Many years ago, I came to the position of a developer in a company and soon witnessed an unusual scene. The team leader of the neighboring department called his subordinate in the middle of the working day and rather loudly and cheekily told him: “Listen, here's some money for you. Drive to the store, buy whiskey and snacks.
I thought: “Come on! All this is strange…” But the situation repeated several more times. After working at the company for a while, I realized that this kind of behavior was the norm there. Some teams were friends against others, undercovering flourished, and top management absolutely did not react to this. I left there, despite the fact that the tasks were interesting and the conditions were not bad. But the morale was unbearable.
Not only I thought so: now this company is no more. But at that moment I realized how important it is to work with informal relationships, how significant an impact they can have on the business as a whole. Moreover, line managers should work with them first of all, and not HR managers or staff psychologists, because it is the leaders who are in daily contact with their subordinates.
But team leads in the IT field, as a rule, have themselves grown from developers, engineers and do not have special education in the areas of psychology and management methodology. Because of this, managers often understand their tasks rather narrowly: solve business problems, fulfill a plan, etc. And they don’t understand why they babysit adults.
In the last ten years, I have been leading development teams, seven of them at Badoo. This article is based on my speech on : in it I will try to explain how and why you need to work on informal relationships in a team.
Problems with informal relationships
How to determine that something bad is happening with informal relationships in a team? There are several markers.
Newbies don't stick around
I am sure that for most people, changing jobs is stressful. The newcomer is in an extremely uncomfortable, unstable situation, also because his experience and abilities in the new team are not confirmed. At the same time, he could be a significant and respected person at a previous job. In this case, the contrast will be even more noticeable and will cause even more discomfort.
What does a person do to express himself? Shows initiative. But the initiative from new employees is often emphatically not accepted: “Where are you going? Without you, we know how everything works here!
In addition, newcomers are often not involved in informal communication. Went to lunch - no newcomer was invited. Someone's birthday is celebrated - a newcomer was not invited. He’s already stressed out about work issues, and there’s no one to talk about it with. It's doubly hard.
Under these conditions, many simply decide to leave for another company.
Fellow Strangers
The next problem is ignorance of colleagues. More often this happens at the border of departments, and not within one department. Performers do not know their internal customers and vice versa: for example, the product team and the development team do not know each other.
The saddest thing is when leaders do not know their subordinates: they do not know their real expectations, they do not know how to motivate them.
Informal leaders in opposition to formal power
In any team there are informal leaders. Like other people, they have their own goals. The peculiarity of informal leaders is that they know how to involve other people in achieving their goals. If the goal of the informal leader does not lie in the plane of the goals of the organization, then such people can become very toxic. And the worst thing that can happen is that they can take part of the team to another company.
disunity
All the problems that I have outlined - poor work with newcomers, lack of communication, informal leaders in the opposition - lead to disunity. In a particular case, it can be illustrated with an eloquent meme:
People don't know what their colleagues are doing. Accordingly, their contribution to the common cause is not appreciated. Disunity leads to a lack of teamwork: team members do not complement each other, as a result of which tasks are solved inefficiently. There is no flexibility due to the fact that communications are not established. It is difficult for leaders to motivate and grow their subordinates. All this leads to the fact that people leave.
And I want it to be good, to be at least like this:
It's even better if it's like this:
What to do?
What to do so that informal relations in your company are “correct” and work for the benefit of the business? I will talk about what we have done and continue to do with us at Badoo. These are three important components:
- company culture;
- regular work on team building;
- reaction to destructive deviations.
Company culture
Company culture is a set of core values that shape the way employees think and behave. This is what unites people in a team, what distinguishes a company from others and makes it possible to be proud of it. These are the values shared by most of the team.
Core values are not constant. They can change, be supplemented depending on changes in the company's strategy. Do not invent them or blindly copy the values of other companies. Also, don't bring in external experts and expect them to create those values for you: the values must come from within the company.
A long time ago I worked as a programmer for a network marketing company. The cult of the boss reigned in it: his portraits and quotes hung in the offices. All employees had to be passionate, to make the world a better place. There, instead of the usual greeting, there was such a chant: “100 billion is our destiny!”. Now it seems funny, but then it was not very funny. This is an example of how not to do it, an example of pseudo-culture.
