Teamwork makes the dream work

Many may think it’s a cliche, but good teamwork is better than anything that new technology can give you.

In The DevOps/SRE series so far, you’ve learned a lot about different technologies in the space, what you should learn to get a better job, and what you can do to succeed in the engineering world. What you haven’t read about so far is the most crucial part; teamwork.

In this blog post, you’ll learn about collaboration and teamwork in the engineering space.

Teams Prosper

Here’s the funny thing about technology; it rarely ever changes. We’ve had the cloud for years. We’ve had a form of Kubernetes (orchestration) for years. We’ve had containers for years. The only difference is its progression and ease of use, but the underlying technology has always been there and we’ve always used it.

With that being said, there are still organizations that fail from a technical standpoint. It’s not because of the technology, it’s because of the team and collaboration, both engineering and leadership. Good organizations that move forward have great team collaboration. It’s people that share the same vision, want to go down the same path, and work together well. They want the same things and want to build the tech legacy together.

Teams always prosper over the individual contributor playing around with the newest tech.

Even if you own a business, you’re always collaborating with others. You’re not just bringing in Kubernetes and saying hey, this will solve all of our problems. If you’re in a highly functional team, technology is always the afterthought. The first thing you’re thinking about is the architecture, plan, and what design needs to happen for the application and/or system to work successfully.

In an organization that has multiple teams, leadership, and has a goal, the first step of the goal should be to build a good team.

Negative Team Energy

For better or worse, you’re always going to have people with negative energy. We’re humans, right? That means we’ll have bad days, problems at home, the car broke down, the kid just got an F on their report card, whatever the case may be. We always have stuff going on.

However, there’s a big difference between negative energy because of a bad day and negative energy because the person just isn’t a fit. This can come in all shapes and sizes, but 9 times out of 10 it’s because of ego. Someone’s idea didn’t get chosen or what they wanted didn’t happen, and because of that, their ego takes over.

An example from a past experience: I was helping in building out standards and policies for an engineering department. It was becoming quite hard to implement the standards because of the current processes and people in place. I had a conversation with one of the C-Levels and it went something like this is all great, but we might change some stuff. My response was it doesn’t matter if you change 100% of it. As long as the team is happy and the organization prospers. I was able to respond in that fashion because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter to me if I’m right all of the time. The only thing that matters to me is the success of what’s being implemented. I don’t bring an ego to the table, I only bring the need to ensure positive results are an outcome.

Side note: don’t confuse negative energy with someone who’s straightforward and won’t just “yes” you to death.

Negative Management

The fish rots from the head down.

I heard that quote many years ago and it always stuck with me. What it means is it doesn’t matter how good a team is if the leadership team is awful. A team can have every single good idea in the world and can help the organization potentially bring in millions. If the leadership team doesn’t care about standardization, policies, and providing a better environment, the team that’s trying to do everything the right way will inevitably not be able to implement the ideas.

As you go through your career, you will find yourself in a situation where the leadership team is awful. At that point, you have to think to yourself:

• Do I want to continue this?
• Do I want to try to change this?
• Do I want to move up to a leadership position so I can help create better outcomes and a better culture?

The truth is; you’ll probably have to leave organizations way more than stay at them if you want good teamwork, good leadership, and good collaboration.

Keys To Successful Teamwork

Now that you know a little bit about what can make a team not work, let’s talk about what will make a team work.

The first is over-communicating. A lot of people don’t want to say too much because they don’t want to sound annoying, overbearing, and they think people won’t listen to them. However, as an engineer, it’s becoming more and more of your job to speak up and say your bit. Otherwise, a lot of the leadership team will be flying blind.

The second is collaboration. You can have a bunch of amazing engineers on a team, but if they can’t collaborate, the team will never go anywhere. It’ll just end up being a team filled with individual contributors. Collaborate and build together.

The third is good and understanding leadership. The best leadership individuals are the people that hire others to lead their own individual thought processes. A good leader isn’t someone that tells everyone what to do, that’s a micromanager. A good leader is someone that gets out of other smart people's way.