I post infrequently about my thoughts on work, right? But it’s now been about 2.5 years since my last job. And I’ve always hated when people muse about work culture when they’re not *doing the work*. The cadre of TEDx speakers who talk about culture culture culture without actually doing the work of managing a team and creating a culture and striving to maintain it.
So I find that I have less and less to say. Which is fine.
But maybe to cap things off – one of the things I’m most proud of in my career is that turnover on my teams was incredibly low. And I like to think (though it’s not my place to say, because I didn’t *experience* what I tried to put into action) that it’s because the work was meaningful, people had opportunities to learn and grow, that they felt listened to (even if holy crap, I was far, far, far from perfect), and that even if something wasn’t right, that it was clear we were constantly striving to improve the team culture.
And the thing that’s baffling to me is that in both jobs I got ousted from, the teams immediately started to churn. And it wasn’t that *I* was suddenly gone. (I’m not *that* egotistical!) It’s that the culture changed. People didn’t feel listened to. They didn’t feel like they had opportunies to grow. I’ve talked to dozens of people who’ve left teams I previously led, and it’s always some variation of the same theme.
And it’s always because the folks who took over the team had the same goal – I heard it directly from them in some form or another, that it was time for the “people with big boy pants” to come in and take over and do things “right”. That my approach was too chaotic or unpredictable. But the thing is, when you’re working in a world where you’re trying to get to product-market fit, things are chaotic and unpredictable. You can’t form long-term schedules. You can’t predict growth or revenue. You can’t be deterministic. And if you’re trying to make things predictable, you’re lying. To you, to your team.
The “big boy pants” folks always wanted things to be deterministic. To be understandable. To tell their bosses that they had plans, and that those plans would work. And they’d be just as wrong as I would have been if I’d actually *tried* to make predictions, and they were much worse off because they’d try to stick with their plans long after it was clear they weren’t working.
The right way to work when building something new is to minimize inertia. To change whenever change needs to happen. As Bruce Lee says, to “be like water”. It’s a whole skill that you have to learn that has nothing to do with planning and predictability, and the best way to do it is by empowering as many people as possible to understand the thing you’ve trying to build, and to give them authority to make decisions and pull the team in different directions.
I feel like that was my career superpower – that I could recruit everyone on a team to *think* like a product leader, and to have a team where everyone could yank the team in a new direction – but with enough structure that it wasn’t total chaos – it was a managed kind of swirl of chaotic energy, directed toward a unified goal.
I could get a team of people together, we could not know where we were going, but we could share a vision of where we wanted to go. Each individual would have a machete, and we’d all be hacking through the jungle, and it was ordered enough that we were all moving in the same direction, but flexible enough that every single person could make progress toward that goal and *own* something in the process.
My job as the team lead wasn’t to be 1st in line with the machete and have everyone fall in behind me. It was to keep everyone’s knives sharp, and to make sure that even when someone saw something interesting, to remember where we were trying to go so that we all kept pointed in the right direction. To give credit to those who hacked through the jungle and made progress. To celebrate everyone’s achievements and elevate them. To try to evolve how the team worked as it grew (this was often the hardest and most difficult part of my job) without destroying that sense of ownership and exploration.
I feel like I learned a lot of tools. Creative sprints where we’d change up the teams and focus on a single task for a short time. Highly iterative “continuous deployment” development. Summarizing your goals in a single sentence. They’re things that sound easy but are incredibly difficult to do well, and in some cases, are almost completely counterintuitive to what people think of as “good” development.
But I think my track record speaks to that – over 20 years, the teams I worked with forged a lot of new territory, both in mobile games (where we were 1st (or very, very early) in cross-platform development on iOS, HTML5 development, continuous deployment, location-aware stuff, performance marketing and more), VR, healthcare, and even developing some really effective prototyping practices for traditional console development.
Some of those became massively successful. Some of those things were really interesting very early explorations into things that didn’t work out, but later because hugely successful for others. Some of them were total duds. 😀
But I can look back on my career with a lot of pride, knowing that we built a lot of new stuff. And again – it’s not because *I* was smart. It’s because I developed ways to make the teams effective. To wield everyone’s full potential to exploring something new.
I think that’s why there was relatively little turnover. Because we were all in it together. We all had a role to play. We were all part of the creative firepower of the team.
I think that’s the thing I’m most proud of.
…and no, there’s not really a point to this. It’s just a bit of reflection. As much as “team culture” can sometimes feel organic, it’s not. It’s something that is crafted from the top. It has to be, because culture is how a team spends time and money, and that’s something that unfortunately doesn’t happen bottom-up.
It took years to figure out what I was doing in the working world. What unique perspective I brought to things. I hope that over the course of your career (whoever you are) you find that thing that you do better than anyone else you know. The thing that makes *you* special (at work).
For me, as a generalist, I often struggled with that. I was never going to be as great at anything as any of my specialized friends. So it turned out that my superpower was essentially process management. I thought of it as “game design” for a long time, but it was more about knowing enough about enough stuff that I could see how the pieces all fit together and wield *all* of it more effectively then a specialist could.
It’s funny, because in the end, it feels ephemeral. It feels like nothing, because there’s almost nothing to point to other than “this works”. And maybe that’s why I take some pride in low churn – and that that changed when I left – because it’s a practical outcome of that ephemeral process.
What do I bring to a team? Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing tangible. But being able to look back on things and realize that no, the teams I led were really, really good at building new things. Forging new territory into unknown spaces, and we did it while keeping the team happy and engaged – and were effective at it *because* the team was happy and engaged.
I feel good about that. (Of course I would – I’m looking back on my own thoughts about work and constructing a narrative I feel good about!) But more, if that’s the narrative I have about looking back on my career, I’m happy. And content.
I hope over the next handful of years, I can pass on some of that mentoring others, so that other people can build teams and processes like that, and embrace their own version of the chaos of discovering new things.