Let's get back to Badoo. At some point, we got together, brainstormed and created a list of our core values.
But it's not the list itself that matters, but how we use it.
First, we use it when hiring: we try to understand whether candidates are ready to share our core values. Secondly, we use it to evaluate employees: on probation, quarterly and semi-annual reviews.
How do we evaluate candidates in interviews? We ask certain questions. For example, about past mistakes; we learn the attitude towards them in order to understand how much a person has awareness, how much he is self-critical and able to learn from his mistakes.
We look at the reaction to questions to which the candidate does not know the answers. Many begin to play up, divert the conversation in the other direction, or immediately give up. We love it when a person tries to logically reach the correct answer and, having already rested on the ceiling, honestly says that he does not know. In this case, we see that a person is able to admit that he does not understand something, and this is normal.
We ask if there are people whom the applicant helped in their careers and development, how he helped them. This is a sign that a person is open to the world, ready to help others.
We are interested in whether there are people from whom the candidate himself has learned something recently. This indirectly indicates how much a person, firstly, loves to learn, and secondly, is grateful to the people who surround him and are ready to give him something new.
It is interesting to learn about the circumstances of leaving the previous job. Here we are interested not so much in the reason for the dismissal, but in how the person transferred his duties: did he prepare everything or did he leave it and burn it with a blue flame? It speaks of responsibility.
Often people at the interview say that they want to develop and therefore left the previous company. It is interesting to know: what prevented development there? Answering this question, candidates sometimes begin to look for someone to blame, say that the boss was somehow not like that, colleagues are stupid, etc. This is how we check how proactive a person is, how ready he is to recognize his problem and do something for it solutions.
Regular team building activities
Having realized and formulated the culture of the company, you need to work on team building. I've broken it down into several directions:
- work with informal leaders;
- work with newcomers;
- working with difficult employees;
- proper one-on-one meetings;
- consideration of personal circumstances;
- elimination of disunity.
Informal leaders
Informal leaders are an effective tool in the hands of a team leader. Through them, we can project the goals of the company to the rest of the team members.
Don't push, sell
The main thing in working with an informal leader is trust. You should not act directively, tell him what to do and how. You need to convince him that the task is important, its solution will make the company better. Or turn to him as an expert and ask: “Look, we have such a problem. What do you think is the best way to solve it? This confirms the authority of the leader, and he is his main tool and weapon.
praise, appreciate
Praise the opinion leader in a timely manner. This tip applies to any employee, but praise is even more important in the case of the opinion leader.
Do not encroach on authority
Do not question the authority of the opinion leader, do not publicly criticize or make fun of him. For you, he is not a rival: a formal leader and an informal leader play on different fields. The first has a bunch of tools for influencing the team, the second, by and large, has only his influence and authority.
Accept Feedback
Listen to feedback from opinion leaders (about other employees, processes) - they appreciate it. The fact that you are listening also confirms the authority of the opinion leader.
Assign formal responsibility
If possible, it is worth assigning formal responsibility to the informal leader. In the future, this will destroy the motivation to go into opposition, and also satisfy the leadership ambitions of the informal leader.
Working with newbies
On the one hand, beginners are those people who bring with them all the freshest, most interesting, effective things that you might not have known about. On the other hand, these are the people who can potentially "blur" the culture of the company.
What do we do at Badoo?
"Gentle" onboarding
From day one, we assign a new curator. This can be a lead or any experienced employee who is ready to answer newbie questions at any time. We do not throw a new employee immediately to solve “combat” tasks and do not demand much from him. For the first few weeks, the newcomer simply gets up to speed in close contact with the curator.
Regular feedback
At first, beginners are very much looking forward to this, because, by and large, feedback for them is the only guideline and indicator of whether they are doing everything right or not. At Badoo, for the first two months, the manager meets with the newcomer one-on-one every week and discusses with him all the questions that have arisen. It is important to be extremely careful when dealing with criticism during this period. On the contrary, it is worth saying that making mistakes is normal, especially at first. It is useful to involve an HR specialist so that a newcomer can give feedback to his manager: what he cannot say in person, he will tell the HR manager.
