DEV Community: Scott-RP

Leadership Hack: 3 Key Elements for Boosting Team Morale

Scott-RP — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 21:57:32 +0000

No individual or business is immune to the impacts that COVID-19 has had across the world these past months. For the first time in history, we are all united under one common realization – that to get through this, we will have to work together.

As organizations work to strategize ways for coming out of this on top, team morale needs to be strong and unwavering. While boosting your team’s morale during uncertain times can be difficult, we’ve identified three key elements to making it happen – organizational transparency, accessible leadership, and employee engagement. Here’s how we break those down:

Organizational Transparency:
In a study by Deloitte, 60% of leaders were concerned about their employees’ perception of organizational transparency – where do you believe your company currently falls? When it comes down to it, employees are the most critical stakeholders in any business. Their skill, enthusiasm, and hard work are the lifeblood of operations, but all too often they’re sheltered from the realities that businesses face. While sometimes this is necessary, to avoid premature speculation on an issue or to protect confidential information, transparency should always be a value that leaders strive to deliver to their employees. This is especially imperative during times of uncertainty, when silence can be deafening. If leadership isn’t making intentional efforts to be open about challenges they’re facing and strategies for success, employees are likely to form unsavory opinions based on hearsay.

To foster a transparent culture, work to deploy the following tactics:

Establish routine, organizational-wide updates that you deliver to your employees. This can be done via email, through a phone/web conference, or through a video recording. Test a variety of methods to see what resonates most effectively with your team. At Rooster Park, we’re doing virtual happy hours every other Friday, inviting the entire company to a Zoom call. I always start with a real world picture of the business, which recently has included which of our partners have been struggling post-lockdown, and what that’s meant for some of our projects and consultants.
Within these communications touch on three key elements – what you know about the challenges your organization is up against, what you’re still unsure of, and how your organization plans to overcome obstacles.
Don’t wait until you have a foolproof strategy before communicating with your employees. If your leadership team is still working through options, let your employees know and keep the updates coming as you have them.. I don’t ever know the full picture, but my team needed to trust that I would move forward with their best interests in mind at every turn – and that’s what I told them.
Remember, being transparent doesn’t mean you can’t be optimistic. A level of safe optimism is a critical piece of transparent communication that will help keep employee morale high.

Accessible Leadership:
The success of your transparency efforts leans heavily on how accessible your leadership team is. A leader can be transparent about challenges, but unless their employees have clear channels for communicating their ideas or concerns, transparency will do little to raise morale. We found that transparency and the accessibility of our leadership team are paramount for creating the level of trust needed to keep morale strong. In a study conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, 55% of employees stated that being able to trust senior leadership was very important, but only 27% of respondents were satisfied with this level of trust. How can you ensure your employees are on the positive side of these stats?

Start with the ideas below:

Accessible leadership is essential for fostering trust. They need to be out on the front lines with employees and not behind a locked door (or, these days, always unavailable via Slack). Right now, with a remote workforce, this means clearly communicating how leadership is stepping up personally for the greater good of the company. A trusted leader is one that people have no hesitation rallying behind.
On the topic of trust, individualized communication is critical. Don’t give your employees the chance to guess where they stand. Outside of transparent and meaningful organization-wide communication, employees should be contacted on an individual basis to candidly talk about how they’re feeling. One-on-one interactions are a key way to build that trust. We’re using Slack, SMS, and good old-fashioned phone calls to check in with our consultants on a 1-1 basis, helping them manage their own individual challenges.
Stay true to your commitments. Don’t make promises that you’re not sure you can keep when communicating with your team. Thinking back to the first section, it’s okay to communicate transparently without having a solution in place – as long as you’re working on one.

Employee Engagement:
Even with transparency and accessibility, employee morale is still at risk if employees aren’t engaged with the organization. During times of uncertainty, fostering employee engagement can be especially tricky – and that’s why it’s all the more important. And while a virtual workforce can throw a wrench in things, it just requires a little creativity!

We break down ways you can boost engagement with your employees below:

First rule – have fun with it! The news is filled with negative headlines and everyone is looking for an escape – be that escape for your employees.
Employee recognition is a key component of an engaged workforce and high-recognition cultures have 31% less voluntary turnover than ones with poor recognition. If you don’t currently have a recognition program (employee of the month, spotlights, etc.), assign a committee to bring this idea to life.
Virtual team bonding is essential to keep energy levels high. Schedule regular team web conferences with no other goal other than to have fun, get to know each other, and spread good vibes. Team bonding is important now more than ever – especially for a workforce that isn’t used to being entirely virtual. Our internal team meeting ends every Wednesday with Dad Jokes. (I’ll spare you most of them, but my favorite involves the Pi Rates of the Caribbean.)

