Team Health - Speed and Trust

In their book “Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems”, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss speak to the need of not only speed, but trust. Gone is the mantra of “move fact and break things” which wreaked havoc on people and teams. We can gain speed while maintaining trusting empowered teams. While the book is not about product teams specifically, all the lessons easily apply.

Frei and Morriss created a “FIX” map of Fast Iterative eXcellence. There are four potential trajectories for your product team.

The Four Quadrants

• Inevitable Decline
  - Diminishing stakeholder value
  - Transactional culture
  - High team member cynicism

• Responsible Stewardship
  - Oriented toward the past
  - Consensus decision-making
  - High team member comfort

• Reckless Disruption
  - High innovation
  - Stakeholder churn
  - "Us" and "them" thinking
  - High team member anxiety

• Accelerating Excellence
  - Rising stakeholder value
  - Balanced culture of creativity and achievement
  - High team member confidence and creativity 

While a team prioritizes work and builds roadmaps it can be useful to weigh these dimensions. Product teams should have a foundational level understanding of speed and trust. We need to treat pace and momentum as mission-critical, but also focus on gaining and keeping the trust of our cross-functional partners and stakeholders. In turn that trust can unlock speed. If all involved trust the plan, in an empowered team, everyone can execute that plan at an accelerated pace.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Create a FIX map and have your product team rate themselves. At first glance, where would you rate your product team? Are you moving fast or slow? Are you building or losing trust with your stakeholders? Don’t overthink it too much, just pick a quadrant and map your team to it.

If you land in the Accelerating Excellence section, great job. These teams are are creating high and rising value for stakeholders and users, and the folks in the team itself. You and your teammates are energized and delivering creative solutions.

If you are in Responsible Stewardship, you are missing the mark on your potential impact.

And Reckless Disruption is likely inflicting a lot of collateral damage in your sprint toward your goals.

Inevitable Decline doesn’t have the advantage of either trust or speed, and really needs some help.

For those not in accelerating excellence, think through how you knew where you landed. How do you understand the tradeoff of being in one of those three quadrants that is lacking? Maybe for those in responsible stewardship, you thought about how many processes any given thing has to go through and the fatigue that comes with that, or how you’ve lost talented colleagues and now can’t keep up. If you are in reckless disruption, maybe you are feeling how what you are delivering isn’t quite meeting user needs or is causing technical debt you can’t get away from. For those in inevitable decline, maybe it just feels bad to come into work some days, you’ve got some frustration and cynicism about your team or situation.

Knowing where the team rates itself provides two areas (trust and speed) to take a further look at and see where improvements can be made. Perhaps this is an exercise to revisit periodically as you work towards improved team health.

Exploring Polarity and Strategic Tension

A topic we often dive into as a product team is competing initiatives, resources, or stakeholders. We attempt to remedy through prioritization frameworks, gaining further insights, and negotiation. However, some tension, some competition in these realms, is good. Tension keeps your rope taut, able to understand the push and pull of what you are tethered to, keeping you aware of your surroundings and its forces.

If we think about our goals or initiatives in the same way, we can explore the opposing forces pushing or pulling the organization or team in several ways at the same time. Product teams that address just one of the poles in a tension are apt to miss opportunities and fail to deal with threats. Looking for the tension between opposing forces broadens the search for strategic responses and increases the prospects of taking appropriate action.

A few weeks ago we explored polarity through contradictory users. The exercise below broadens our exploration into several different forms of polarity or tension, in terms of short term and long term initiative planning.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

John Cutler wrote a list of prompts for exploring tension as a part of the annual planning process. Distill the list into a handful you believe your team will find most valuable. Add them to a white board or virtual Miro and ask each team member to choose one fill-in-the-blank prompt. Though reticent at first, my team quickly began filling in multiple prompts. Discuss what the team came up with.
And remember, strategic tensions are dynamic - they can change as the strategy is executed or the initiative develops. Revisit these statements to edit or add as needed.

Job/Career Priorities

Job news is everywhere right now. The jobs report was released last week, showing lowest unemployment rate in decades, even as tech companies continue to lay off workers. The Great Resignation that began in 2021 continues, but recent reports have come out citing those who left their jobs feel regret about their decisions. Companies continue to update and mandate return to office policies as the pandemic wanes and a recession looms. All of this can lead to a very charged workplace.

Team morale is an outsized contributor to product team efficiency and outputs. How individuals feel about their employer, their position, their work life contributes greatly to their success on a product team. Even though these larger conversations might not feel like they directly impact a backlog or a sprint, they certainly affect the individuals managing that work.