Involvement in informal communication
No need to leave newcomers out of informal communication. Let's go to lunch by the department - call the newcomer. Celebrate someone's birthday - invite a newbie. He may refuse, but after a while he will definitely agree. The main thing is to let him know that he is not superfluous, but a full member of the team.
Initiatives
It is also extremely important to work carefully with initiatives. This does not mean that you need to do everything that a beginner suggests. The burden of proving usefulness, changing the existing status quo in the company lies with the proposer, that is, in this case, with the new employee. If for some reason his initiative is not suitable, try to reasonedly, like with a professional, to talk about why this is not suitable.
Help
At first, help for beginners is very important. We are all interested in the fact that the new employee adapts as quickly as possible and begins to solve combat missions. Often beginners are afraid to ask for help because they think their questions are stupid. Today he has already approached once: he will come up again - probably, they will think that he is unprofessional. We explain that there is nothing wrong with this: you need to approach a colleague as soon as you "rested" in a problem. I tried to figure it out for half an hour or an hour - and nothing happens? Come on, otherwise you'll only make things worse for everyone.
Dealing with difficult employees
Difficult employees are people who work against the culture of the company, against its core values. These are employees who systematically make disrespectful statements, try to undermine the authority of the leader, etc. How to work with them?
Understand the true motives of resistance
It may be an insult that you did not notice, or it may be such a position in life: I am against it, that's all. You can try asking about it directly. If you can’t find out what the problem is and the person goes on the defensive, you can try to talk to people with whom he communicates closely. Perhaps they will shed some light on the motives.
If the motives are clear, then try to negotiate
You may have to compromise somewhere. If it is not possible to negotiate directly with the employee, you can try to involve the so-called parliamentarian, for example, an experienced HR specialist who will talk alone with the employee, talk alone with you, draw conclusions and give valuable recommendations to both.
Remove an employee: for example, transfer to another team
There is a conflict on a personal level: people just don't like each other, that's all. In this case, you can try to transfer a person to another department so as not to lose a valuable employee.
Ignore
If the measures described above do not help, you can try to turn off the person from the processes in which he considers himself significant. This will strike at his authority and, perhaps, bring him to reason.
Fire
If this does not work, then there is only one option left - to part with a difficult employee, because constant conflicts with him adversely affect the authority of the leader.
Proper one-on-one meetings
Let me remind you that we are now talking only about informal relationships. I believe that regular one-on-one meetings with employees are an excellent format for building trust between the leader and subordinates. At 1:1, in addition to working moments, it is worth paying attention to near-working issues.
- Give the first word to your subordinate. Perhaps he, as they say, boiled up and he was preparing. Do not interrupt him: let him speak.
- Discuss the difficulties. Both working and non-working, which may affect work processes.
- Discuss relationships with colleagues: is everything good there. If you find out that there are some problems, then offer your help, or rather, ask how you, as a leader, can help. The main thing is not to forget to really help if the employee asks for it.
- The advice that I read in Maxim Batyrev's book "45 Manager's Tattoos". At the end of the meeting, when everything seems to have been talked about, ask the question: “What else should we discuss?” Some people just at this moment give out the most interesting.
Accounting for personal circumstances
If the manager and the subordinate have developed a trusting relationship, then the subordinate can quite easily inform you about some personal circumstances: the birth of a child, health problems, mortgages, divorce, etc. We are all people, and anything can happen.
What will a competent leader do in this case?
- Gives a break. Transfer from complex, critical projects to low-priority turnover.
- Send on vacation.
- Revise the scheme of motivation. If a person has taken a mortgage, the financial issue comes to the fore. So, you can give him a bonus, if there is anything for it (instead of the same diploma).
- Will change work schedule. For example, if a person's children went to the garden, you can adjust the start time of the working day. Why not?
When a leader hears people, takes into account their personal circumstances, this is appreciated. And vice versa: when a person knows that the leader is aware of his problems and does not take them into account, this gives rise to resentment.
Breaking apart
Let me tell you how we fight disunity at Badoo.
