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Today, being an engineering leader is one of the toughest tasks; it involves driving product metrics while ensuring teams keep performing at the best levels, and not everyone is capable of doing it correctly. If you are a CTO who’s looking to build high-performing and exceptional engineering teams across your organization, hiring the top talent is not the only thing in this playbook.
In this post, we define what high-performing teams look like and how to build them in your organization by making the right decisions at the people and execution levels.
What does a High-Performing Engineering Team Look Like?
A high-performing engineering team is a group of individuals who are predictable and reliable for delivery of work within expected timelines. These teams are not siloed, and they often have work flowing across the team where everyone is collaborating towards achieving a shared goal. Moreover, the performance from such teams is sustained and does not have volatility. They can perform at the best levels and deliver fantastic products for much longer periods than other teams.
As we know what a high-performing team looks like, let’s discuss how you can build one for yourself.
Read: How Big Data Is Transforming Real-Time Business Decision Making
How Can CTOs Build High-Performing Engineering Teams?
1. Foster a Collaborative Environment
If you want to build a good team, it is important to foster a collaborative environment. Team members should be able to freely exchange ideas, collaborate, and share feedback on work without being judged.
A team that can collaborate can take on any challenging project and come out victorious due to their ability to collaborate and work with each other without any issues.
2. Structure Teams to Minimize Overhead
As teams become bigger, having the right structure can unlock amazing performance. If your teams are not structured well, that will become a bottleneck even if you have the best engineers and tools with your team.
While structuring teams, you should define clear ownership and accountability for every vertical that your team operates in. If ownership is not clear, the team can be stuck waiting for approvals and chasing the wrong members, which can negatively impact velocity.
3. Encourage Continuous Learning and Development
Continuous learning and development is one of the easiest areas a CTO can focus on to make their teams better and unlock high performance. Most engineers don’t leave because of too much work; they leave due to no learning or professional development in their work. If you can craft an amazing learning and development plan for your engineers, you can retain exceptional talent, build more capabilities, and unlock more possibilities for performance in your teams.
Learning and development should also include clear career ladders and actionable steps the team members can take to reach the next level. If they are performing exceptionally, they should be promoted based on their career ladders, and they can also use the career ladders to identify their focus areas for the next step in their career.
4. Recognize Team Contributions and Efforts
Teams that are recognized for their contributions and efforts by their CTOs can sustain high performance much longer than the ones that never receive appreciation. As a CTO, it is your responsibility to set up a recognition program for your organization, which can be helpful in highlighting and recognizing team contributions. These programs can include cash/stock rewards and awards, along with appreciation notes that boost team morale.
Moreover, when teams achieve milestones in a long project, it is important to acknowledge the progress so that they can feel their efforts are valued.
5. Reduce Meetings
Though meetings are necessary for collaboration, excessive meetings can negatively impact performance and become a big blocker for everyone on the team. Meetings without clear agendas, too many participants, and recurring schedules are some of the worst things that you can gift your teams.
If you want to unlock high performance, you have to reduce meetings, as every hour you free your team from meetings is an extra hour that they can spend doing deep work and performing better. As a CTO, you can define guidelines to reduce meetings, add focus hours every week, require meeting agendas, and limit participants to the minimum required ones. This will definitely help in improving the performance of your engineering teams.
6. Build Execution Discipline
A team is as good as its workflows and execution discipline. Without defined workflows and discipline in executing the processes, your teams can spend significant time doing unnecessary work, which ultimately reduces productivity and performance.
When teams cannot control task inflow, and engineers work on multiple things parallely, it becomes harder to focus on the important items, and deliver them perfectly.
As a CTO, it should be your responsibility to ensure your teams are not overburdened with work, and they are unblocked quickly. This execution discipline will ensure that work keeps moving with defined timelines and steps, and you can perform at your best levels for sustained periods.
7. Feedbacks for Continuous Improvement
If you want to keep improving and pushing the boundaries of high performance, you have to be ready to accept feedback for continuous improvement and act on it. As a CTO, you should host monthly/quarterly feedback loops that make it easier to identify and fix issues in your teams much faster. Moreover, the feedbacks that you accept, should be non-biased and employees should be free to raise their questions without any repercussions.
By now, we’ve discussed many things about building high-performing teams, and all of them are equally important. If you miss any of these things, you may not unlock the full potential of your engineering teams. As a CTO, the best thing you can do during this journey is to be open to feedback and flexible enough to change tracks so that your teams’ performance never degrades. Moreover, keep recognizing the good work from your teams, and you will see the performance compound at a much faster rate than anything else.
Author’s Bio:
Harikrishna Kundariya, is a marketer, developer, IoT, Cloud & AWS savvy, co-founder, and Director of eSparkBiz, a Software Development Company. His 14+ years of experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on IoT and SaaS applications.