Throughout my 12 years of experience in the Information Technology industry I’ve had the pleasure of working with several different leaders that I either reported directly to or had the opportunity to be mentored. I’ve worked for some great leaders and others who honestly weren’t so great, but reality is that I learned so much from both. I learned what I appreciated from the good ones and what I really wanted different from the others. While working as a team leader on several teams I found certain aspects that helped myself and fellow teammates become more cohesive. Along with this, while working for ‘not so great’ leaders helped me really understand what it meant for myself and others to want to stay working for the team. Today my team is one of the highest performing teams where I work and the first to be the most self-managed team within the IT department. Below are five tips from my own experiences that have worked for us and I hope you are just as successful.
1) Create annual themes based on annual priorities/initiatives to help inspire high performance and bring the members together as a team by having something in common. For example, pirates, sharks, lions, eagles, etc. For example, pirates can promote taking risks, thinking outside of the box. Sharks are fierce, eagles are kings of the sky, lions represent leadership. Use memes and creative ways to incorporate the theme into team emails or meetings. signing an email with RAWR! Get into it. Be cheesy. This can create laughs and allows the group to know it’s okay to have fun while at work. Extra idea (which I do with my own team): Send small theme related gifts to the team to show appreciation and help them to continue the theme going daily such as coffee mugs or pirate flags. It’s a known fact that happy people work harder because this can make work more enjoyable and in result help you retain good talent.
Photo by Shannon Harrod
2) Hold non-work-related team events monthly or quarterly for team bonding. This allows the team to get to know each other more personally helping to humanize each member especially if the team if fully remote and from different backgrounds or cultures. For example, coffee/tea breaks for 30 minutes once a month. Hire a company to host a team building event, run a 10K together, or purchase online game packs such as Jackbox to play fun and funny games. My personal favorite is Drawful. These games are good for all ages and cultures as well. Extra idea: Have team members take turns on coming up with a fun activity for the team each month. Go in alphabetical order to be fair.
Photo by Shannon Harrod
3) Self-managed team meetings are great opportunities for the team to work together. Randomly be unable to attend the meeting to naturally force the team to decide who will run the meeting. This only works of course if they are very familiar with how the meeting is ran. Such as a daily status meeting. They may take turns on presenting and recording the notes on behalf of the team. The important part is to let it be their decision on who will run the meeting and not an appointment by the manager. It can take time for them to do this very comfortably, but ultimately this helps them to get more comfortable with each other as a team and of course allows the manager to be able to attend other meetings from time to time. This can also boost team confidence because they will be proud, they did it on their own.
4) Host periodic retrospectives on how the team is performing. Try not to contribute unless necessary or be the last person to provide feedback from the manager perspective. Make it simple asking the team, what went wrong, what went well, and what could they do to improve. Use a shared whiteboard or have someone scribe the responses on behalf of the team. At first it may be difficult to get a new team to contribute openly. Call team members out who aren’t’ contributing to try to get their thoughts. If you notice specific team members aren’t contributing over multiple retrospectives, talk with them in your 1-1s to find out how you can help make it more comfortable for them. Reassure them their contributions to the teams’ goals and successes is valued and that the team would love to know their perspective. Another good idea is to make sure the meeting rules is set from the beginning that there are no bad ideas, and all opinions are considered and captured. When you end up getting action items out of each retrospective make sure to assign them so that they get addressed. Over time you’ll find how quickly the team progresses and makes them more engaged in retrospectives because they experience the changes for the better of the team. This will make the members feel empowered and again more cohesive because they all feel confident in their roles and contributions. Another maturity point is the team will hold each other accountable when certain members are impacting the work of others. You just need to be careful and moderate to ensure the conversations don’t become a bullying session.
Image by Shannon Harrod
5) Celebrate as a team for project successes and birthdays. Keep a team shared calendar and asked all members to add their birthdays. Make sure you do something fun to celebrate that person with the team. A fun idea is to create a Jib Jab and send it out to the group with everyone’s face on it singing happy birthday. For team wins, do something fun, such as send snacks/coffee to the team members prior to an all-night project that is planned. Another idea is to allow the team to leave early on a Friday unexpectedly so they can relax and start the weekend early. It is very likely they will talk about it amongst each other and sharing their appreciation of the support and ‘free’ time off.
Photo by Shannon Harrod