Building a Team That Thrives

“The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership”

– Harvey S Firestone

One characteristic about myself that I discovered in the last few years is that I like developing people. When I was growing up, I played a lot of NBA 2k, and while others around me flocked toward the Exhibition modes, MyPlayer(now MyCareer) was my favorite. I got real satisfaction from building up a player from a nobody to a Superstar. Somehow, this has shown up more as I coach youth basketball and get to develop kids. Leading my dev team no exception.

While I hardly feel qualified to develop anyone (since I feel like I need so much work myself), I recognize that it is an important part of my job. The big question I ask myself is how? What does it look like to develop my team? Is it skills? Is it habits? When I have questions like these, one of my favorite places to go is Reddit. There are always easy to find opinion on Reddit. However, this time around, it was LinkedIn that had the goods. They have a good article called “How can you develop your team members’ skills and potential“. I’ll use this to help me get started.

Defining the team identity

Something that I have not taken the time to do is come up with a concrete vision for how I want my team to operate. This is likely why I have not been strong in the development area. I do not know what my team identity is. In case you haven’t guess by name, I’m a basketball fan, especially the NBA. A big thing for NBA teams is identity: are you a defensive team or offensive team? Half court team or transition team? I am wondering what that would look like in the tech space. I have never tried to translate that logic to anything before.

To help give myself some ideas, I jumped on ChatGPT. Some options it gave are Innovation-Driven, Customer-Centric, Speed & Agility, and Collaboration-First. The one that piques my interest the most is being Innovation-Driven. However, with my team being new and the red-tape we get from the government, it probably not feasible to make that our identity right now. My second choice would be Speed and Agility.

Speed and Agility

To revisit the basketball talk from earlier, the Speed and Agility would correlate to a fast-break or transition-heavy basketball team: choosing the fastest way to score a basket. Similarly, when developing any product, you want to go as fast as you can when sending features to production. For my team, we still move pretty slow on this front. This is partially because everyone is still trying to get comfortable with the work. However, going forward, if we are going to be a Speed and Agility team, then I need to start pushing us in that direction. In the coming weeks, I will build out my strategy for how I will accomplish this.