wrong
   • No fear of being wrong
   • No fear of asking questions
   • No allocation of blame
   • Ego management
   • Lack of ego
   • Non-toxic environment
   • Safe place to be yourself
   

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10. Healthy cultures accept
    • Diverse
    • Inclusive
    • Stable
    • Feeling of progression
    • Work/life balance
    • Mental health awareness
    • Distraction-free workspaces
    

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11. How do you measure it?
    • Are you making progress towards shared goals?
    • Are you delivering stuff?
    • How long does stuff take to deliver?
    • Are your people productive?
    

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12. It's the together bit that counts
    

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13. Rituals
    • What rituals do good teams follow?
    • What rituals enable healthy teams?
    

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14. How do you handle feedback?
    • Positive
    • Corrective
    

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15. Regular retrospectives
    • Concentrate on problems and solutions rather than people
    • Address issues early
    • Keep conversations transparent
    

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16. Code previews
    • Improves confidence
    • Reduces re-writes
    • Shares information
    

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17. Pairing
    It is not just for programmers.
    

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18. Code reviews
    • Ask questions
    • Offer suggestions
    • Talk about the code, not the author
    

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19. Team working agreements
    • Roles and responsibilities
    • Timings
    • Methodologies
    

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20. Teams are immutable
    

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21. • Teams change. They get bigger or smaller. People move from 'small'
    roles to 'big' roles as team grow.
    • Provide mentorship for new team leads.
    • Move work to a team rather than forming teams around work. This
    helps stability and performance
    

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22. The feedback loop on improving teams or mentoring people is so
    much longer than we're used to. So feedback should be regular and
    frequent.
    1:1s for individuals, retros for teams
    

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23. Division between leading and doing gets mashed up - it's difficult to
    lead while doing and vice versa
    Admitting a thing is happening and discussing it openly can be
    enough acknowledgement to start improving it.
    

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24. When bringing in new team members
    • Offer support
    • Documentation
    • Sherpa/buddy model - always interruptable
    • Pair on code often
    • Regular 1:1s with their lead
    • Socialisation
    • Spend more time in social activities to ease them in personally
    • Bring people in for social easing even before they start employment
    

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25. Key points
    • Over-communicate, in public
    • Create rituals that encourage communication and sharing
    • When they don't work, keep iterating
    

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