CTO Craft Con: Keynote: Foster a Culture of Progression and Retain Your Talent
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Sam Phillips - Co-founder & CTO at Residently As leaders, our product is our team: we make the machine that makes the machine. Diverse hiring is a critical part of this work, but an inclusive, retentive culture is essential to enabling high-performance. In this talk I’ll discuss strategies for creating an environment where people can get the progression they need without feeling the need to leave. https://ctocraft.com
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CTO Craft Con: Keynote: Foster a Culture of Progression and Retain Your Talent
- 1. Sam Phillips Co-Founder & CTO, Residently @samsworldofno Foster a Culture of Progression and Retain Your Talent
- 2. @samsworldofno My motivations Getting started A culture of progression
- 3. @samsworldofno The product is the team. Hiring is hard, retention is critical to performance. Although I am enough - I’m also a learner and I want to be getting better. The intuition
- 4. @samsworldofno Creating a diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace Promote employability through growth - in case things go wrong. The rules
- 5. @samsworldofno When ranking what’s important in choosing a job, the ability to do what they do best comes first. Money is fourth. 2016 study: 70% of team members unhappy with growth opportunities at their jobs. The data State of the American Workplace (Gallup 2017); The New Path Forward: Creating Compelling Careers for Employees and Organizations, CEB, 2016
- 6. @samsworldofno Basic needs, individual needs, teamwork needs and growth needs. Team members whose needs are met produce better business outcomes and staff turnover goes down by 59%. What your team needs State of the American Workplace (Gallup 2017)
- 7. @samsworldofno Remove obstacles Require teamwork Work transparently Delegate autonomy Support intentionally … and you don’t need to get too formal, too early. Getting started
- 8. @samsworldofno It’s hard to encourage growth when all movement is difficult. What can I do to help on the basic stuff? Remove obstacles
- 9. @samsworldofno My definition of team: if you are sick, I can continue your work. The team is the primary place of teaching and learning. Pairing creates a default environment of collaboration and knowledge sharing. Require teamwork
- 10. @samsworldofno Processes that are explicit and radiate information naturally teach. Our best teams make no secret of how they manage, prioritise and trade off. Work transparently
- 11. @samsworldofno It’s hard to grow unless you can try the work. Consider how broad a task you can delegate, all the way to autonomy. Don’t skip the expectation setting, and don’t skip the feedback. Delegate autonomy
- 12. @samsworldofno The real work of people management - feedback, coaching, catchups. Show up, take an active interest in supporting, monitoring and measuring. Consider informal vs formal progression planning. Support Intentionally
- 13. @samsworldofno These are a great way to formalise expectations from your team. Check out blog posts from Sally Lait, James Stanier and Alice Bartlett - I’ll link them on my Twitter :) Getting started on a framework
- 14. …thank you! Good luck :) Sam Phillips Co-Founder & CTO, Residently @samsworldofno
Editor's Notes
- [sit central, lower the screen, show speaker notes, quit intensive apps, turn on dnd, gain down to 25%] Good evening folks - I’m Sam, and I’m Co-Founder and CTO at Residently, the startup that’s fixing renting, for renters. In today’s last session I wanted to talk a little bit about enabling progression and growth for your team members; not so much about development plans and progression frameworks, although these are important, but more about creating a culture where in addition to being planned and mapped, that progression is actually possible. And not only possible: it’s the default mode in which you are operating.
- The agenda today is simple - we’ll chat a little bit about what motivates me to create a culture of progression & growth… and share some research. I’ll then go through a few ways to get started. I tend to work in startups so I’m almost always “getting started”, but plenty of this has applied to my work in larger tech companies too. So… what are my motivations?
- As a a leader, I see my job as making the machine that makes the machine: my product is the team. When it comes to progression, my first motivation is just the feeling… and the logic of it. One of my key inputs to creating my product, my team, is hiring. It’s critical and worth doing well, but if you have high turnover of team members, it’s logical that you’ll end up doing way more hiring, taking time away from other things. More profoundly, though, if your teams are unstable they will struggle to reach a point of high performance. As team members change, dynamics change too and psychological safety can suffer. Forming the relationships within the new team takes time. The people you retain also get better at working in you organisation over time as they develop their skills, domain knowledge and internal context. The last thing that’s obvious to me is myself: I’m a learner, and I want to get better. I’ve left good jobs because I wasn’t learning anything any more. And I’m not alone: learning and getting better is a natural human instinct. Progression is not about “changing people” - the desire to learn and improve is who we are, and it’s how your team members already want to be treated. And they are more versatile than we sometimes think - at home, they fix things, they raise children, they drive cars. They are extremely competent and varied in their skillset… and they want to do more.
- I also believe that I have two, more general, responsibilities. Firstly, like many people I believe that an inclusive workplace with a diverse workforce, brings business upside… …but in a way, honestly, I don’t care. I strive for a diverse workplace for itself alone, not for the business results, but because we have a moral responsibility to create it. If we have the opportunity to make the world better, how could we not take it? A culture of progression enables the diverse workplace because it increases retention, meaning that when you make efforts to recruit more diversely, those efforts aren’t wasted when people leave in a year or two because they have no opportunities. It’s easier to hit diversity targets when recruiting for less experienced people - retaining those folks is the key to having diversity throughout your team. My other general responsibility is that of a leader in a startup. People have this idea that startups are risky places to work, somehow riskier than other small businesses, or large businesses. It’s not true: all of these organisations have to make difficult choices and sometimes cuts. But still, I want to sleep at night and my way of ensuring this is knowing that if something goes wrong, the folks in my team will be able to find a new role. If I’ve invested in growth and I can say with a straight face that everybody who joins my team leaves more qualified and more employable than when they started, then I’ve met that responsibility.
