Assessing and Improving Team Performance

In addition to work on deliverables and immediate needs, engineering managers are charged with owning and improving team performance over time. Successful engineering managers must not only lead their teams but also effectively course-correct them when they are off track. Teams are complex organisms, so it may not always be obvious how to address their performance.

How do you know how your team is doing? And with that, how do you know what actions to take to optimize your team? These questions have fueled writings, research, and an entire industry of software and tooling that attempts to give engineering managers and business leaders some means to assess and improve engineering teams. In this chapter, we will survey the major approaches and research findings to understand how to solve these problems and develop a basis to hone your skills further.

This chapter takes the concepts you have learned in previous chapters and brings them together...

The classic stages of a team

Engineering ability alone does not determine the performance of a team. Team dynamics is a broad term to describe the collective behaviors and psychological processes that occur within a team. Engineering managers must explore concepts within team dynamics in order to understand why team performance is the way it is.

One of the most commonly used ways of looking at teams is through Bruce Tuckman’s four stages of team development: forming, storming, norming, and performing. Developed in the 1960s, understanding these stages can give you a frame of reference as to why a team may be behaving in a certain way. Even without a deep knowledge of these stages, it is useful to be aware that a major contributor to team performance is where they fall on the path to team familiarity and acceptance. Keep this in mind as you work with and assess teams of your own. Let’s look at the four stages in more detail:

• Forming teams are recently assembled...

Assessing engineering teams

As engineering managers, we need to be able to accurately and consistently assess our teams. This is necessary to support and grow our engineering team’s output, but also critically important to be prepared for times when the team’s performance comes into question by others. When your stakeholders or company leadership question your team’s performance, having a deep understanding of your performance trends and the data to support that will make your job much easier. Instead of reacting with uncertainty, maintain a working knowledge of team performance.

Assessing engineering teams comprehensively is hard to do. We may have gut feelings, the opinions of outside stakeholders, or raw measures such as lines of code written, but each of these can turn out to be poor indicators of team performance. In the search for an understanding of team performance, it is easy to go down the wrong path and arrive at the wrong conclusions. To avoid this...

Introducing team emergent states

In the past few decades, researchers have sought to shed light on some of the underlying factors contributing to team performance and outcomes. Marks, Mathieu, and Zaccaro (2001) introduced a taxonomy for describing teamwork and team processes that identifies team emergent states along the way. Their definition of team process can be summarized as interdependent acts to produce outcomes in taskwork and achieve collective goals. Team emergent states are distinguished from processes as dynamic and contextual states of being that are reflected in members’ beliefs and behaviors.

Further studies (DOI:10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-012218-015106) have suggested that the primary factors that predict performance and outcomes for teams include the following:

• Compositional features: Who is on the team—their skills, traits, and tenure
• Structural features: How work is structured—tasks, interdependence, and virtuality
• Leadership...

Improving team performance

In this chapter, we have learned powerful techniques to focus your efforts and work toward ideal outcomes as an engineering manager. Along with your success definition, performance targets, and desired emergent states, you need ways to motivate, mentor, and coach your engineers.

Motivating your team

In Chapter 6, we introduced the importance of motivation in doing our best work, but only in the context of supporting production systems. Maintaining and encouraging motivation in your team is helpful in all aspects of their work, so let’s look at motivation more broadly now.

If you believe that workers are inherently lazy, then you have what Douglas McGregor dubbed a Theory X management style. McGregor’s hypothesis calls managers Theory Y if they make positive assumptions about their teams, believing they are genuinely interested in and committed to their work. Theory X managers make negative assumptions, viewing their team as self-serving...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to assess and improve the performance of your engineering team. To be successful as engineering managers, we must be able to understand our team’s performance and how to guide them to meet the challenges of our businesses. Building high-performing teams requires an understanding of measurement, goal setting, managing team dynamics, and working with individuals on your team.

Key takeaways include the following:

• Be aware of and help your team progress through the stages of teams: forming, storming, norming, and performing
• Avoid the pitfalls of assessing teams: Goodhart’s law, perverse incentives, and the McNamara fallacy
• Determine what high performance means for your team by choosing a success definition: efficiency, effectiveness, or innovation
• Assess your team with both quantitative and qualitative measures to have a complete picture of their performance
• Choose contextual KPIs and share them with your...

Further reading

• Using the Stages of Team Development. MIT. (https://hr.mit.edu/learning-topics/teams/articles/stages-development)
• Forsgren, Nicole, Humble, Jez, and Gene Kim. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. IT Revolution, 2018. (https://itrevolution.com/product/accelerate/)
• DORA Quick Check (https://dora.dev/quickcheck/)
• DORA publications, resources, and community (https://dora.dev/)
• The SPACE of Developer Productivity. ACM Queue, 2021. (https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3454124)
• Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Penguin, 2011. (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301674/drive-by-daniel-h-pink/)
• How to mentor software engineers. xdg.me, 2021. (https://xdg.me/mentor-engineers/)
• How to Give Feedback to People Who Cry, Yell, or Get Defensive. hbr.org, 2016. (https://hbr.org/2016/09/how-to-give-feedback-to-people-who-cry-yell-or...