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
2. Your culture is a living thing
3. Culture fit?
4. Culture fit is static
5. Focus on culture growth
6. Healthy cultures take work
7. Healthy cultures communicate • Nonviolent communication • Lack of bike shedding • Open discussions on how to do stuff • Social interactions
8. Healthy cultures trust • Autonomy • Members are responsible and mature • Feeling of security in position • Support by management
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
10. Healthy cultures accept • Diverse • Inclusive • Stable • Feeling of progression • Work/life balance • Mental health awareness • Distraction-free workspaces
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?
12. It's the together bit that counts
13. Rituals • What rituals do good teams follow? • What rituals enable healthy teams?
14. How do you handle feedback? • Positive • Corrective
15. Regular retrospectives • Concentrate on problems and solutions rather than people • Address issues early • Keep conversations transparent
16. Code previews • Improves confidence • Reduces re-writes • Shares information
17. Pairing It is not just for programmers.
18. Code reviews • Ask questions • Offer suggestions • Talk about the code, not the author
19. Team working agreements • Roles and responsibilities • Timings • Methodologies
20. Teams are immutable
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
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
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.
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
25. Key points • Over-communicate, in public • Create rituals that encourage communication and sharing • When they don't work, keep iterating