In this article, I will talk about 2 types of teams that manage to help organizations go in the right direction. We often complain about people who look at the given task from a revenue perspective like how much this is going to make us rich or our team rich. It is not actually a bad thing. We are getting our salaries at the end of each month without any hassles because of these people. I agree there are many politics and policies involved, but this is still how it is. Every stable, valuable & agile team in an organization is the result of 100s of politics, strained, gauged, quarreled, abandoned, and inflexible endeavors by each person in it.
Here I want to write about 5 points that make those teams better and coordinated to establish themselves the creative DNA in their work style and structure. I am a software engineer who is working as a consultant on behalf of Dynatrace for some of the largest organizations in India (Sometimes APAC). Having 2 major teams in an organization is important. One, that handles money and cashflow. Two maintain the rest of the processes. It is easy to have people populated with the tasks that are way out of their domain. Sometimes a mechanical engineer works as a developer. It is always important to have the right people at the right place to ensure your organization or team is structured well.
1. Assign right people to right place
It is important to have the right people at the right place in both teams who are handling money (Sales) and the growth of the company (Services). Without 2 of those teams, it will be difficult to achieve the company’s mission statement and reach near to its vision. As I observed in my experience about teams, they often tend to take credits for others’ work instead of taking credits for what exactly they did. “People blame on each other when the problem comes but when there is a credit overdue, the same people fall in line to take them.” Being professionals, we all have to keep in mind that if we are not ready to take accountability for the mistakes we did, then there is no reason for us to go forward and take credit for the work others do. Having the right people who can take accountability on behalf of their team are the ones who are a great fit to lead any team, whether it is a service or sales team. Knowing the domain comes second in this ever-accelerating technology world.
These days the hard truth is, 7-year old can become a CEO and develop an application. What sets us apart is how well we motivate our team to work up to their true potential. Inspiring people to work for you is important because not all will follow our mission statement in life. For example, my mission statement is different from others but that doesn’t mean I am right and they are wrong. I like to align my thoughts with the vision of the organization that I work for and some only want to get the job done no matter what. These are just their own perspective of life and how they live. As long as they are satisfied with what they are doing for themselves, everything is the right choice.
If you are a team lead or a manager, being creative is the most important trait. Whether the company you work for might follow a fully professional model, treat your employee as a resource model; this mindset will short live. At some point, you must switch your way of working or else your job. Having an open mindset to see opportunities around you is a special skill so develop it and by this people around you will feel good about you and the job they are doing.
If you are authoritarian, assign people to the right jobs. A person with a less creative mind or too technical a mindset is not fit for leading teams. Either that person should learn to adapt or he should be assigned to his rightful place. You cannot train fish to climb a tree no matter what it is impossible. Learning new tools that matched your working style helps you to stay productive and organized — This is not possible unless you have the right people at the right place.
2. Right decisions at the right time
When you put people who work well at the right place, obviously the standard of the company will increase. When they are in the right place, it is also necessary to make the right decision at the right place. For example, if your team is in crisis and need to fire some of your team members when you are the decision-maker, you need to carefully understand the budget of the team you have allowed for and then need to discuss with your services team lead about the problem and make him understand to come up with ideas that can save jobs as well as increase the growth rate of the team and the company. Always better service can get The company to higher places so it is important to provide the best possible service to your end-user or your business partners.
About firing people, as long as a leader hesitates to take hard decisions, the team cannot get creative or it’s difficult to build the ‘A’ team. Give one or 2 changes to grow or to show their talent to employees is a good idea but if they keep taking many chances and still no progress, it is good to tell them to part ways with the company and find another domain where they actually can put their heart and mind to. It will help them to find their path too. I had a friend where I referred her to our company and my manager gave her a lot of chances for almost a year but the improvement from her side was ordinary. She was into art and this is a technology company so she doesn’t fit in and got fired last year but ever since she got fired, her life turns out well and she now has some amazing sketches of her own.
Sometimes, there will be clashes between sales and service teams which often affect the people at the bottom of the triangle too. It affects the morale of team members where there is a cold war going on inside the company itself like civil war. Being an integral part of the company’s growth, if both teams start quarreling to credits, the overall growth of the organization affects. This sometimes might occur because of a change in leadership. When a person changes to the director’s position, this friction happens. The frequency of the new guy doesn’t match with all others below.
When this situation comes, it is good to have a meeting where all services and sales team sit together and decide the future and discuss their expectations with the new person by revisiting why they are working for the company in the first place; whether their love toward the company, for every month’s salary, for career-related or to make a difference and make a mark upon it.
“Remember to consider all your options before making decisions that affect all your team members and morale mustn’t affect at any cost.”
3. Value opinion of each team member
If you are a .manager or a team lead, you will be having people who work for you and for the company. In your team, there will be people who love the company they are working for. I am not saying 100% of your team members are loving what they work on. They also need to make a living from their work hence that love of work would be long gone in them due to the responsibilities they have in their personal life.