Joint dinners
I was surprised to hear that in many companies, employees go to lunch alone or in pairs. This is extremely inefficient! After all, while we are waiting for the waiter, we can discuss a lot of things, learn something new about the people with whom you work. If the size of the office allows, you can organize a dining room, as we did. During lunch hours, people from different departments sit shoulder to shoulder and discuss a variety of topics: it works very well for team building.
Team building, corporate events with families
In our case, team building is regular (once every three months) outings anywhere: laser tag, bowling, billiards, just going to a bar. Participation in these events is voluntary. A day is chosen that is convenient for the majority, and we take into account newcomers in the first place, trying to involve them as much as possible.
Corporate events, in our case, are truly grandiose events, for example, trips in the summer for three days. This year we were in Krasnaya Polyana. We are traveling with families, but I know that this is a moot point. Yes, there are disadvantages: of course, the cost, as well as the fact that families reduce the "team building" of the event. There are people who prefer to spend time with family rather than with colleagues. But we tried different formats and settled on this one. Firstly, a family person is much easier to pull out to a three-day event with a family than one, and most of us are family. Secondly, we get a loyal person from the outside - a spouse. And it often happens that families, having met at a corporate party, then continue friendly communication in everyday life.
Sports, hiking, rafting
This is a very simple and equally effective method of team building. We have teams for running, triathlon, table tennis. We go rafting every year. In general, I consider this one of the most powerful ways of team building, because in unusual conditions for themselves, sometimes associated with extreme sports, people learn absolutely new things about themselves and about those around them.
Interest clubs
Those who do not like sports can be carried away by playing checkers, chess, “What? Where? When?". About three years ago, our colleagues created a musical group. Interestingly, many of its participants at that time either did not know how to play musical instruments at all, or did it extremely uncertainly. Most recently, they gave another concert in the office, and it was cool! I remember how proud I was of the people I work with.
Hackathons
It's also a pretty simple way. People from different departments gather to solve some interesting problem, not necessarily a work one. Pizza, beer, got together and created something together, and at the same time learned a lot about each other - something that is impossible to find out in the course of a working routine.
Reaction
The last block is about the reaction to all sorts of destructive phenomena that act against the basic values of the company, which means that they have a detrimental effect on the moral climate in the team.
Familiarity
When a leader and a subordinate are too passionate about their friendship, they risk overstepping their bounds. In this case, the manager should always remember that he is a manager (even at joint drinking and partying), and strictly stop going beyond the border, which he himself must outline for himself.
Disrespectful speech and actions
This is unacceptable and extremely destructive. This is what poisons the atmosphere in the team. Stop it as soon as you hear / see. And do not forget to understand the reason after. It is necessary to understand whether personal dislike or a work conflict is behind this behavior. We need to understand, promote it in order to prevent the recurrence of such situations. For example, it happens that people cover up their own mistakes with the mistakes of other people or departments. Developers blame testers, testers blame developers. Often this happens because people simply do not know what the neighboring department is doing, do not appreciate its contribution to the common cause. You can work on this, for example, by creating channels for reporting on the success of departments, so that employees understand who does what in the company and what their contribution is.
Gossip
Rumors are always the result of lack of information. Lack of information is a kind of vacuum that is filled with impurities. Having learned about the existence of some kind of rumor, the manager should explain as truthfully as possible how things really are, and then think about how to create normal channels for conveying this kind of information: mailing lists, digests, regular seminars, etc.
Not so long ago we had a similar story at Badoo. Business decided to transfer part of the development from Moscow to London - a normal business requirement, as time shows, justified. But this gave rise to a rumor that the Moscow office is closing. This idea was so firmly planted in the minds of many employees that we had to make a lot of efforts in order to dispel the rumor. Just imagine the motivation of the people who believed this: “Why make any plans if we will soon be closed anyway?”
Conclusions
How to make informal relationships work for the benefit of business?
- Understand and shape the company culture. Hire people who share your values. Get rid of those who act against them.
- Work on team building on a regular basis. Create and develop formats in which people can form informal relationships.
- Respond to disruptive deviations. Remember that you are the manager, and therefore the guardian of your company's culture.
And most importantly: get to know your people! Smartly weave informal relationships into work relationships. This will give you a complete picture, which, in turn, will allow you to make more informed decisions.
Source: habr.com