- Hello. How to keep the humans when the team is gone - that's what we are going to be talking
about today. I hope you already read the extract of this talk. I'm here highlighting just a
few of the most important points that I wanted to make. This talk is talking about the challenge
that is, you know, very difficult, and very hard to persevere through. It deals with humans.
It touches their lives, but, at the end, I think that it can be one of the most rewarding
experiences that you may undergo as a leader, and a cautious leader here might rightfully
ask why am I talking about this? Do I have the right to talk about this? Let me establish
my credibility as a witness here by explaining where am I coming from. Dear, distinguished
jury members, I had the unfortunate necessity of going through some of these challenges
myself. In one case, I did go to a company insolvency with my product team, and I managed
to find a good thing for them after serious negotiations, but we stayed through that difficult
period. Although, you know, as an engineer could be, they could find a good job in a
week or two, and they decided to stick together, and I'm glad it worked out. Five years later,
that core team is still working in the same company now. In our case, I built the team
from scratch to 40-plus people, and, together with some other people, we our leadership,
we decided to factor to organise to set them up for success, and we shut down some teams.
We assigned people to different partners, but, at the end, six months later, the attritional
level of that group was still zero. In my company, there are people that I have been
working together with for five-plus years. There are other colleagues that I have referred
or hired in my next gigs that I have known them for 15 years already. I hope that I have
established my credibility as a witness! But I have to say very honestly, I'm not sure
I did myself on paper signing up on a talk that should take around ten minutes and talk
about such a huge and very difficult problem. However, that means, that, actually, I'm not
going to give you recipes, or silver bullets, or, you know, ready solutions. There are a
look at of books in that topic. Some of them are really good, particularly with the best
ones, you have to work hard to customise them for your context, which is very Newman week
and sensitive. Each small start-up that runs out of money, or every agency that has to
downsize because of crisis, or every big company that is reorganising internally, without losing
any people, they have unique context, and I cannot give you a ready-made recipe. I will
try to squeeze in a few practical tips. What I want to talk about is how we are approaching
this as, let's say, a mental and emotional challenge to go through. So, before we start
doing that, I would like to actually ask ourselves why do we even care about this? Why we would
even talk about people in this way, and keeping the humans when the team is gone? Should we
care about the business, or should we care about the humans? Or should we care about
both? Actually, I'm putting the people first here, which has benefits forth business down
the line. Let me start with we should care about the people, because you're talking about
some humans here. They have their families, their incomes, impacted. Maybe their plans,
their visas, their mortgages, whatever. Whenever one's job is insecure, it puts you in a preservation
mode. That is a significant negative change. Making sure their concerns are at least heard,
and understood may be even addressed is something that is I consider to be basic the humane
thing to do. When our jobs are at risk, even when my job is at risk, I don't think we should
stop being decent human beings, and hopefully even more than that. Going further, I can
only speak about myself here from my perspective. I consider myself to be very lucky to be part
of this industry in the 21st century, and I'm grateful to the chain of events that led
me here, but we are well paid compared to the rest of the labour market, and to other
occupations here. Even during the crisis, such as pandemic or recession, our jobs are
mostly regrouped, and they're not net losses. I think we as engineering product dev leads
have responsibility towards our communities, our occupations, to score some Karma points
and to consider ourselves to be highly employable on average. In that context, putting our teams
and our team members' priorities first for some time should not be detrimental, and it
will not be detrimental to our near future job security, and job situation. The following
point is is that there is some personal benefit here. Here, not only that what I just said,
our job security will not be a danger, I believe that the opposite is the case. Such battle
scars, and handling this situation as true leaders are giving us great experience and
great stories that is only increasing our value in the labour market. Maybe the important
part here when talking about personal benefits, the relationships that you're forging, that
you're strengthening with your team members in this way, are something that will follow
you for a lifetime. I hope in a you've actually started building and strengthening those relationships
way before, and now you're just, you know, following through with the same way. I personally
have relationships as I explained that span not just companies, and not just years, but
even decades now. So just imagine what do you think? What would be someone's reaction
in a few years? If they got a job offer from a former lead that actually took care, took
time to hear about their concerns, and address them, will they be gladly, at least maybe
even accepting the next job offer years down the road? I think they will. But going further,
I said we will also talk about what is the benefit of the business here? So, especially
when you're talking about large companies, which are mostly restructuring and reassigning
people to different teams, if you invest enough time, and enough energy into following through
that transition, there is only one thing that can happen. If those people see that you and
the company, the organisation, is treating them with respect and with genuine care, they
will feel even more strongly attached to that organisation. People understand realities.
They know that sometimes business priorities change. And they will gladly accept if you
approach them in that way. What they will not accept and what they will not buy is if
you approach them with a careless bland bureaucratic selfish attitude. People value care and transparency.