When you value individual opinions and consider their ideas, they start to trust you. When that trust builds between them and you, they feel at home while working. People who consider their workplace as their second home, don’t need to be monitored. They will be self-driven and become risk-takers too. Working for money will be converted to working for the mission of the company. Nothing else a company wants when each and every member start working for the company instead of for the salary they are providing. Productivity will be doubled at least.
There is an instance I like to share that happened in our team, our team started with 1 person and now within 4 years, we have grown up to 40 members. We are a services team and always growing from the feedbacks from customers and great people in our team. Now, for the first time, we engaged in 24x7 maintenance with some of the major banks in the country. The team has now got split into micro teams, program managers, and under them, there are TLs and people who are doing shifts. It is going on fine but program managers started to treat members below them as resources instead of humans. When they did that, individual opinions have no value and their many frictions started inside the team and they start to work for money.
I started working here when there were only 6 to 7 members in the team and from that day main unique point of our team was the culture and respect we had towards people. Now, many misunderstandings are started between team members and the way they work as well — I strongly feel this is because of lack of creativity in the work and offline communication. Still, the tools we are using are outdated, and also communication patterns are old. To overcome this, our services manager started open mic sessions with individuals. This might solve the problem temporarily but in a long run, innovation needs to be added to produce some phenomenal results. The above problem is facing by many companies around the world. A better solution is to streamline the thoughts of team members, not their work. Streamlining needs to be done at the root. When we start valuing every member’s suggestion, we can combine different solutions to reach a level of improvement where everyone is happy to work.
4. Free electron
This point is unconventional to follow but it works and I saw teams who did this are going wonderfully. The free electron is the process of letting a person or people (depending on the size of a team typically 50:5) roam around freely across projects and teams to look at the things that need to be taken care of. I know this because I am the free electron in our team right now. Where we give complete freedom to the electron team (the term I call for the team that works freely without boundaries) start building creative ideas around the team. They act like a boundary around. There can be 2 types of teams, Internal electron teams, and external electron teams.
The internal electron team is meant to control the affairs of the team. If it is a services team, the team should contain at least 5 members. Each of them has a unique skill.
- Technologist (Who can learn any given skill in a short period of time),
- Developer (Who can build or automate the workflows to accommodate difficult tasks in the team),
- Leader (Who supports every individual and hold keys to make teamwork),
- Creative Head (Who can inspire every team member with art, technology, and life) and
- An All-rounder (Who knows in and out of services and technology).
The external electron team mostly handles bridges and gaps between teams. Maintains all the affairs of teams and motivates them to work with each other well. The main responsibility of this team is to remind every team in the company about the mission statement and vision of the company so that it will be aligned with every employee who works for the company. This role can also be played by the VP or director of the region.
When there is a crisis in the company this team or the person (Who I call a free electron) can pop in and try to minimize the risk of employee dissatisfaction toward the company or any team. It is not mandatory to hire people, especially for the electron team. You can assign this to the people who already know about your team and willing to go extra mile for the betterment of your team or the company.
5. People to adapt and learn quickly
These days, inventions in technology are getting doubled every 18 months. The skill you know now will get outdated in the next 5 years or maybe even next year. To keep up with the pace we need to learn as fast as we can and also with correct concepts and topics that match your customer or end-users.
The trigger point for each team toward progress is its people. When they collectively work together for the same purpose, difficult challenges will get easier. Multiple brains are always better than one single brain that is because viewpoints will be different. You might be looking at money or revenue but another team member might look at the quality delivery point of you, some others may look at MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution). When you are up to date with what’s going on in your industry and the tools, you can brainstorm with your team member, to adapt that tool to make life easier. Literally, more tech-savvy's in your team; better you can face challenges and get help quickly.
If your team still uses an excel sheet for tracking issues, finding issues at the right time and management of that issue will become clumsy. If a team member comes in with an idea to use Incident Management System and train others to use the same, Hola!!! You can quickly store, organize, search and keep track of every activity or issues that are reported to your peers or your customer about their application. What will happen to productivity now? I will leave this question for you to answer.
Conclusion:
Managing a team is a tough task and imagine the whole company of 2000 people. This article is based on my experience and observation of teams that work across my reach. I found many politics that happen internally with customers as well as members in your team with other teams. At last, everything comes to the ego of the person who is there in that place and gets a chance to prove that guy is right on his decisions. Few are really good at making decisions and managing a company or team. Finally, each professional will act based on his instincts rather than thinking about what’s right for the team. I am not telling everyone does that but most of us do. People who understand the big picture are the ones who can lead well and also the people who align their vision toward the company they work for are rare to be found. If you have that person in your team, never let that person get away because they are crazy ones. As Steve Jobs says and it is already proven,
Crazy ones are the ones who have the potential to change the world and make it better for living.
Keep reading for more articles and wish you have a happy days ahead. Please check out my website for more updates and collections of my work, thetechnologist.in