While many businesses are playing it day-by-day, working to foster levels of organizational transparency, leadership accessibility, and employee engagement that you can be proud of, will help ensure your team is motivated to weather any storm right along with you.

3 Ways to Collaborate More Effectively with Your Software Engineering Team

Scott-RP — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 19:14:06 +0000

Have you ever finished your first week on a new client project wishing you had forged better connections and camaraderie with your new team? They might be some of the smartest engineers out there, and they, like you, jumped at the chance to work on this cutting-edge project for an innovative company. But something’s missing. You’re not working effectively together – you just can’t seem to get in the right flow. You know synergy with your team will help the project be successful, but what can you do as an individual to foster collaboration?
Having a mindful approach to your day to day team interactions can help create a positive and open environment. Let’s look at three tangible ways engineering teams foster collaboration.

1) Create a Psychologically Safe Environment

In Google’s widely-referenced study, Project Aristotle, they set out to discover what makes “the perfect team.” Studying close to 200 teams over a two-year timespan, Google ultimately discovered that psychological safety was the leading attribute of effective teams. Introduced by behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson, psychological safety is the concept that teams collaborate most effectively when they feel safe to speak up and take risks without the fear of rejection, embarrassment, or retaliation.

Creating an environment that exhibits this concept depends upon two key elements:

“Conversational turn-taking” –giving everyone a chance to share their perspective, feedback, questions, and concerns – and, even more importantly, listening to everyone when they speak.
“Social sensitivity” – gauging each person’s emotions according to their tone of voice, expressions, and nonverbal cues – and managing your own emotions accordingly.

It’s worth mentioning that many software engineers have a couple of shared personality traits that may make these elements more difficult to achieve (and Google, who employs hundreds of engineers, readily admits these challenges): They’re used to working independently, executing on tasks autonomously and without much need for extensive interaction.

As a result, having a positive influence on your project team and helping them collaborate more effectively will require modeling the behaviors that contribute to a psychologically safe environment. Initiate interpersonal communication often, be inclusive, ask questions, pay attention to non-verbal cues, and validate comments from your colleagues. Your fellow engineers need to feel safe and free of judgment in order to practice optimal collaboration. Aside from the obvious benefits that collaboration has towards the success of a project, this will strengthen the bonds of your team – and work is more fun with friends, right?

2) Focus on Learning Opportunities

Mistakes are inevitable, especially when a team of engineers is learning how to work together on a project. Incomplete deployment scripts, untested configurations, undocumented processes, and infrastructure failures are just a few examples where collaboration is essential to correcting the path forward. But don’t point fingers, because assigning blame is the least effective approach.
Instead, framing challenges as opportunities to learn helps us gain trust, reinforces the concept of psychological safety, and ultimately, enables us to collaborate in a way that achieves project success.
What does this look like? It means asking questions, soliciting feedback, acknowledging your own fallibility and vulnerability, and encouraging reasonable risk-taking. Explain the logic behind your decision-making and provide examples of how particular solutions or approaches may have worked for you in similar past scenarios – encourage your team to challenge your way of thinking so you can all land upon the best decision.

3) Promote Regular Communication

Many software engineers are content to steadily chip away at their work without much input from others. Even in an environment where they feel safe enough to bring any idea, question, or concern forward, there’s no guarantee that this will result in regular communication. But the fact is, collaboration improves quality and accelerates development, and it depends heavily on regular interaction between team members.

Hold your fellow engineers accountable to attending meetings and sharing knowledge, ensuring that everyone is on the same page around project goals and deadlines. Even if you’re not the lead on a project, take the initiative to huddle everyone together for regular brainstorming or troubleshooting sessions. During these meetings, model engagement, focus, and presence by making eye contact, being aware of your body language, and responding with acknowledgment and gratitude. When people feel safe sharing any and all ideas, they’re reminded why they were passionate about engineering in the first place – innovation and limitless possibilities.

Understand that First and Foremost, You’re Part of a Team

At the end of the day, the success of the project depends on your team’s ability to function as an effective unit. You might have expert-level engineering skills, but that won’t move the needle on a project if your team can’t effectively work together to deliver. By fostering a psychologically safe working environment, viewing all obstacles as learning opportunities, and making regular communication a top priority – your team can be unstoppable.

Software Engineers: How to Demonstrate Your EQ During Interviews

Scott-RP — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 21:48:32 +0000

You’ve practiced dozens of coding challenges online, rehearsed how to explain your deep technical knowledge, and have spent a good hour researching the company you’re interviewing with – you’re well-positioned to ace your next interview – almost.

As home to Seattle’s top software engineering consultants, we work closely with area businesses to understand exactly what they’re looking for in their next team member. While your coding skills can help you pass the technical test with flying colors and your professional experience might impress hiring managers, there’s still one critical element that employers are gauging in their candidates – emotional intelligence.

