Scott Porad’s Post

Scott Porad Why not take a look at a REAL organizational diagram that checks off all 3 good points you bring up? See my recent post about the diagram below… https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7100922630517522432-unTW

In my experience, underperforming teams lack clarity of vision from their leaders. People want to know that they are working on something important. They want to know that their contribution matters. And they want to believe in their leader, and their colleagues. If you give them that, you get a team of rockstars.

I love that you're characterizing this as a "team transformation project". I've been thinking a lot about this topic lately and I'm gravitating toward that idea that under-performing engineering teams tend to have challenges in one or more of three large categories of problems: technology, systems/processes, culture. Technology challenges can be anything from technical debt, to lack of skill, to literally the problem being too hard to solve (rare), technology choices that aren't useful for the stage of the product, etc. Systems/Process challenges can be any mix of too much or too little process, but you know it's a problem when team members, stakeholders, and leaders can't keep track of what is done, in flight, and not yet done. And of course cultural problems are the hardest to fix, and tend to related to some form of learned helplessness and inability to address and fix the technical or system challenges. I like the "digging in the dirt" analogy to identify what are the real challenges that the team is facing. You remember I used to like to call it "setting a breakpoint in the debugger" - slow down the observation of the team dynamics to better understand what variables are impacting the state machine of the organization.