Something I’m passionate about is nourishing the growth of other fellow engineers. My mentor once shared an important lesson: owning your career growth is essential. That means ensuring you find opportunities to help you scale your role into something you want.

Rather than letting someone tell you how you should move through your career, owning your career growth changes that perspective. Managers are often busy with their own schedules, tasks, and growth. By relying on managers to help them grow, individuals often have opportunities to fall through the cracks or take on responsibilities that don’t interest them.

The Importance of a Clear Career Ladder

On the reverse side, it is essential that managers have a clear career ladder to inspire the growth of their reports. At my company, we have a transparent career ladder that describes the levels of growth. For example, engineers move through being junior, senior, staff, and principal.

Each level in the career has its own description, typically split into two main parts: technical and communication. I recommend that leadership adds items that are important at a certain level, such as working on projects or mentoring other engineers.

The engineers on my team have access to the career ladder and requirements for each level. If a company does not have this transparency within its company, it would be a good chance for individual contributors to start a conversation with their managers. Without career ladders, team members cannot set goals or understand the expectations for the next role.

Result-Driven Documentation

I recommend that team members keep a journal of any work they do. This can be broken down into specific tasks that are notable, achievement-worthy, or day-to-day work. During quarterly or end-of-the-year reviews, this journal comes in handy to remember important tasks that may be overlooked during these meetings.

When you are ready to grow your career or transition into another role, the journal holds your experiences at your fingertips. At the end of the day, your promotion or career growth depends on the results that you have shown.

Throughout my career, I’ve built numerous teams. Each time I built a team, I iterated on my process – considering what I should, and would do differently. The most recent team I built was about six months old before I stepped on board.

I followed the interview and hiring process to flesh out the team – and as I look back retrospectively, I search for the difference between the team before and after. I know that now the team has produced a significant amount of value to the company – delivering high-quality work.

Three Factors When Building a Team

START FROM THE BEGINNING:

The hiring process is one of the most important steps when building a team. Something that I may do differently is select candidates based on values rather than technical skills. While technical skills are the basic principles that allow candidates to apply for the role, I don’t hire someone until they can prove their talents match our values.

My company has a rigorous interview process, and while there are pros and cons, the process typically allows panels to understand a candidate’s communication skills. There are around five interviews, starting with hiring managers, then panels, and finally, the leadership level.

CONSTANT COMMUNICATION:

While forming the team, I set up the rules of engagement for a team as early as possible. For example, a rule may be detailing how to put in a core request or how to review one. In my experience, conflict is most likely to happen when communication is unclear; therefore, ensuring the rules of engagement mitigates these troubles.

Hashing out the communication guidelines quickly after creating the team gives members confidence. The rules of engagement should set expectations so the team members understand what they are required to do and how to go about it.

THE FACTOR OF TRUST:

You cannot build a great team without the basis of trust. This is one of the human parts of management and building a team. Without the factor of trust, teams will not hold one another accountable.

Trust is built from many moving parts. One relates to the rules of engagement, as having clear expectations allows a team to work better with one another. The second part of trust is constant communication between teams. Lastly, I like to think about the human aspect of a team and add daily fun activities that can be integrated with work. In my findings, teams with personal and professional relationships are typically more productive – due to the strong trust between members.

Lessons From Team Building

• Remember that teams are not stationary but move and grow with their members. No matter how it changes, I try to continue to empower the individuals on my team to act as leaders.

• Having consistent meetings at the beginning of a team’s life cycle is important to maintaining a routine. I’ve found that consistency is key to productivity.