Fostering a strong organizational culture is one of the most valuable jobs a leader or manager can do to amplify the work of their teams. In other words, managers and team leaders must support the culture in their teams. Research shows that cross-functional collaboration, a secure climate for learning, and effective tooling are highly correlated with software delivery performance and contribute to a positive team culture.
Collaboration begins with building trust between teams and counterparts. Trust must be built over time; it is built on kept promises, open communication, and behaving predictably even in stressful situations. Teams work more effectively, and that relationship will signal to the organization that cross-functional collaboration is valued.
An admin or engineer may find as they build their skills that they are interested in another departmental role. This sort of lateral move may be incredibly valuable to both teams. Encourage practitioners to move between departments. Practitioners bring valuable information about processes and challenges to their new team, and members of the previous team have a natural point person when reaching out to collaborate.
One way to build relationships is using disaster recovery testing. Many large technology companies run disaster recovery testing exercises, or “game days,” in which outages are simulated or created according to a prepared plan, and teams must work together to support or restore service levels. When Kripa Krishnan was Directory of Disaster Recovery at Google, she reported in Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure, “For DiRT-style events to be successful, an organization first needs to accept system and process failures as a means of learning...We design tests that require engineers from several groups who might not normally work together to interact with each other. That way, should a real large-scale disaster ever strike, these people will already have strong working relationships.”
Collaboration and a climate for learning go hand in hand. Emphasize how much the organization values a climate of learning by putting resources behind formal education opportunities, creating a training budget, and advocating for it internally. Learning often happens outside of formal education so ensure your teams have the resources to engage in informal learning and the proper space to explore ideas. Companies like 3M and Google have famously set aside a part of time (20% and 15%, respectively) for focused free-thinking and exploration of side projects.
Make it safe to fail. If failure is punished, people will not try new things. Treating failures as opportunities to learn and holding blameless postmortems to work out how to improve processes and systems helps people feel comfortable taking reasonable risks. Encourage sharing and innovation by having demo days or forums to allow teams to share what they have created with each other. This sets up a foundation for team celebration and cooperative learning.
Collaboration and learning would not get far without effective tooling. Unless there is a good reason for practitioners to not use their own tools, make sure the choice of tools is owned by the team. If they can build infrastructure and applications the way they want, they are much more likely to be invested in their work. This is backed up in the data: one of the major contributors to job satisfaction in Accelerate: The science behind devops: Building and scaling high performing technology organizations, is whether employees feel they have the tools and resources to do their job. If your organization must standardize tools, ensure that procurement and finance are acting in the interests of teams, not the other way around.
While many engineering success stories highlight the fantastic grass-roots efforts of the technical teams involved, these transformations benefit from truly engaged and transformative leadership supporting and amplifying the work of their teams. This support carries through to deliver value to the business, so organizations would be wise to see culture development as an investment in their teams, technology, and solutions.
