Unlocking a High-Performing Engineering Team: Cultivating the Essential Qualities for Success

Building a successful engineering team is critical to the success of any organisation. Effective engineering teams can drive innovation, deliver high-quality products, and drive positive business outcomes. Building a successful engineering team is about hiring the right talent and creating a culture that supports and nurtures the desired qualities and behaviours.

In this blog post, we will explore the essential qualities that make a successful engineering team and provide practical tips on building and maintaining a team that is experiment-driven, results-oriented, bold and confident in communication, able to influence, customer-focused, and acts as an agent of change.

Experiment Driven

Encouraging your team to experiment and try new things can lead to innovative solutions, faster problem-solving, and improved processes. By fostering a culture of experimentation, your team will feel empowered to take risks, which can lead to breakthroughs.

An engineering team can create a culture of experimentation that leads to innovation and continuous improvement by encouraging team members to experiment with new ideas and approaches. Foster an environment where it is safe to take risks, and failure is a learning opportunity.

To ensure the team understands the importance of experimentation, set aside protected time: Allocate specific time for experiments and new projects through hackathons, dedicated sprints, or regular experimentation days.

A team must understand the experimentation process and the objectives to attain. This process should also include methods for evaluating the results and sharing and incorporating lessons learned into future work.

To ensure the time is used efficiently, provide resources and support necessary for team members to conduct experiments effectively. Resources can include access to data and tools, mentorship, and guidance from more experienced team members.

Once experiments conclude, recognise and mark the successes of your team’s experiments. Remember, an experiment’s positive or negative outcome is a success as the team probably learnt something valuable. Celebrating can be done through rewards, recognition, or simply by sharing the results with the broader team.

New or improved experiments come from encouraging collaboration between team members on experimentation projects. Collaboration can lead to sharing ideas, leveraging strengths, a greater understanding of limitations and risks, and creating new and improved solutions.

An engineering team can create a culture of experimentation that leads to innovation and continuous improvement.

Results Oriented

Emphasise the importance of delivering results and making a positive impact. Focusing on results can be done by setting clear goals, tracking progress, and recognising and rewarding success. This approach encourages team members to take ownership of their work and strive for excellence.

An engineering team can be results-orientated that drives innovation and continuous improvement by establishing clear and measurable goals for the team, both short-term and long-term. Setting goals will ensure everyone is aligned and working towards the same objectives.

There is always too much work to do, so it is essential to encourage the team to focus on delivering results and making a positive impact rather than just completing tasks. This mindset shift can lead to more effective decision-making and a stronger focus on outcomes. Linking outcomes to why this will benefit customers can help prioritise the more effective work.

To support the team in removing blockers and to help understand priorities and purpose, regularly track the team’s progress towards its goals and adjust course as necessary. Leadership can support progress through regular check-ins, status updates, and goal-setting sessions.

To help maintain morale, especially when the team is under pressure, celebrate and recognise team members who deliver results and make a positive impact. Recognition can be done through events like “show and tell”, town halls, greater responsibility, public recognition, or other incentives.

Nothing is perfect, so to remove unnecessary toil that can lead to inefficiency and poor morale, encourage team members to continuously seek ways to improve their processes, techniques, and outcomes. Continuous improvement can lead to more efficient and effective working and an empowered team with improved morale.

The talent on a team shines when they are empowered to take ownership of their work and make decisions that drive results. Leadership can enable ownership by the team by delegating tasks, providing resources needed by the team, and encouraging collaboration.

An engineering team can create a results-orientated culture that drives innovation and continuous improvement.

Bold and Confident Communication

Encourage team members to communicate effectively and express their opinions openly. By fostering open communication, team members can share their thoughts and insights, leading to better outcomes. Bold and confident communication can lead to better decision-making and improved collaboration.

An engineering team is full of experience and ideas, which benefits from fostering an environment where team members feel comfortable expressing their opinions and sharing their thoughts. Encourage open and honest communication, and avoid a blame culture. Recognise that only some on the team communicate in the same way, so embrace diverse styles, methods, and channels for communication.

Provide training and support to help team members improve their communication skills. Sometimes team members need to develop skills in communication. The team can develop skills through workshops, coaching, or mentorship programs.

Effective engineering teams have diverse talent. Encourage team members to listen to one another and actively consider multiple perspectives. Active listening can lead to better understanding and more effective communication. It also helps team members develop and grow in ways they could have predicted.

Encourage leaders within the team to model bold and confident communication. Modelling behaviour can help set the tone for the rest of the team and create a culture of open communication. “Show, don’t tell” is a way to uplift the team’s communication capabilities effectively.

To foster the best ideas, outcomes and stories, encourage team members to share their diverse perspectives and backgrounds. Sharing can lead to more creative and innovative solutions and better decision-making. Refining a story for a diverse audience can increase impact and opportunities.

Encourage open communication and collaboration through periodic team meetings, one-on-one meetings, or informal get-togethers. Try to Schedule meetings where workflow is uninterrupted throughout the day. Pay close attention to ensure meetings maintain the effectiveness of the team. They should increase cohesion, develop insights and opportunities, clarify purpose and goals, and not interrupt work.

