When I became a manager, I asked my managers for advice about how to build the team spirit in a new team to have a great start. There were many answers, but one advice was common: give the team a goal and deliver something as soon as possible. Deliver something.
While it sounds like a vague idea that doesn’t specify what to deliver, we found a goal and committed to it, and it worked. With small nudges to keep the team focus on the goal, the team of five people delivered three achievements in the first six weeks.
And this article is about why the first wins are important.
Before we dive into, it’s better to grasp the context of the team. The team was a spin-off from an existing team. Three of us were working together already, one person came from a team that we were closely collaborating. The last person joined us from another team that we had no prior collaboration. We don’t have a scrum master or a dedicated product manager, however, we have two great product managers and a staff engineer who help us whenever we need.
Many teams just work on a project without having a clear vision and goals. Sometimes motivation comes from creating a new product or using a new technology. However, if the work doesn’t provide any meaning, all the team building activities fall short. If we were in a boat with the team, it doesn’t matter if we have the best boat or not. When we have to no destination to go, it’s not fun to stay in the middle of the sea and consume all the supply in parties while floating. Especially, new teams quickly consume their low motivation supply in this floating state.
New teams have different dynamics from existing teams because there are no processes yet and people don’t know each other; they are in the forming state, as Tuckmann says. When we partially spun off a new team, we inherited some processes, such as daily stand-ups, planning cycles, and more. It was tempting to focus on creating processes around the new team. However, what I realized that giving the new team a goal helps to form these processes on the way. When the goal is clear, the processes evolve in alignment with the goal.
Every team has unique sets of problems. Not everyone has a chance to form a new team. Sometimes we took over a team that is struggling to deliver. Most struggling teams usually forget their goals. When they focus on something else than the goal and have many discussions without a common objective, everyone follows their own track. When I was working in such a team as a software engineer, the first thing our new manager did (after listening to everyone) was gathering everyone around a goal and constantly reminding it to everyone. One common goal helped to solve other related issues as well. When people learned that they share a goal, they become more collaborative.
Team spirit forms around a common goal
Be it a new team or on existing one, when people have common understanding of the aim, they have a “reason to move the ship.” Instead of being in a floating ship, they focus on doing their part to move the ship in the right direction. They also figure out better ways to collaborate while doing it. Collaboration creates team spirit, team spirit creates success. Once everyone believes in that they can work together and succeed, there is nothing can stand in front of them.
Creating a team spirit passes from having the common and achievable goal. I don’t like S.M.A.R.T. goals for teams. When I talk about goals for new teams, I mean release X in Y weeks, I don’t mean increase conversion rate by 3% in a month. First, let the team accomplish something together, anything. Give them a meaningful, and achievable goal which is so small that they cannot not achieve it.
When we set a big goal for the team right in the beginning, it becomes difficult to achieve and people fall on to sidetracks and create their own smaller goals. In the beginning, pick the goals smaller. Small goals will bring more moments of success and celebration. However, giving a sole goal doesn’t work alone.
Setting the goal and leaving the team alone with it is apt to fail. The leader has to constantly repeat the goal and coach and nudge people in the correct direction. In the boat, if the captain doesn’t remind the course all the time, neither helmsperson nor the navigator can fix the course by themselves.
Don’t start with processes
While setting goals, many managers fall into a trap of defining processes, a.k.a. how we are going to work. When leaders start defining methods, they take responsibility from the team. The new groups who discuss how they will work tend to forget the goals. Even though the methods aim to achieve the goal, the team’s focus stays on the processes and methods. When the whole team, including the manager, focus on the goals, they usually find superior processes and approaches on the side.
Celebrate
When everyone focuses on the same small goals, the achievement easily follows. There is one thing I briefly mentioned that is as important as the goal itself: celebration. Without celebrating an achievement, we cannot expect it to be repeated. We want repeated success, and celebration is a type of reward we can give the team because we want to reinforce the desired behavior and recognize the work that has been done.
When managers immediately focus on the next goal and skip or forget the celebration, they fail to create the team spirit. Without taking a moment to recognize the achievement, we cannot create a sense of ownership.
Pushing for shorter iterations, starting with small goals, and celebrating in the end helps to create an autonomous, self-healing team. Then as a leader, you can start having better one-to-one relations with team members and move your focus to stakeholder alignments, organizational problems and cross-team projects.
If you’re a manager of a new team and don’t know where to start, gather people around a small goal and deliver it, deliver something to create team ego. What you deliver is not as important as you think in the beginning. Of course, it has to be related to your team’s focus but deliver quickly and celebrate. I’ve tried this, and it works great. Don’t skip celebrations, and never stop listening to your team members. If you’re a new team, you have to prove your value to the organization and stakeholders. The best way to do that is to deliver work consistently.
When you deliver, your team becomes happy, you become happy, your stakeholders become happy: WIN-WIN-WIN.
