Cara Bermingham

I wanted to take this moving opportunity to go through my notes and consolidate thoughts from the last few years of working with leadership teams because they might be useful to some. There’s also a trip down memory lane from my time at Co-op Digital.

Leadership teams from the outside

The role of a team coach or delivery manager working with product teams translates really well to working with leadership teams in digital organisations. At least this has been my experience.

I’d always imagined leadership coaching to be a very specific skill set you have to train for (and a very specific type of person who can do it). It definitely requires a lot of specifics but it has been refreshing for me to see that actually a team is a team, with humans in it and the same types of human problems. 

There are some differences of course. One is that it’s often much harder for them to admit that things aren’t working well for various reasons.  It also seems like the essential ways of working a delivery manager would spend so much time setting up for product teams are often totally missed when it comes to the folks running the place. Quite often they are having to organise the work they have to achieve themselves without support. Someone to organise calendar invites isn’t the same, sorry.

Often they aren’t actually a team in the same sense as a product team and that’s ok. There are however important things they must align on in order for things to run smoothly. For example, what are the most important things people should be working on and why? This sounds easy, but getting a group of leaders together to agree and communicate this clearly can be surprisingly difficult without the space, time and facilitation.

Here are some other things I’ve noticed from the past few years that I’ve been supporting leadership teams to work better together:

Being visible and approachable is very important. There are always a lot of assumptions that people in the wider organisation know who the leadership team are and what they are there to do – quite often they don’t have a clue. 

There are also assumptions from leaders that teams know that they have freedom to make decisions. The right ‘permission’ often doesn’t trickle down to a team level. Trust isn’t a given and needs to be talked about and modelled over and over. Of course it also needs to be more than words which means no stepping in to micro manage at the last minute.

Leadership teams often don’t spend that much quality time together so need to work even harder to form bonds and connect on a personal level. A lot of product teams take for granted that they will be having regular retrospectives and possibly even regular tea and cake. For the majority of leadership teams I’ve worked with they don’t take this time out for each other and it shows.  

Finally, more often than not, some leadership teams get sucked into the finer detail of the every day and can forget to keep focus on the aforementioned really high level important stuff. I wonder if this is because it’s easier for them?…it’s definitely not easier for the people working for them. 

I’ve not come into leadership coaching via the more traditional route but I do understand how to help people work better together. It turns out that leadership teams are just quite often people who need to work better together.

My experience being on the inside

When I joined the Co-op Digital leadership team back in 2017(!) I was suffering from a lot of self doubt – turns out the majority of my lovely team were too. Over the years we worked hard together to make things better for our communities and really opened up to each other in the process. At first it felt stiff, formal and like we were struggling to understand what we had to do together, even though we knew there was so much to be done.

We often learned the hard way but I think the fact that we had mostly all been practitioners previously really helped us to build our ways of working.  Here are some of the things we worked on together that helped. 

Agreeing what we were there to do together as a team.

This was hard as we all had individual roles and our main focus was leading our communities  – but surely there was something that brought us together? I was adamant that this was the case but had to admit that it wasn’t obvious straight away. What we agreed on was something like:

• Aligning on the most important things we should be working on and repeating it over and over to our teams
• Getting the operational stuff working and working well 
• Finding great people and supporting them to build the most important things we are talking about in point one

Being better communicators.

There were quite a few moments where some of the team would share information with people but not all, and that had serious knock on effects. People felt annoyed that they were the last to know about important information, and also things got twisted and miscommunicated. We were trying to break away from the traditional ‘cascading of comms’ but realised that we needed to be super clear about what we were saying and who was telling who (when!) Trello cards with checkboxes can be all you need for this.

Making time for each other

For a while we just made sure that we sat together at least twice a week – even if we weren’t working on the same things, it helped us to connect a bit more and more often than not it led to better communication and understanding.  

Being vulnerable and admitting when we were struggling

Covid hitting actually really helped this. We started having to meet much more regularly and do some serious crisis management. Our team dynamic probably improved 10x as fast because of it. I’m sure this is true of a lot of other teams.

Giving ourselves the space to sit back and look at everything

I always tried to push for us to take the time to get everything on the wall (yes we had walls then) and really look at what we were working on and who was doing what. Even if it’s not all relevant to everyone – if you are part of an SLT you need to be at least aware of what’s happening across all the communities. It can save a lot of time having to update and repeat things constantly if you don’t have that shared understanding. Once you’ve got a format that works, it doesn’t have to be that painful – promise.

Finding the right people to run the day to day

It really helped when we found great people to run things operationally and then could leave this to run and just attend the meetings we had to. We had to set the process up right first as a team and not have it forced upon us *cough* PMO *cough*. We managed to come up with a fairly lightweight portfolio and assignment process that was as transparent as possible so people could have a quick look and see what work was coming up, in progress etc. This took us about 500 attempts but I think the key to it was having the right people in our mini ops team to run with it.

Changing things up when they didn’t work for us

We definitely weren’t precious about how we worked together, and that really made a difference. It’s important to hold your beliefs and your regular calendar invites lightly.

I grew and learned so much from being part of that team. If any of my former teammates are reading, thanks for all of it, even the really hard bits! Also, what have I missed?

To everyone else, please share any thoughts about either working with leadership teams or being in them. I’d love to know what you think.