This graphic by @lizandmollie of how we do and could measure success on the job is telling.

All workplaces are different. And what you need at different times in your life and your career might be met or not by your current workplace. Employees should understand what their true needs are and if the workplace can meet those needs or not, either now or in the future. Sometimes reframing the discussion in these terms can help an employee who was feeling anxious understand their stability; conversely it can also help an employee on the fence decide what is right for them.

This is not to take any responsibility away from the company. As product leaders, we should continue to positively affect the culture of a company in all the ways that we are able, advocating for our team members, their advancement, and their work life quality. Companies should of course be changing and adapting to an evolving workforce as well.

If possible, let’s continue to help contextualize the bigger picture to our product teams, and hopefully create a more stable engaged team by doing so.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Begin by showing your team the above graphic from @lizandmollie. Explain the concept of needs and priorities with a job changing over time or based on life circumstance.

Ask folks to on their own (not publicly) assign a percentage to their career priorities based on the list - Pay, Benefits, Title, Balance, Flexibility, Impact, Passion. Feel free to adjust categories, especially as it makes more sense culturally/regionally - countries with more standardized federal/state benefits might not have that as category, for example. After giving folks time to tally their responses, ask them to move a dot into the bubble that aligns with their number one priority right now. If you feel comfortable generalizing, you can talk about how this might compare to the company’s ability to respond to these needs/priorities.

Encourage folks to talk to their manager about their job priorities if they haven’t already. This is a good exercise to encourage folks to do every 4-6 months, to see if anything has changed for them.

Cumulative Actions

Cumulative actions are compounding effects - the sum of the whole effect is worth more than the individual effects of the parts. The phrase actually comes from medicine, where it can be lethal. Repeated consumption of a drug, even small amounts, can accumulate enough in your body to become toxic. However, we can think of it more positively in terms of actions throughout our day that can collect into a habit. About 43% of our actions or behaviors are habitual - it is how we maintain the cognitive space to function as humans.

Most daily actions evaporate. Some accumulate. To pinpoint the ones that accumulate, and identify the accumulation as positive or negative can be a very enlightening exercise. James Clear writes in his very popular Atomic Habits that, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity."

This accumulation of “votes” or actions can happen in our personal lives or our professional lives. The exercise below can help make them more intentional.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

In a white-boarding tool, ask the team to identify daily actions that are serving them, ones that they could begin to accumulate. And then in a separate column ask which actions are not serving them, and perhaps are negatively accumulating. Leaving the responses open to personal and professional scenarios opens up talk about scheduling a day, or work/life balance, or some challenges of working remotely. This exercise works especially well in a format where team members can “up vote” or +1 other’s responses.

New Year Maxim

Calendar New Year is fraught with folks setting goals and resolutions. As we know, so many times this type of thing fails out of the gate - research says the failure rate for New Year’s resolutions is about 80%. And a dichotomy is created in the workplace, as often times a fiscal calendar or fiscal quarter professional goal setting doesn’t correspond to the standard Gregorian calendar.

While my organization’s fiscal half falls this time of year, it isn’t a major time of resetting goals. However, these types of calendar milestones are places where people reassess and perhaps are motivated to shift behaviors. Because of that, I think it is important to address as a group. (Note, another good time for this is the start of a school year - while not everyone is a student, or has students, this type of cultural milestone exists in many places.)

Instead of setting resolutions, I ask my team to think about how they are feeling heading into the new calendar year. It’s a bit of taking stock of their energy level and their mentality - a general check-in. And then, steering clear of specific goals or things they want to change, I ask for a word or maxim as they look ahead. The time period of a coherent 12 months can also be hard conceptually, so a general forward outlook may be preferable to a specific time frame. The idea of choosing a “word of the year” has almost a cult following at this point, but even a less rigorous process can still yield thoughtful responses. Additionally, it allows us to see our teams and colleagues wishes and hopes (or struggles and roadblocks) a bit more clearly.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Once the dust of the holidays settle, prepare a whiteboarding session with a “emotion wheel” or something similar. Ask folks to identify their current state. (I ask that they name two adjectives, as you can have someone who is excited AND anxious or enthusiastic AND confused - it is good to know both.) I leave this part anonymous, so that folks can be honest, but ask them to share their responses if they wish.

Then ask them to add stickies for a maxim / word / wish as they look forward. Ideally sharing with the group provides insight and camaraderie.