People-First Leadership: A Key to Successful Dev Teams

2. Develop People-First KPIs

Certainly, part of your organization’s roadmap or strategy will outline the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you want your team to work toward — such as projects completed or numeric goals reached. This is especially true in the tech industry. You’ll be tasked with leading your team to deploy apps or software on certain timelines, while reaching other metrics like user downloads, purchases, conversions, etc.

Developing people-first KPIs (in addition to the product KPIs) means that you expressly build mechanisms into your strategy plan to measure how your people are doing over time – not just how they’re performing, but also how they’re doing as people under your care.

Some examples of people-focused KPIs include:

• Create anonymous monthly check-in surveys that measure if employees feel their needs are being met. Set a goal for both participation and a positive result. For example: We want 80% of employees to respond to monthly anonymous check-in surveys, and we want an average score of 4.5 out of 5.
• Ensuring employees are taking a certain percentage of their vacation days.
• Committing to a number of 1:1 informal individual check-ins with your team so they have a safe, regular space to share concerns and successes and to be seen by you.
• Committing to a number of 1:1 formal individual check-ins with your team to give them regular feedback, formally recognize their work, revisit their role description to make sure it still fits and more.
• Revisiting the purpose and number of meetings your team holds to ensure people have the time and energy to do their work.
• Adding “people updates” into “product updates”. When project or team leads are giving updates on the status of projects/products, make space to share team contributions and successes, ensuring the people who do the work are included and seen, not just the output.

These are just a few ideas. Maybe yours includes a company retreat, special recognitions, or bonuses that recognize the “human” aspects of your team’s success such as reliability, good communication and other soft skills.

KPIs help you learn how your team feels about their work, their role, you and your organization. This feedback is critical for successfully leading and retaining your team.

3. Listen

Although we all know we need to listen to one another, most people don’t explicitly make the time to do so. This is especially true in tech, where we are multitasking under deadlines, constantly upskilling and working on The Next Big Thing. It might seem sufficient to get a brief update at Stand-Up and, if you don’t hear any fire alarms, send people to work.

Taking the time to listen has a big impact on your team. Image by Bing Image Creator

But listening is an integral part of being a team leader — it’s as necessary as taking vitals is for a medical professional. If someone is sitting in front of a doctor, the doctor can pretty safely assume the person’s heart is beating and they are breathing. But they stop what they are doing anyway, press a stethoscope to their patient’s chest, and listen.

Be honest: Do you look at your team members, sitting there at Stand-Up and breathing, and assume everything is fine? Or do you take the time to put your finger on their pulse?

As a team leader, really listening to your team is like flipping to the back of the textbook for answers. If you make space, make time, and ask good questions, your team will tell you if their needs are being met. With this knowledge, you can update timelines, change the scope of projects, consider new hires, update employment policies and take other proactive steps to ensure your team has what they need.

You are just one person doing the best you can to lead your team. But listening is the very best superpower you can develop to meet your team where they are so you can do the work to support them.

This is the really important part: Once you’ve listened, if you hear something that requires action, it’s critical you facilitate that action right away. You won’t get infinite chances to listen. If you go to your doctor and complain of a pain in your chest, and the doctor listens, does nothing and sends you home, you probably aren’t going back.

4. Communicate

There have been a lot of psychological studies on the impact of uncertainty on people. The main conclusion is that, because the brain is burdened with keeping us safe, it perceives uncertainty as a threat to our survival.

Your tech team will often face uncertainty due to the changing nature of technology, the tech market, user behavior and more — in addition to health crises and a turbulent economic climate. Even if your team’s needs are being met, those psychological studies also mention something else the human brain will do when it perceives uncertainty: It makes up stories to fill in the gaps. The stories your team members’ brains write can seed problems on your team.

Your team members may begin to doubt if you’re noticing their efforts, if their job is secure, if they are doing good work, if it’s acceptable to take sick or vacation days, if it’s OK to raise a concern and more.

Good communication skills are the best defense against uncertainty. Remember that you’re managing people: They want to know what’s going on.

Communicate with your team:

• Transparently: Be honest and clear whenever you communicate — whether that is giving performance feedback, projecting upcoming projects, sharing challenges, etc. People can handle difficult information; it’s uncertainty that feels like the threat.
• Often: Don’t give your team members’ brains time to start filling in gaps. Give updates and feedback often so your team feels safe, seen and included.

Consider building team communications (again, about issues that affect your team as people as well as the work they’re doing) into Stand-Ups, 1:1 meetings and your regular email updates.

5. Lead With Empathy

Many people in tech consider themselves introverted, logical, linear, technical, etc. Along the way, in all the robot memes and Spock jokes, I think a very unfortunate subtext has surfaced: that “techy” people aren’t very sensitive or emotional — or, worse, that they aren’t very human.

Maybe you’ve heard that, too, which is what brought you to this article. But despite the stereotypes, people in tech are absolutely capable of leading with empathy, and they need empathy just as much as anyone else.

Jokes aside, programmers are not robots; they need empathy.

One of my favorite philosophers, Michel de Montaigne, said, “Every man carries the entire form of the human condition.” Overlooking his 16th century, non-gender neutral language, what he means is that each of us is, at our core, made of the same stuff; we feel, more or less, the same things. Maslow supports this in his hierarchy.

You’re capable of empathy simply because you are a person. And I want to reiterate now that being a person is hard. And, again, you won’t get it right many days, and neither will your team.

Some ways to be more empathic include:

1. Listen without judgment: If a team member is struggling, don’t take it as personal criticism or an attack on yourself or the company. Encourage them to express themselves without getting defensive or arguing. Remember that both of you are on the same team, not only in development, but also in creating a positive and healthy work environment.
2. Provide emotional support: Let your team members know that they can trust you to talk about things that bother them — or even things that make them happy. Celebrate their successes and commisserate with their struggles. Sometimes, they might not even be looking for a solution, but just a sympathetic ear.
3. Show vulnerability: Be willing to share your own struggles and challenges with your team, when appropriate. This builds trust and creates a more open and supportive team culture.
4. Be present: Even in a busy tech environment, setting aside regular time for each team member and dedicating yourself to them during that time is vital for making your team members feel you value them.

Remember, a lot like tech, people are in a constant state of iteration. There’s no perfection — only progress. You get to decide as a team lead if you’re willing to do the work to support your team members as they evolve.

Listen. Communicate. Lean on the benefit of the doubt. You’ll end up with a team that feels cared for, valuable and excited to contribute in a meaningful way.