According to Eb Ikonne, leaders should provide a motivating challenge or mission so that the software engineering team understands what success looks like. They can provide an enabling structure for effective teamwork, address things that negatively impact team success, and reduce or remove friction. Coaching can help people discover how to work effectively together.
At QCon London Eb Ikonne spoke about fostering high-performing work environments for software development.
In his talk, Ikonne referred to the five conditions outlined in J Richard Hackman’s book Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances:
- The team must be a real team, rather than a team in name only
- A compelling direction for its work
- An enabling structure that facilitates teamwork
- The team operates within a supportive organizational context
- The team has expert teamwork coaching
The word "team" is often used pretty casually in the work setting, often to create a sense of camaraderie between people who have to collaborate in some form or fashion, Ikonne said. As a leader, you want to clarify who is on (and not on) the software engineering team. Everyone must know the people who might help the team occasionally but are not team members. This clarity is vital, he stated.
Ikonne mentioned that leaders must provide a motivating challenge or mission for the team. The software engineering team should understand what success looks like and what they need to do to achieve it:
As the leader, you need to express why the work matters. The direction serves as an enabling constraint for the team to choose between options on how they will go about doing their work.
Every person, in their role, e.g., architect, software engineer, etc, needs to understand how their work contributes to the whole, Ikonne said.
An enabling structure that facilitates teamwork is an important condition for effective teams that leaders often take for granted, Ikonne argued. You want to ensure the team has the right number of architects, software engineers, team leads, etc required to deliver software successfully.
Ikonne said that the broader organization (unknowingly) prevents teams from succeeding by implementing policies and practices that introduce unhealthy friction. We need to address factors that negatively impact team success and reduce or remove friction.
The supportive context needs to reinforce the importance of teams. However, rewards, incentives, and recognition often encourage a focus on individual interests over the interests of the collective, Ikonne explained:
As a leader, I need to ensure we have the right focus. It takes very little to encourage "hero coder" behavior on a team, which is something team leaders should work to avoid.
Ikonne mentioned that the team leader must provide the software engineering team with coaching or engage third-party professionals to help the team develop its technical and social skills. It’s often taken for granted that people will know how to work well together when this isn’t necessarily the case. The coaching required when forming a team will differ from coaching when the team has worked together for some time or when the team reflects on its work processes. As a leader, I’ve had to recognize and adapt the coaching needed to match the situation, Ikonne said.
As a leader, you must continually focus on and work on these conditions. Conditions will not always be perfect; however, you can only improve these essential conditions by working on them and improving them. That is part of leading teams, Ikonne concluded.