When I started to enter the management era of my career, I knew I wanted to organize a team that focused on a few key elements I’ve found to be present in high-quality teams. These themes have emerged over the years I’ve worked as an individual contributor. From teams shifting from one effort to another, through organizational changes which can sometimes put pressure on culture, I knew that we’d need to strike a balance between efficiency, support, and connectedness.
There have been a few consistent challenges across the multiple teams I’ve organized and managed. In today’s world, talent exists all over the globe, which means our team members do as wel. Geographically dispersed, multidisciplinary teams hold immense power when their talents combine. But how do we prevent a disconnected community? And how do we ensure that leadership gains visibility into the team and what they produce? While each team was, of course, unique in what it faced and how it ultimately succeeded, these challenges appeared pretty consistently.
Start with the basics
The concept of building an effective, confident, powerful team meant–for us–moving from a decentralized environment to one that fosters a central connection. The teams I’ve shaped were looking for focus while balancing a sense of belonging. The big idea being one that blended the idea of system and operation with the vibrant support of a cross-discipline community. I’m a firm believer that everything in life is about balance–whether personal or professional. And in the case here, I knew that we had the right ingredients, we just needed to put them together in a way that worked for the collective team.
We started with the basics, something tangible that we all could rally around. The focus set on building an operational foundation. One example of that being a combination of design playbook development, kanban boards, and team rituals (or some might call them ceremonies). In all of my experiences, I could summarize how we approached this through the following three areas:
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Creating a shared methodology of how we approach our work, from intake through delivery.
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Sharing the value we’re creating and exposing that progress to each other as well as leaders, all in an effort to drive ownership and provide visibility across teammates and the broader organization.
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Developing routine behaviors that support not only the value we’re creating every day, but also our community of practitioners.
There’s no community without culture
The culture of community inherently supports and pushes the limits of what we can do on our own. I wholeheartedly believe that we’re stronger together than we are as individuals. And I always strive to make that evident by showcasing how teammates work together in harmony, whether delivering on a shared program or cross-collaborating during our ceremonies. A typical snapshot of ceremonies has looked like:
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Weekly design syncs, where team members meet to kick off each week and align on current priorities.
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Weekly design critiques, giving teammates an opportunity to collect feedback and drive consistency in our delivery.
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Asynchronous collaboration through team channels and threads.
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Monthly organization team syncs, which focused on cross-team dynamics and learnings.
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Quarterly retrospectives, where teammates could share openly and freely about what’s working and what wasn’t.
I’ve used similar formats with other teams based on the team’s primary directive. In all my experiences, I’ve found this format to be successful in creating both a shared and individual sense of accountability while also ensuring the team’s culture doesn’t fall away in service of delivery. When approaching these team dynamics with a creative mind, the idea of balance continues to percolate with persistence.
Empowering = Leading
Which leads me to briefly touch on how I view the future of work. The last main theme I’ve found to be vital in any team–or for that matter, any person’s success–is empowerment. Empowering a designer, an advisee, or a teammate has a profound impact on the future of their craft. Empowerment is a catalyst for greatness. Teams and contributors should be empowered to make decisions, not simply for the sake of moving fast and getting things done, which of course speed is an effect here, but empowerment leads to many other positive components to a successful working environment. Trust, integrity, impact–to name a few. As a team works together in an empowered environment, they’ll further their connections in cross-collaboration, skill sharing, and both giving and receiving feedback. I find it to be vital that a team be empowered to further cement trust within the organization.
While this is only a summary–albeit a brief one–of how I’ve found success building united teams, this serves as a glimpse into the making of modern teams. While simplified, I do believe that happy designers (or creators in general) can create their best work in environments where there’s intention, connection, and empowerment.
