The Manager Trinity: Effective Teams
Unlocking the Manager’s Role: Crafting Happy, Productive Teams for Lasting Success
Whether you’re an aspiring, new, or seasoned manager, this article articulates the tenets of successful managers exploring the second key aspect of a manager’s role— making teams happy and productive. Read here for the overarching 3 core tenets and how managers add value.
In my experience, most managers primarily focus on 1:1 management, making individuals happy and productive. However, to truly excel as a manager, you need to go beyond that and invest in building effective teams and contributing to the company’s success. Balancing the three tenets — individuals, teams, and company value — adds complexity to decision-making. It’s a skill rarely explicitly taught or discussed, which is why I want to delve into it here.
Example: granting someone a month off during a critical product launch might boost their happiness and productivity, but it could hinder their growth as well as team and company objectives. The three tenets are interconnected and must be harmonized, rather than isolated, for effective management.
This story focuses on the 2nd tenet of the manager’s job
Your job is to
Help individuals be happy and productive so they can form happy and productive teams that deliver value to the company.
I personally think about it in a progressive manner, but it’s a balancing act. I start with the individuals, choosing them, understanding them, and making them happy and productive. Next, I think about the team, composed of those people you chose and groom. When considering the team you often need to adjust the choices of people. Since people work in teams, you can’t hire clones. You need to consider the web of skill, personalities, opinions, backgrounds and what not, that will both jive well together (team dynamics) and produce the best outcomes (team skills). It doesn’t stop there. The next piece to weave into this optimization model is the company: do the people on your team culturally fit the company? Do they share the company’s values? Can they derive meaning from the company’s vision and goals? Those will be key to producing value for the company.
Another way to think of it is like a nice puzzle. Each individual on the team is a puzzle piece. Individual puzzle pieces don’t make sense alone, but when they harmoniously integrate with one another the other puzzle pieces — those are their team members — they can create a beautiful puzzle — which I analogize to creating impact for the company.
Help Teams be happy and productive:
In parallel to molding the individuals on your team, your job is to build, design and shape effective teams that deliver business value in a predictable manner. Your goal is to create a well oiled machine made of gear wheels.
Each team member is a gear wheel, turning in an effort to produce something valuable for the company. When the wheels integrate sufficiently even one working wheel can slowly turn the others, so each wheel’s work is a bit easier, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Team Composition:
Consider things like experience levels, skill set, personalities, and diversity of opinions (backgrounds, gender, race, and so on). You might want to fill in certain roles like architect, tech lead, test engineer etc. Hiring only senior engineers often leads to competition on challenging work and makes it hard for members to develop leadership skills since there will be no one to lead. Hiring only juniors will take a toll on you as the only mentor and will make it hard to deliver predictability (junior employees unveil more unknowns during their work).
Team Dynamics and Communication:
The way people interact with one another is the cornerstone of a productive team. Starting with people’s Inherent personalities, you can influence the personality mix of your team during recruitment and then mold team communication and trust with processes, attention and coaching.
- Lacking, inconsistent or inefficient communication causes issues like duplicate work or missing pieces of work, in addition to frustrated team members who had to throw away their work or thought they hit the deadline until they learned their peers forgot to integrate with their work. As the manager it’ll be hard to know when you need to intervene to close a knowledge gap or load balance work.
- Unresolved friction among team members will fester and grow leading to unexpected problems such as members leaving the team, lack of communication etc. Team members are rarely willing or capable of addressing this friction themselves. As the manager you can do a lot to assuage the tension in a few short conversations. If you are unsure how to handle that, I’m happy to lend advice.
Predictability:
This makes a notable difference between strong teams and weak teams. A well performing team can be counted on to deliver a piece of work. If your team misses deadlines half of the time… can’t even finish this sentence. You, with the team, should strive to improve your estimations and convert unknowns to knowns by tracking predictability, spikes/research and the art of retrospecting. Simply start by documenting predicted time to finish work and compare with the actual time it took to complete. Using spikes in parallel will allow some pre-research of what is needed to complete the task, thus reducing surprise unknowns.
Processes and Frameworks:
The right processes help the team communicate with each other, with you and with cross-function collaborators (such as PM, UX). They also help with improving predictability and with understanding the state of work to adjust assignments and deadlines accordingly. Examples of processes include Agile/Scrum, OKRs, Kanban and anything in between.
Process? Yuck! Over the years, the word process has developed a bad reputation due to bad implementations that are common. If your team shows aversion to a process you suggest, or the one your company adopted, collaborate with them on augmenting it and finding one that works with them. Collaboration is essential here, they should be part of the solution for this to succeed. Remember all processes are in service of something, focus on that goal and augment the rest.
Isn’t it other people’s job? Oftentimes, project or program managers can help design and/or implement a process for the team, but many times the front line manager will do that. Don’t ignore this part of the job assuming it’s out of bounds for you.
Group retrospectives:
This specific practice is worth calling out. Well run group retrospective helps with everything mentioned above. It will open communication channels, can be a place where the team ideates what is hindering their predictability, highlight issues with team composition and be a place where they choose or augment team processes and frameworks used.
Hopefully I captured the key pieces that help mold happy and productive teams. See anything missing? Found anything surprising? Connect with me on linkedin or share your knowledge to make us all better managers using the comments.