So, let's go further. Yes, I want to emphasise, out of these four groups of reasons, actually,
there is one that I would like to call out. The first and foremost, we're talking about
people here. So let's not forget what is the most important thing that we are covering
throughout this whole talk today. Let's start by being decent human beings. I hope by now,
you share some of these talks with me - some of these thoughts with me, so let's focus
on the key concepts that I think you should be applying during this kind of transition
process. First of all, I think that it's, you know, critical that you try very hard,
as hard as possible, to think about your people's future. Or their next gigs. Make sure you
reach out to them. Make sure that you hear them. Maybe they have family issues. Maybe
they're the sole caretakers in their family. Maybe you have visa challenges if they lose
their company. Use your network within your organisation, or build it up. When I said
that we went through that, we basically called, called, called, emailed half of the town,
and we made some relationships that lasted even today, even though only one of them of
course could materialise, and that was actually a good outcome. So speak to your network,
the new one, why you hired those people, and why you retained them. And bonus: if your
team actually wants to continue working as a team, those departments and those companies
can get a great well-functioning product development team that otherwise would take them tens of
thousands of dollars or euros, and maybe even months to hire together as a team. But make
sure you prioritise your records, though. Think, for instance, who is the soul provider
in the family. Prioritise them first over somebody else who has less critical needs.
Anyway, going further in this next step, the next advice would try to be smartly transparent.
That doesn't mean to say everything that you think of, or hear, or anything that opens
up the moment it happens. People in these situations, they enter preservation mode,
as I said, and every gap that you leave, they will fill it in with their worst assumptions.
It's basically human nature. So, if you don't make enough time and space to think and convey
the message in the right way, then you're beginning them the opportunity to fill in
the gaps themselves. So, if you do it quickly, run away, or you assume that they have the
same awareness, and the same conflict that you do. Trust me, they will fill in those
gaps with the worst-case scenario. Be smartly transparent. Don't hide anything, but measure
when and what you share with them, for their own benefit, not for manipulating. Going further,
once the decision that the business has shut down, or reorganise, you owe them a thorough
explanation, and do that in various ways. You will have to do an all-hands series of
one-on-ones, make sure that you send out an email with all your thoughts summarised, make
sure that it is carefully crafted. You know, different sizes of companies and different
types of challenges are demand be different approaches here, so, again, this is not a
recipe, but make sure that you deliver the explanation very thoroughly to your team.
However, going further, focus on the transition. So, these types of situations are perfect
for dwelling, ruminating, even entering blaming mode. Of course, the team will be asking,
"How did we actually get here?" "What is it because we missed this or that?" Was it that
person's failure they didn't deliver on time, or whatever? Put that aside for some time.
Right now, you have to cope with transition, and find them and yourself
a new home. Now, I will be contradicting myself. I said, because I will say take care of yourself.
I hope that, by now, you have acquired that skill that masters your taking care of yourself
at the same time while you're taking care of the team. Make sure that you're not letting
down your support net. Being a lead manager is often a lonely job, and talking with your
family, friends, coach, whatever you have, can be very beneficial. In these times, they
will be supporting you a lot, but make sure you pay back that kind of support, pay back
those credits with enough interest once the storm is over. At the end, be pragmatic about
setting expectations and following through on them. For example, if the team wants to
stay together for a couple of weeks but there is no prospect of that, it's better just to
be very open about that instead of giving them false hopes, or within four or six weeks,
there is no chance of materialising some opportunities, it's better to just call it a day, otherwise
some of the risks that people are concerned exponentially rising, the moment has been
lost, and long periods of uncertainty are actually breeding anxiety, so, sometimes,
it's just easier to call it a day, especially to remind you once again: we are kind of privileged,
and we're still better off than many other job profiles if the labour market. - job profiles
in the labour market. Out of all these things, the important thing to take care of in my
opinion is the people's future. Make sure you hear them, you understand what their concerns
are, and, if you can address and resolve their concerns, please do that before you do anything
else. Now, I have one practical hint to give here. I said that you will need to communicate
very thoroughly with your team. The best way to do that is to actually upfront create a
communications plan, and that communications plan is basically just a list of everything
that needs to be done, who is going to do that, with what purpose, what is the maximum
you would want to spend? What is the medium you want to use? You're probably not going
to do all of this together. You will have your management chain, or your leadership
team helping you out. Spread that across with them. Share your responsibility. And this
will help you not just be synchronised, but it will also give you another chance to think
through all of these challenges, and find some gaps in your communication plan while
you're still putting it on paper. So, bringing it at home, I did give you a bunch of different
hints and tips. I touched on many important different concepts. I know I glossed over
them. They're so important and so profound been that in ten minutes, I cannot talk enough
about them. So, one thing that I again have stressed and will stress again, the most important
thing to take care of are the people. If you care about them, you will not be at a loss.
I've benefitted a lot personally and professionally from investing in those strong relationships
that make teams. I guess we all know, though that that should not start when difficult
periods come over. Building relationships in teams is actually many small things done
well repeatedly all the time. This is especially during hard times, they can be disproportionately
positively strengthened, and they will give you definitely an outsized return on your
investment. Keep the humans, especially when the team is gone. Thank you very much. [Music].