The Magic of #FEELINGStime

A truth that should be universally acknowledged – but isn’t – is that a group of hardworking people do not necessarily make a high performing team. On a basic level, a group of hard working people checking code into the same codebase isn’t necessarily a team. At a more complex level, hard work doesn’t necessarily correspond with progress made, and progress perceived. It doesn’t necessarily correspond to user benefit, or to things shipped. Hard work doesn’t mean smart work, it doesn’t mean valued work, and it isn’t necessarily rewarded.

The difference between a team that is killing it, and a team that is… not, is not necessarily measured in commits. It’s not measured in meetings, or design documents, or other arbitrary things. A team that is killing it has an energy, and an excitement. A team that is killing it is shipping. Not just checkboxes and release notes, but shipping as in, delivering meaningful improvement to users. A team that is killing it is not competing with anything other than themselves, who they were yesterday, who they think they can be tomorrow.

Every other month I put together something we call “The State of All the Things” for our team (a ~26 person x-platform mobile team). It’s where we take stock of our multi-month, multi-engineer projects, where they are at, what we expect next, and how that compares against where we thought we would be last time. When I put together the last one, it was clear that a bunch of great stuff had happened since, and that as a team we had more momentum. This also showed in the ways I personally was able to spend my time – less time on fires, on the emotionally draining work that goes into making a team more effective. More time on longer term things, on problems that had seemed impossible to contemplate and all of a sudden started to slot into place.

A lot of the work to get here was outlined in the series I did on effective mobile teams. But there was one thing that I haven’t really written about.

I have five managers who report to me, and we invested the time and effort into making them a team. I really think this is core to all the improvements we’ve made as a team this year.

The first thing was that we were explicit that they were a team. We had a team meetup (really more like a plagueup, as we were all sick – we had team outings to CVS for drugs). We started a weekly team meeting. I was explicit in the langauge I used that they were a team, and individually they served the teams they lead, and in time their language changed too. As we onboarded new managers, we onboarded them into that team.

The second thing was that we worked on being open with each other. Management is often extremely lonely – especially when things are hard. We start each team meeting with what we call “#FEELINGStime”. Everyone says how they feel. This gets us straight to the most important things happening on the team as a whole, but also gives us context on how the others are doing. It gives us space to confess to the things we are struggling with, or proud of, without it seeming like we were being “checked up on” or bragging.

The third thing was that we actively support each other. After #FEELINGStime whoever is happiest takes the team chore for the week. We’ll role play tough conversations with each other, help each other out, review each other’s drafts, and provide encouraging feedback – sometimes something felt really tough, but someone looking from the outside will be really impressed by it. Sometimes multiple people are just struggling with the same things, and it’s reassuring to feel like you’re not alone in that.

When it comes to management, I really believe in peer support – I work very hard to be a good manager, and support the managers on my team, but I know it’s better for everyone if they get that support from elsewhere, too – and where better than each other?

If you’re looking for peer support, you might like the Eng Managers slack.