An engineering team can develop a bold and confident communication culture that leads to better collaboration, decision-making, and outcomes.

Able to Influence

Building a team of individuals who can influence others is critical. Team members who influence others can help drive change and implement new ideas. Promoting team influence can be done by hiring individuals with strong interpersonal skills who can build relationships and influence others.

Support team members to build strong relationships with stakeholders and colleagues. Leadership can support the team in building relationships by facilitating regular interactions, project collaboration and delegating where appropriate. Bringing key team members to planning kick-offs, making introductions, and helping them develop a map of the network they should influence can help team members take the next step.

Teams build credibility by developing deep expertise in their work area and articulating their ideas and solutions clearly and effectively. A team can build expertise through continuous learning and professional development, peer learning, and temporary secondments. “Show, don’t tell” helps quickly build credibility with customers and peers.

Leaders on the team can lead by example and demonstrate the desired behaviours and attitudes that elevate a team’s ability to influence. Modelling behaviour can help create a positive culture and inspire others to follow their lead.

Ensure that the team’s results are fit-for-purpose and adopted by the organisation and that they collaborate with others to build consensus that drives positive change. Leadership can support building consensus around outcomes by promoting team-building activities, cross-functional collaboration, and stakeholder engagement before, during and after delivery.

Take the initiative and drive positive change through small iterative deliveries by identifying opportunities for improvement, proposing solutions, and engaging others to support the team’s efforts. In many organisations, talk (presentations) is cheap, and delivery garners support and influence.

An engineering team can develop the ability to influence others and drive positive change, leading to better outcomes and improved results.

Customer-Focused

Ensuring that your team is customer-focused is essential. It helps to encourage the team to understand the customers’ needs and make decisions that align with their interests. A customer focus can lead to better customer satisfaction, improved products, and stronger customer relationships.

Regularly engage with customers to understand their needs and expectations. The team can understand the customer’s needs through surveys, focus groups, or one-on-one interviews. Often customers express themselves in terms of solutions. However, it is often beneficial to understand why the customer would get value from a solution to improve their outcomes and satisfaction.

Have the team collaborate with customers to identify improvement opportunities and co-create solutions that meet their needs. Co-creation will lead to solutions that meet customer needs with fewer unexpected gaps. It also leads to the customer’s greater understanding of when to expect required features.

Ensure continued engagement by the customer by regularly gathering and incorporating their feedback into the product development process. The team can attain customer feedback through customer satisfaction surveys, user testing, and research teams.

Make prioritising the customer experience a proactive decision and ensure it is at the forefront of decision-making and design processes. Sometimes it is necessary to focus on operational efficiencies ahead of the customer experience; however, the customer should understand the benefits of improved operational efficiencies and when the team will prioritise customer experience again.

Fostering a customer-centric culture within the engineering team, where the customer is always at the centre of all discussions and decisions, will help ensure the team focuses on what matters to the customer. Adopting customer-focused language and terms helps to support that.

Empower team members to make decisions that are in the customer’s best interests and provide them with the necessary resources and support. Disempowering teams to be champions of the customer is one of the quickest ways to lose that positive customer-focused culture.

By focusing on these practices, an engineering team can become more customer-focused and develop a deep understanding of customer needs, leading to better outcomes and improved results.

Agents of Change

Encourage team members to be agents of change by empowering them to drive change within the organisation and embrace new ideas and approaches. Sometimes the team is seen as an agent of change for the organisation, and it can serve as a model of how the rest of the organisation can change. The team will be able to adapt to new challenges and opportunities by fostering a culture of change.

Encourage team members to embrace change and the constructive disruption it can cause while continuously seeking ways to improve processes and outcomes.

Leaders can act by example and demonstrate a willingness to embrace change and drive positive impact. The team itself can lead by example for the rest of the organisation.

An organisation and the environment it operates in are continuously evolving and changing. Embrace the opportunities to foster a growth mindset within the team, where members constantly seek opportunities for learning and development.

As opportunities and risks arise, encourage team members to think outside the box and bring forward new and innovative ideas. An incremental change to processes, tools, and solutions often leads to cumulative drag and toil in the organisation that builds over time. Cumulative inefficiencies can often be avoided by thinking more broadly.

Excessive toil and operational drag in an organisation hampers taking opportunities and opens the organisation to outside disruption. Encourage a culture of continuous improvement, where team members regularly evaluate processes, products, and services and identify opportunities for improvement.

Having the team adopt a positive risk-managing mindset opens them to trying new approaches and gaining new insights. Encourage team members to take calculated risks and try new avenues.

An engineering team can become agents of change, driving innovation and continuous improvement and helping to shape the organisation’s future.

In conclusion, building a successful engineering team requires a combination of the right culture and individuals. By focusing on these six essential qualities, you can create a high-performing team that drives innovation, delivers results, and creates value for your customers.