Why Is Emotional Intelligence Important in the Workplace?
Summed up, emotional intelligence, or EQ, guides how you manage your emotions and interact with those around you. Your EQ determines how you respond when you’re faced with an overloaded plate, competing deadlines, or conflict within a project team. When it comes to the success of a project, software engineers with high EQ are invaluable.

To gauge a candidate’s EQ during an interview, employers come prepared with a series of behavioral interviewing questions. Their goal is to get a good sense of how the individual will react when faced with adversity or situations that push them to interact with the team at large.

In their report on emotional intelligence, leading organizational consulting firm Korn Ferry grouped EQ into four categories that have shown to distinguish outstanding performance in the workplace: Self-Awareness, Social Awareness, Self-Management, and Relationship Management. A well-rounded and high-performing software engineer should be able to highlight their strengths in these areas during the interview.

The EQ Qualities that Employers Are Looking for During Your Interview:

Self-awareness:
Do you understand how your attitudes and behaviors impact your performance?
We know what you’re thinking: “Self-aware? I’m interviewing for a senior-level software position. They just care that I have the expertise to get the job done.” The truth is, understanding your strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies, is the foundation for emotional intelligence and a critical quality of high-performing individuals. Employers aren’t looking for perfect workers – they’re looking for people who have a commitment to continuous improvement and who understand how their actions impact those around them.

Behavioral questions to be prepared for:
How do you best receive feedback? How do you react when someone gives feedback you disagree with?
Would you consider yourself competitive? If so, how does this show in your work?

Self-management:
Can you adjust your behaviors and emotions to achieve positive outcomes?
Adaptable. Optimistic. Goal-oriented. We can all agree these are buzzwords an employer is looking for in their next hire – and they all fit under the self-management EQ bucket. Outside of sprinkling a few of these buzzwords around your resume, be prepared to show examples of how you lived up to these words in your past professional experiences. In other words, how do you apply what you know about your tendencies (hello, self-awareness) and adjust them to achieve positive outcomes?

Let’s use adaptability as an example, as it’s a critical soft skill that we look for in our software engineers. Adaptability doesn’t need to mean you can fly by the seat of your pants while handling any hiccup in stride – when it comes to looming project deadlines, nobody likes surprises. Adaptability does mean that you’ve developed proper coping mechanisms for dealing with change, that you understand the show must go on, and that you’re prepared to be a team player to overcome any obstacles.

Behavioral questions to be prepared for:
What’s an example of when you were put under a lot of pressure? How did you respond? How did you overcome it?
How do you juggle multiple priorities?

Social-awareness:
Are you able to interpret the attitudes and behaviors of those around you?
No software engineer can drive a project to the finish line by themselves. While popular culture may paint a picture of an engineer huddled over their computer alone, software projects require continuous interactions between everyone on the team. When ineffective communication is the kryptonite of even the most promising projects, understanding how others around you are feeling is critical. During an interview, you can bet employers are gauging how well you can collaborate with others.

Software engineers must think empathetically when interacting with their teams and with clients. For example, how are others reacting to their communication styles? Why might one team member be missing deadlines? Why might a client be unresponsive? If they’re not cognizant of the attitudes and behaviors of others, future hiccups to the project are a ticking timebomb.

Behavioral questions to be prepared for:
How do you manage working with others who don’t communicate or think the same way you do?

Describe a time where you noticed a team member was struggling and took initiative to support them.

Relationship Management: Are you able to leverage your soft skills to create positive outcomes for your team and clients?

Relationship management – the EQ MVP. Here is where all of the elements above come into play to determine how you interact with those around you and the impact that those interactions have. When highlighting your relationship management strengths, consider times where you acted as a mentor, lead a project, de-escalated a client concern, you get the gist – this is what employers want to hear.

Businesses come to Rooster Park when they need top software engineers to move their projects forward. Many of them have worked with individuals who in the past, despite being skilled engineers, were missing the critical soft skills that mark a true team player, like communication, leadership, and conflict management skills. Employers understand the importance of relationship management and want to be sure their candidates do, too.

Behavioral questions to be prepared for:
Explain your conflict management style? Can you give an example or two?
If you have a great idea and want your team to get on board, how would you communicate it to them? How would you react if someone disagreed?

Soft Skills Tip the Scales
We see it every day – seasoned software engineers with enviable resumes and technical skills that perfectly fit the opportunity at hand, yet still aren’t the perfect fit. What happened? More times than not, the answer lies in their inability to highlight their soft skills in a way that convinces employers they have the emotional intelligence to not only be a world-class engineer, but to be part of a world-class team.