- And of course, there is data backing this up. We often talk about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs - I’m sure almost all of you have seen it before, where basic needs like shelter and belonging are met, along with self-actualisation: become the best you can be… also known as progression. Richer, more rigorous sources of data exist though, which I thought I would share. Gallup releases data, based upon surveys they’ve been doing since the 1990s, on what attracts people to roles, and what causes them to leave. When ranking what’s important to folks when choosing a new role, self-actualisation: the ability to do what they do best, is at the top. This correlates with why people leave: the top reason is a lack of growth. Money is fourth. I think the old saying is true that people join companies and they leave managers… but I think when they stay, they stay for themselves.
- Gallup’s data is based on their Q12 model. This is twelve questions to evaluate whether your needs are met: basic needs, individual needs, teamwork needs - and growth needs. These aren’t linear - they overlap and interact. In fact, growth and progression are mentioned not just in the final questions but throughout. This isn’t a million miles away from what Maslow’s theories tell us: but their data back it up. Staff turnover goes down by 59% when needs are met, including growth needs.
- So the question I ask myself is: am I creating an environment in which learning can actually happen, not just the expectation that it will happen? This is my list for an engineering leader - you’ll have your own! Remove obstacles, require teamwork, work transparently, delegate autonomy and support intentionally. One thing I often see is places starting with the development plans. A document for a manager and team member to fill in. For ambitious team mates this can be a good early way to focus conversations, but it can lack structure when the expectations of a formal progression framework aren’t in place, and jar against a culture where progression isn’t supported. That’s why I talk about the culture of progression - the opportunities to learn - as a precursor for the learning plans. Again: Am I, as a leader, creating an environment in which learning can actually happen, not just the expectation that it will happen?
- For me, a leader’s first task is to remove obstacles. This basically covers the first three quarters of Gallup’s survey. First, hire great people. Second, to a degree, get out of their way - we’ll take about delegation in a moment. But definitely try to let the organisation get out of their way. How can you have an authentic conversation about growth when even getting the day-to-day stuff done is hard? We’ve all worked with big company nonsense and a lot of it is unavoidable or unassailable. I worked at a company where emails took an hour to be delivered if they had too many recipients. I worked at another where my laptop crashed every 30 minutes. I can’t get better at my job if I can’t even do my job. As leaders in different organisations we’ll have different amounts of influence - but use what you can to make the environment where growth conversations don’t seem ridiculous.
- My second fundamental thing, along with removing obstacles, is requiring teamwork. “Require” seems quite forceful, but I believe this is one of the most effective things you can do. Whenever I’ve been bought into a team to teach them “agile” or to improve “productivity”, what I invariably find isn’t waterfall, it’s chaos and it’s no teamwork. There are often people working in proximity - maybe physically, maybe in similar code or business areas, but their work is not shared. My definition of a team: if you are sick, I can continue your work… because it is is shared and we’re regularly communicating about progress. Teams are incredibly powerful and can be the primary locus of learning. It’s literal in a way: there are literally people there to help you and to teach you, and you have opportunities to learn to teach, as well. What’s more, with the psychological safety of your team around you, you can learn things, try things and fail. The team is not in competition with each other and we only succeed together. This almost automatically provides progression for everybody.
- One thing I love about the technology industry and the practices of teamwork and agile is that there’s no slight-of-hand to it: we show clearly how we’re doing things and by teaching through our daily actions we make knowledge accessible. It’s much more possible to work with a stakeholder, to run a retrospective, to do a story kickoff when you’ve been part of those processes many times before. So I like to teach through our daily actions: we manage in the open and we provide growth by default.
- As a leader, you should make sure that you’re letting people stretch themselves but providing a safety net. Let them try roles and tasks out: see if they like them, see what they need to do to become good at them. This the hardest one for me - situational leadership tells us about how much we can delegate, but it’s always my urge to push and see how people thrive. It’s easy to delegate when you’re sure and then feel very pleased with yourself about how well it went. If things went perfectly, maybe you delegated too late and that person or team was already capable a while ago. A growth area for me is when things don’t go perfectly, or don’t go well at all - it’s important to remember that people can grow, people want to grow - but they need feedback. [I had a boss once, not for very long before I left, who would deliberately set you hard or impossible tasks to see how you handled it. That’s not the supportive environment we’re talking about.]
- There simply is no substitute for the work of people management and coaching. It’s your job to let people know how they’re getting on and also to encourage coaching conversations where they evaluate themselves. Feedback is part of their salary: you’ve got to help them close that loop. You’ve got to help them find opportunities to do more. If your team member has an ambition/development plan - show up for it. Remember to ask about it in 1:1s, remember to listen and be consistent. You can do informal development plans for your most capable and ambitious team members way before you roll out a bigger process.
- My message today has been that you might not need a formal framework as early as you think - and timing is important because it’s a significant investment of time. But when you do need a framework, I of course recommend going all in. It’s a great way of giving clarity over where people are and what’s expected of them now, and in the future. It puts a structure around your growth conversations and can be used for the ambitious, the under performers and the ones who need to be shown the path just a little bit more. There are loads of great resources in this conference and around the internet - follow me on twitter @samsworldofno and I’ll tweet a bunch of links today :)
- That’s it for now! Thank you so much for listening and for CTO Craft for having me. If you’d like to talk more, give me some feedback or ask a question, follow me on Twitter.