> There were some hard, frank and truthful discussions, and also lots of conversations in 1-2-1s with the team to understand what they needed, what was blocking them, and what they needed to feel confident.
What did you learn from these discussion? What were the specific problems called out? And what actions did you take?
One of the overriding emotions that surfaced was fear of blame. As the internal platform team, they were on the end of every frustrated engineers vent when something went wrong, and they were also facing scrutiny from the founders about the slow pace of delivery.
This manifested most acutely in a classic build/buy decision. The team wanted to buy, the company to build. After getting past the intellectual arguments, it was clear a deeper motivation to buy was to avoid being 'blamed' if / when something went wrong.
Getting one of the founders to understand this, and to get him to express that he would personally be accountable if it didn't work out and that he wouldn't blame the team, was transformational - suddenly building became a fun challenge rather than an onerous burden. That was the beginning of that team's journey back to health and thriving
Thank you for clarifying!
> There were some hard, frank and truthful discussions, and also lots of conversations in 1-2-1s with the team to understand what they needed, what was blocking them, and what they needed to feel confident.
What did you learn from these discussion? What were the specific problems called out? And what actions did you take?
One of the overriding emotions that surfaced was fear of blame. As the internal platform team, they were on the end of every frustrated engineers vent when something went wrong, and they were also facing scrutiny from the founders about the slow pace of delivery.
This manifested most acutely in a classic build/buy decision. The team wanted to buy, the company to build. After getting past the intellectual arguments, it was clear a deeper motivation to buy was to avoid being 'blamed' if / when something went wrong.
Getting one of the founders to understand this, and to get him to express that he would personally be accountable if it didn't work out and that he wouldn't blame the team, was transformational - suddenly building became a fun challenge rather than an onerous burden. That was the beginning of that team's journey back to health and thriving