Whether you work at an enterprise company in a legacy industry or an early-stage startup in an emerging market, establishing trust among team members is key to success. Trust is a team sport, and though it’s built by everyone in the organization, it’s up to the leaders to set the tone. Just like a coach and captains do more than run drills and call plays, engineering leaders do more than just set the priorities and team processes: they help define the team's culture and maintain morale, and they must make a concerted effort to cultivate trust. As a leader, here are a few things I do to build trust within my engineering organization.
Create a Feedback Culture
Employees who receive regular feedback on their work feel more confident and secure in their positions because they understand what’s expected of them. According to one report, 43 percent of highly engaged employees received feedback weekly, but an astonishing 98 percent said they fail to be engaged when managers give little to no feedback.
Creating space to share viewpoints during 1:1’s, standups, and retrospectives is a great way to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to give and receive feedback.
Engineering metrics can help keep that feedback specific and actionable. Consider this example: someone flags that Cycle Time is higher than expected. The engineering leader can work with the team to dig deeper into Cycle Time-related metrics such as Time to Open, Time to Merge, and Time to First Review to determine which part of the SDLC is moving slowest.
Conversations about where slowdowns are occurring can remain focused on concrete data, rather than on feelings and assumptions, and the team can work together to troubleshoot. Once they’ve identified an opportunity for improvement, they can set targets together and measure success.
Make It Safe to Take Risks
Psychological safety, the security of knowing that you won’t be punished for making a mistake, is essential in high-performing engineering organizations. It allows teams and individuals to have confidence in taking risks of all kinds, from the most basic risk of opening a pull request for feedback to the larger leaps necessary to drive true innovation and stay ahead of the competition.
On the front end of the SDLC, developers who feel safe subjecting their work to the review process know they’ll have the opportunity to work through their mistakes and won’t be penalized for them. On the tail end, developers must feel secure enough to deploy code. That security can be found on two levels: the confidence that their deployment won’t break things, and the trust that they won’t be punished if it does.
Data can play a key role in your efforts to cultivate a culture of psychological safety. Clear, objective metrics can help you combat intrinsic biases and check your assumptions to keep conversations grounded in fact. This makes it easier to keep conversations focused on the work, rather than the person behind that work.
Build Trust with Engineering KPIs
Data can be a powerful tool for understanding performance and unblocking your team. To be successful, be transparent about what data you’ll gather and how it will be used. This shows your team that the data is there to help—not hurt—them.
A great way to build trust is to listen to the most pervasive problems that your team experiences and help solve them. Maybe they’re stuck waiting for code review for too long, or struggle to break work into smaller chunks. Engineering metrics can help you identify why the team may be running into these problems so that you can work together to address them. You can leverage those metrics to set targeted KPIs and OKRs so that you can keep an eye on them going forward and ensure that your team has everything they need to reach their goals. When data helps solve a problem that matters to them, engineers are more likely to leverage it in the future.
Trust is a Team Sport
Trust is a team sport, and engineering leaders are responsible for providing the best tools to help their team win. Engineering metrics help managers provide feedback, understand and remove roadblocks, and measure progress. These metrics make it easier to focus conversations on the work, not the person behind it, which fosters an environment of continuous improvement and builds confidence in individuals and teams.
James McGill is the VP of engineering at Code Climate, where he applies over a decade of experience as a technologist and leader to building tools to help engineering teams achieve everything they are capable of.
