One of the things I enjoy most in my professional life is the challenge that comes with building and guiding a team. In this post I’d like to offer an opinion on 3 factors that have a tremendous effect on motivation of teams: The team composition, the diversity of activities and the environment.
Starting with possibly the most obvious of those: The team’s composition. When at liberty to build a team I tend to look most of all for uniform variety. That may sound a little contradictory at first but let me explain.
First of all, on the individual level I look for people with a passion for what they do (which in my case is typically software development). No matter what team or individual, there has to be a shared layer of passion about what you’ll do for at least 8hrs every day. In case you are not passionate about that, don’t bother applying.
My second highest thing to look for is character and team spirit. It’s part of how you would do in a team, but it also relates to having an opinion and how you react to various situations.
So, having figured that out as much as possible during the interviews, I try to compose a team that has a lot of variety. However the variety is chosen so that in the end each side is covered by an equal counterpart. I’ll have introvert people countered by very outgoing individuals, experience by raw potential , … . Particularly that last bit to me is very important. It’s having more senior (not necessarily in age) people on board for a number of reasons. First for the obvious maturity and experience they bring to any team but secondly also to help guide the junior members. I try to achieve rotation where the raw potential gets experience and learns so they can train incoming potential and keep the team eco system running.
After the composition of the team the next big important factor is the diversity of what they do. Goes without saying they will be focussed on a specific topic and/or technology and most likely work on the same project for some time, but even within a project there generally are ways to keep people challenged and refreshed. I am not claiming people should switch tasks every few days, but during the course of a project they should definitely have taken up different roles (i.e. caring for the build, lead on a specific topic,…).
The last factor in my list up top is the environment the team is in. Obviously the environment a team is in is partly defined by their peers, hence why I spent quite a bit of time earlier on that. The other part though is one where the company has much more influence than it actually thinks. It is the space in which the team operates and how the infrastructure supports them. This discussion goes beyond the private office/landscape setup (I believe in an open space with corners where people can dive in for meetings or to get some quiet time…). It is how your company is set up to support the team. For instance, the mere fact that a developer has a standard issued corporate laptop can be a problem. Part of running a good/healthy/fun business to me means supporting what is most important to you, and believe it or not, but in 99% of the cases that will be the people doing the work. Obviously there is a business reality you live in and there is a need for structure and procedures to run it efficiently…but that should never stop you from trying to tilt the balance in favor of a good/fun/healthy atmosphere for your team.