The magical ways to connect with your teams and inspire them to do the best they could
Running a company has never been easy, that what I can say to my buddies from the experiences working for a dozen of companies, multiple teams with cool people, and mostly through sharing numerous ups and downs in the last 15 years. One of the hardest challenges besides working on rocket-science technologies and company cash flow is to make sure your people are highly engaged with the vision the company set. It is challenging because it deals with people that 1. are human, and 2. have no consistent, universal answers like one plus one in mathematics or in coding tasks with clear inputs/outputs. I don't mean to de-emphasize the works of other areas as I believe everyone in a company has their own set of challenges to solve; the CEO is busy with setting up the vision and pulling in investors; while the VP is tasked with keeping the organization well-oiled and trimming excessive fat, an engineer solves a customer feature, a customer support tries to keep customer happy, etc. But it's important to know what pulls people in which is not entirely about money/benefits then find a way to have your people resonate with that value.
You may come here not only because of the eye-catching title but also because you, as a manager, see the team effort is scattered, the not-so-high excitement even when there is good news, and other shaky things you hopefully find a formula to lift up the situation. The thing is I don't really have one formula to give; I got to judge it based on a number of factors: the company vision, the team setup, way of collaboration, the culture and existing people, the managers, and workloads. Also the formulas are different case by case, from time to time so it's important that the managers should expect to be adaptive. In this post we will look through an interesting case study I have experienced myself together with some insights that may benefit you.
Skunkworks back in 2010 was the hottest startup in Vietnam, attracting top talents from different countries to do, you know, skunkworks. The product could be described as event planning with friends, something as simple as Facebook Events nowadays. 4 years in the making yet the team couldn't roll out a strong minimum-viable product to customers to gain some traction. Still dozens of million dollars were spent on iterating ideas, processing location data, marketing, paychecks, Google-level perks, etc. Team members at different level were yelling and fighting over simple feature requests which easily took 2 week cycles instead 2 days; people got lost in protecting their opinions with egos instead of aligning; in the end there were a bunch of super stars with little to none collaboration plus too much distrust. The perfect recipe for disaster it was. Then one day the team was utterly shocked to be informed that Skunkworks would shut down in a few days, almost nobody would anticipate that could happen. Obviously it could have been avoided with a much better product management one can say, but one equally interesting cause I observed was the way the team (including me as a mobile developer) lost the connection to the vision and to each other.
Until today, I still believe the ship could have been saved if that connection as one of critical countermeasures had been stronger. How much would a developer joining 2 months ago with his observation and thoughts be able to steer the whole organization rushing at full speed? Not very much. Frankly I had no direct manager to talk to but the VP Engineering and the CEO but my effort to get their attention didn't turn out well. What I could do best was to complete my tasks in the best way while building up deep relationship with peers. Even when one has superpower to influence, it's incredibly harder to execute once the behavior has been deeply rooted, not to mention the difficulty to win hearts from super stars with big egos. The shutdown of Skunkworks was the right move financially, I was lucky to be selected to Skunkworks 2.0 a few weeks later, the new team was scaled down from 100 persons to an elite team of 10 with revamped yet clear vision. The second MVP was confidently delivered in weeks, team bonding became so good and everyone knew their purposes.
It was a true cross-functional team who ate, worked and played together before Agile became trendy. Yes, starting over is one of effective ways to have the team connect to each other, sometimes more effective than trying to patch the existing issue bit by bit. It's because convincing individuals to correct their behaviors takes a long time with a lot of "luck", forcing people leads to frustration, public announcements may or may not give the responses one would expect. Now back to the wish to steer the whole organization rushing at full speed, multiple buy-in from different levels of leadership can bring great results but it needs to be all from top to middle to bottom. It doesn't have to be as strictly hierarchical as in the army; the main point is to have an aligned view toward a vision for changes to happen. Also humans resonate better to those who they work closely with than to the whole organization.
Therefore the team setup has a direct impact in helping people connect to their purposes which are aligned to organization vision and encouraging them to do their best. Having two persons working on a temporary project then call it a team doesn't feel right, on the other hand telling a bunch of people to figure out the purpose themselves without sharing vision is a waste of effort. From different sources on the Internet you can find articles about Spotify's engineering culture around aligned autonomy with repeating mantra "Do X, figure out how".
At first glance it looks like managers's heaven. What those articles don't show are: first, Spotify doesn't use the Spotify model itself (link) (oh dear) and second, the model can only be deployed given high trust between team members and the manager, and third the manager needs to operate as part of the team not as a driving force from outside. You as the manager should explain the way of work and your leading style to the team and make sure that the team is comfortable before adapting something.
Now it comes to the final part about inspiring your team to do the best they could. I can only give some advices from my limited experiences of leading teams as a technical founder of a small startup.
••• The higher your role is, the more impact you can make, and the fuzzier it is for you to navigate to the good outcome as there are fewer people tell you what to do but it's you that figure out yourself. And the best way to solve that? Enable your teammates to step in your domain, trust them to solve your issues. That way you both help them grow while the whole team achieve the targets together.
••• Again, help your team grow, in whatever way you and your team agree upon. Not many feel happy working on the same field for more than years without some personal development or seeing opportunities to grow. If you can help a developer step up to a team lead, it's great. If you can help a team leader becomes a manager, even better.
••• It's always a balance to strike for: how much control you want to have on the team, how open you let the team face the real pressure from the frontline versus how much you want to shield them so that they can focus on their daily tasks.
••• Build a long lasting human-to-human relationship: the work to build up relationship must be appreciated by leaders in your organization, if not please make it clear as soon as possible and have a strategy for it preferably as soon as the company is set up. Otherwise the longer the company runs the harder it becomes to transform.
••• Connection is stronger if it's bi-directional than uni-directional. People are sharp enough to tell if you approach them with good intention or not even how hard you try to hide. You can decide what to give but you can't control what will be returned later.