If you’re like me, the hairs on the back of your neck go up when you hear someone say that part of your job as a manager is to create systems to help make your team’s performance consistent. Maybe you’ve been a victim of a reactive process established in a pressured postmortem to “make sure that problem never happens again.”
Engineering teams often resist that kind of process or system because it tends to exert control that stems from a lack of trust.
But when you can create a system that magnifies trust, you actually help your creative engineering team members thrive.
So how can a system magnify trust?
First of all, a system like this is not a rigid process with checklists, handoffs, and the scrutiny of formal quality gates. Those may feel like the things you need so that you as the leader can gain trust with your peers. But what those constraints really do is to demonstrate a lack of trust in your team, which erodes their trust in you.
Instead, the kind of system that magnifies trust is one that establishes clear ownership boundaries, defining what kinds of decisions people can make on their own, and when they need to include other specialists in the conversation. These systems capture the outcomes of conversations so the team doesn’t constantly re-debate priorities, re-litigate their decisions, and re-invent their workflows. A trust-magnifying system defines clear standards of quality output and the expected remediation when that quality is not met, and then it empowers and expects the team to maintain those standards.
And if you’d like a thinking partner to help you define your own systems so that managing engineers can feel natural to you, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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