Norming: individuals begin to resolve differences.
Performing: effective, flow state.
Groups (or group changes) can restart this process.
Skills: human growth and resiliency skills.
Meet your team
Foster trust: understand each other, person needs, preferences and approaches.
Learn about teammates differences.
Humans core needs: BICEPS
Belonging.
Improvement.
Choice.
Equality (information, resources).
Predictability (balance in changes).
Significance.
Share BICEPS with teammates to see how they fit.
First 1:1 questions are great to start knowing BICEPS of your reports.
Grumpiness questions are very relevant:
What makes you grumpy?
How will I know you’re grumpy?
How can I help you when you’re grumpy?
They will help to know best times for 1:1’s, autonomy and how the team tackle the work.
Feedback and recognition are good key questions for initial 1:1.
Get to know early how reports prefer to receive recognition, when and if public or private.
Goals and support are related to how to get things done.
Goals for 1yr, 9m, 6m, 3m.
What does the report need from management, peers and teammates?
Why and what is the most valuable thing in 1:1 for report? Ask and discover this.
Wordy growth question for long term growing (discover how the report wants to grow).
How the ICs treat themselves? It is the most important question for initial 1:1 because you might need it along the way.
All these questions can give you a great picture of your team.
It’s also important to let the team know you. Name behavior and improve together.
What are you optimizing for? I do for vision, mentoring and feedback delivery.
Tip: optimize for long-term relationships. Align 1:1 work with current role and future roles in career perspective.
Share a summary of MadLib with reports in initials 1:1 (my answers as a manager):
What do you optimize for?
What do you hope teammates will lean on you for?
What management skill are you working on learning or improving?
Grow your teammates
Managers should help grow and support the team progress.
For different hats:
Mentoring: help the other person overcome a roadblock. Problem + solution. What would I’ve done.
Coaching: asking open questions, reflecting. “What” questions. Repeat back. Choose when helping somebody.
Sponsoring: helping others reach next level. Take advantage of the many moments to do it.
Delivering feedback: combines mentoring, coaching, sponsoring. Sometimes it exists as a formal process in the company. You need to deliver both positive and negative. Depends also on organizational structure.
The best feedback is specific, actionable and delivered in a way that ensures the receiver can actually absorb it.
Use some framework as SBI (situation, behavior, impact).
Write down SBI before conducting feedback session.
Impact can be frame in terms of something that the person cares about.
It’s better to avoid making the person feel threatened.
It is critical for your team to also know how to give proper feedback. Use sponsoring, coaching and mentoring!
To deliver third party feedback, you need to search for something you can own too.
1:1 objectives:
Build trust.
Gain shared context.
Plan out and support career growth.
Solve problems.
Feedback could not work. Moving to other team could. Beware not to pass a problem.
Set clear expectations about how to ship, how to hit goals and how to level up.
Set clear expectations
Need to define shared expectations to reach organization goals.
Document team-wide expectations. Do it with the team.
Roles, vision, responsibilities, how to collaborate, communicate.
Roles & responsibilities:
Humans benefit from clarity in day to day operations.
Two tools: responsibility assignment matrix and Venn diagrams.
Important also: ladder, skills matrix, job descriptions.
RACI matrix (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed). Per project or task.
Venn diagram: use it to define responsibilities in cross functional teams. Iterate, share and modify. Should evolve during time. Can be used in many different roles.
Vision:
VMSO statement is the North Star of every company. Vision, Mission, Strategy, Objectives.
Onboarding live doc is important as team practice.
Put regular meetings, syncs, VMSO, project status, etc.