Improve people to improve your business

One way to improve your business, organization, impact, outcomes, everything, is to improve your colleagues, peers, team mates.

I write a lot about personal improvements. Conclusions that made my career possible, helped me to progress and create more impact.

Imagine each of your team members improving daily. Better at their jobs. Widening their skills and learning to work together more efficiently.

What to do to achieve this?

• Provide them with materials you believe is important for their work.
• Share feedback, but first build trusted relationships! Without the latter, feedback may constitute complaining.
• Create space where they can share and learn from past mistakes. E.g. a retro. No retribution for bringing things up and avoid assigning blame!

How to measure improvements? [In digital products.]

• Honestly, this is hard and I am not qualified for this.
• Maybe not even measureable, not directly.
• Business bottom line, revenue, etc. are measurements for the business and not directly applicable for teams, especially not for individual performance.

This is a lot of work. Individual, meaningful and actionable feedback is hard to compile. It requires a lot of legwork, direct interactions, etc.

How to scale improving my colleagues if I have a lot of reports?

• Work with your direct reports on what values you bring.
• Show them ways to get better, improvements, do all as I mentioned above.
• And trust them to bring the mindset to their reports.
• Include incentives toward self and team improvement efforts.

In software engineering, one part of the job is continuous learning. Without it, impossible to keep up with such a fast evolving industry. Improvement has to be a part of daily goals.

I hold the value, every day I just want to be a bit better at something than I was yesterday. The topic changes.

Sometimes it is tech.

Sometimes it is management.

Sometimes it is writing.

Unsurprisingly, learning writing allowed more responsibilities in my software engineer jobs. Being a good communicator, at least not a boring one, unlocks potential. It enables me to help my team to achieve more. An effort for improvements.

What are your improvement strategies? How is your team enables continuous improvement?