Building great IT teams: Technical team HR skills make a difference
Creating great technical teams is not all about ping pong tables, slides, beer taps, or all the other fun stuff in your company kewl campaign…. it should be about active career management, individual empowerment combined with great team processes. Highly technical employees are a special breed where you often find a huge diversity in personalities, motivations, social skills, and talent levels. This requires extra care and commitment to keep things running smoothly. I will be writing articles about team-building topics in more detail but here are a few of my early thoughts.
I write this article, not as an HR professional, but I am a highly technical IT leader and collaborative team mentor who has seen his share of good and horrible teams and cultures! Building great teams is the KEY to high productivity, retention, and company success.
Good Manager training for your culture goals!
- The leaders of teams must be great team members themselves and promoters of team success. Management skills are an art! so, training and skills growth for the manager is important for great team building.
Individual goals and career path management
- Each team member needs to feel they have a growth requirement and duty to themselves and the team, and that the company supports them raising gaps in skills.
- Tracked and pre-agreed yearly growth goals are ALWAYS set and then part of manager/employee success metrics.
- Allow a fun growth goal to be part of the culture… something they would love to be able to do is a great motivator.
Training/Learning mantra
- Technology roles demand constant training and growth to “keep up” with the insanely fast pace of change. A skills roadmap for a role is one way to help map out training goals, but there are others.
Team processes and recognition + rewards
- Loyalty to each other’s differences and team success can be promoted/cultured
- Recognize excellent efforts, but reward the team success. High-profile individual awards sow the seeds of jealousy that must be avoided…, make it about the team as much as possible. Uneven team member contributions do need to be managed and addressed though.
- Make those teams small enough where the platoon mentality kicks in across the team and circular support becomes important
- Allow team members to assess the mood, productivity and, team health issue alerts together and on a scheduled basis…. no 360 reviews or satisfaction surveys against each other!
- Low performers need to be assessed, encouraged, and have new goals for success vs silent HR removal tactics or other team morale killing methods.
Do build “FUN” and “enjoy each other” culture
- A company culture that is somber, serious, and impersonal is not uncommon, and this can be tough for anyone, and perhaps more so for Techies that don’t often admit they need other human interaction for happiness too!
The next article I write about will be “Wolves or Workhorses”, what that type of IT team do you cultivate! Please like and comment to help me write better content.
