A new manager walks in the door...
Sensing the health and capabilities of a new team
Having recently joined the absolutely fine folks at 0x Labs (I’m having a blast, thank you for asking!) as head of engineering, I’ve had to think about how to assess the health and capabilities of the new (to me) team. If you’ve never consciously thought about it, these ideas apply equally to teams you might’ve been managing for a while.
Its a fool’s errand to try to make this type of analysis formulaic or, worse, quantitative. But asking the team a few simple questions and thinking through the shades and colors of the answers will help qualitatively situate and anchor you. Think of this as the quick and not-so-dirty diagnosis step of Richard Rumelt’s “diagnosis, guiding policy, action plan” guidance from Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.
But first: what is a “healthy” organization?
A healthy organization has the ability to maintain a pace of delivery that the business needs, over a timeframe that the business cares about.
Business needs obviously vary. A small startup may care about maintaining its current pace for 9 or 12 months, whereas a large company may have a 3 or 4 year horizon. Note that while I have software engineering organizations in mind, the concepts seem applicable to almost any type of organization.
So, in the spirit of quick surveys like DORA’s DevOps Quick Check, here are some questions you can ask your team to assess organizational health.
The 4 Cs of organizations
Control
You think you ought to work on X. Who approves the work?
Watch out, “we don’t need no stinkin’ approvals” (even if said professionally!) is usually not a good answer. It could be a good answer if the team scores really high on all of the other Cs, see below. Hearing signals of autonomy and empowerment can be good, but they are not tautologically good. In the absence of Clarity and Competence, control is just autonomy as in Lord of the Flies and empowerment as in… well, as in Lord of the Flies.
What you’re hoping for when you ask “who approves the work?” is a response that suggests control as in “I’m in control of the situation” — i.e., the confidence to make a decision, rather than just authority to make a decision.
Teams in a healthy organization control their operations with minimal support from any external authority.
Competence
How often do folks here ask for help?
Its a great sign of organizational and individual competence if people ask for help a lot. (Except if all the questions are all addressed to or fielded by the same person.)
This may be a touch counter-intuitive. If people are asking for help often, how does it signal competence? Here’s how:
It signals that people are confident enough in what they do know to be open about what they don’t know.
It signals that people value the collective intelligence of the organization.
By not penalizing someone for exposing what they don’t know, it signals that the environment rewards people for getting things done, not just for “knowing stuff”. After all, what is the point of competence if not to actually get things done?
As a bonus, asking for help also signals an environment of psychological safety.
People in a healthy organization demonstrate competence in their domain.
Clarity
What would you continue to work on and try to deliver if half your team got pulled off to work on something else?
Clarity — or Context, if you prefer — is an interesting and subtle one. Clarity, to be useful, must be (a) felt by the team and (b) correct.
Let’s take clarity on strategy as an example. Put simply:
The strategy needs to have been communicated to the team.
The team needs to have recognized that the strategy has been communicated to them.
The needs to have understood the strategy well enough to make aligned decisions based on the strategy.
People in a healthy organization have the clarity on strategy that they need to make good business decisions.
Capacity
What defines “completed” work? How much of what you deliver is “complete”?
Barring immature practices and inexperienced staff, a team will generally have a good, intuitive sense of when things have been built in a way that they can move forward, vs. in a way that holds them back.
This is likely the most obvious C of organizational health and, because of that, it is pretty common for organizations to lazily ascribe all problems to a lack of capacity. A team lacking in any of the other Cs can easily suffer consequences that you can mistakenly attribute to capacity.
E.g., take a company that is still searching for product-market fit. A team in the company has cycled through several experiments and has, unsurprisingly, accumulated tech debt along the way. What does the team say when asked about the debt? If they say “we just don’t have time for it”, its a Clarity problem masquerading as a Capacity problem. If they say “that’s not our priority right now”, it means they have enough Clarity on the strategy to understand that this is not a Capacity problem.
To be confident that the inability to complete work is truly a Capacity problem and not something else, look for other correlating signs. E.g., if an experienced, knowledgeable team is flitting from production incident to production incident without rigorous analysis, or if a team struggles to clearly differentiate between urgency and importance.
I think Will Larson’s Staying on the Path to High-Performing Teams, distilling Capacity issues down to its essence, is destined to be a classic. (@RemindMeOfThis in 10 years.)
A healthy organization has the capacity it needs to do its work completely.
So there you have it, a short list of open-ended questions that help you quickly establish an understanding of organizational health, especially if you are new to the organization.
Do you have an organization with Control over what it does, the Competence to tap into its collective intelligence, the Clarity to make good business decisions, and the Capacity to complete work that it starts? Well, congratulations!
This post covered how to understand the current state of the organization — the “here” — so you can plot a course to “there”.
To plot that course, you need to respect that teams are complex systems with emergent behavior which can never be fully designed and are full of surprises. But while emergent behavior is, by definition, not entirely in our control, we can absolutely bend systems to make good outcomes more likely. Much more likely. Maybe I’ll have more to say about “bending the system” in a future post… but I did say a little bit about one narrow, specific part of it in a past post: