Leadership and Management Consultancy

Taking on high-calibre engineers and experienced managers seemed like a recipe for success and, happily, teams were able to form quickly and effectively. However, in year two a problem began to emerge - buoyed by team success and a highly competitive job market, individuals expected promotion and increased compensation but lacked an objective understanding of the development and progress that was expected of them.

This in turn led to difficult conversations for managers to navigate - top-heavy teams left very little space for internal promotion; calibrating performance evaluation was highly subjective between managers; strong-negotiators were able to hold leadership hostage because of a lack of objective succession planning and, because of a perceived need for a majority of senior colleagues, back-filling key roles would be expensive and reduce the already scarce opportunities for junior team-mates to grow within the company.

Our response was to develop a competency framework that would define excellence in all roles, at all levels, and demonstrate our vision of the journey that engineers could take from graduate through to principal.

Working with the engineering managers and head of engineering, we identified and described the key skills and characteristics needed to be ‘an excellent engineer’ at any level. We used real examples of behaviours, tasks and responsibilities gathered through our experience as managers and through interviews and workshops with teams. We were able to differentiate these criteria to different roles and levels, and to be explicit in the expectations at each level, and to provide context on the opportunities that colleagues could create to develop their skills in the current and next level.

We built out a high level role-map that demonstrated the progression through a number of possible pathways - across individual-contributor, people-leader and skilled technician journeys; we supported this with a low level tool for managers and team-mates to use to evaluate their performance more objectively, encouraging continuous self-reflection and feedback, gathering examples of good practice and areas for development.

We adapted the performance review process to incorporate a calibration process for managers so that we could maximise our objective judgement as a team of peers - this also became the basis for a team-wide succession planning exercise that could be easily maintained and that increased diversity of opportunity by focussing on skills and characteristics required rather than the ‘next most qualified person available’.

We used the competency framework to introduce performance-linked pay bands that would enable us to reward achievement proportionally and more sustainably and that would be suitable from initial hire.

This was a significant investment in resource! However there were multiple, long-standing benefits: greater transparency and objectivity in expectations for colleagues; increased opportunities for growth and development through greater understanding of what development was needed to achieve excellence; a reduction in pay disparity introduced through negotiation which often disproportionally impacts colleagues from minority groups; a significantly better understanding of the need for balanced teams, and an understanding of the skills, rather than the roles, needed to build and maintain effective value delivery.

Working with a large product team of engineers, designers, data scientists and product managers, I implemented a quarterly ‘Maker Day’ that saw cross-functional teams working together to explore creative solutions to real business challenges.

Using the long-term roadmap as our starting point, we invited anyone to submit a challenge - thinking in terms of what they might do as a founder or entrepreneur, without the burden of their day-job getting in the way! I provided a framework for development of these initial ideas, to understand the feasibility of yielding some tangible value given some focussed resource in a hands-on day of development.

The wider team was then invited to form squads that would tackle each of the shortlisted challenges and I established team spaces to get conversations and excitement building. For the Maker Day itself, we encouraged all squads to be physically present together, to be prepared for a full day of focus on this new challenge and to think without constraint. I encouraged teams to become self-organising, with just enough project management to focus their attention and make the best use of their time and resource.

Each team goes on to explore the solutions to their challenge, utilising all the available skills and talents before celebrating the outcomes with the whole group.

Through these Maker Days I have witnessed teams:

• Implement a novel, AI-driven approach to resolving a common customer barrier
• Identify and design an implementation strategy for a completely new product-line, incorporating the technical, commercial and marketing approaches that would typically take weeks of cycles of meetings and discussions to achieve
• Evaluate and redesign the product design-system, accelerating a rebranding process in response to a change in the nature of the wider business
• Fix long-standing issues and bugs by taking a fresh-thinking approach to existing problems
• Identify and analyse new and potential customer needs and opportunities - responding with concrete plans for engaging with these new challenges

Above all, in every innovation experience, I have seen colleagues' surprise and delight in discovering new skills and talents in themselves and their peers leading to stronger relationships within and across teams. Frequently I have seen these ad hoc ideas become fully-fledged projects that have generated tangible and long-standing benefits for the wider business.