Beyond Finance Leadership & Management

What are the best practices you follow to cultivate ownership on your team? 

I have a few that come to mind. I learned these through my experience working for companies big and small, under managers great and awful and through trial and error in my own team management. 

Where did you learn these practices?

I’m currently reading The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier and have found it to be a great resource and relevant to my role. I’m fortunate to be able to learn by doing, with a safety net, at Beyond Finance. My goal is to help my team succeed, and ultimately, become engineering leaders themselves if they desire.

How has a culture of ownership positively impacted the work your team produces? 

One way we foster a culture of ownership is that the members of my team rotate who gets to be “project lead.” This has helped ensure that everybody is exposed to more of the software development lifecycle, spreads out domain knowledge and creates opportunities for mentoring from the senior team members when they are not the acting lead. This also gives juniors a chance to step up and take on more responsibility in a structured way.

We also have each team member contribute to each project if possible, so that the ownership is shared and everyone has a basic understanding of what’s being worked on. This has positively impacted my team when someone needs to go on PTO, gets pulled into a production hotfix, or needs to help out on a higher-priority project because they are the subject matter expert. Additionally, this rotation allows our team leads to practice delegation and ensure that the projects we work on are consistent with our development standards and practices, which is a crucial skill for reaching the next leadership level.

Having a culture of ownership at the project level spills over to ownership of the product as a whole, which fosters a sense of camaraderie across all the teams here at Beyond Finance.

What advice would you give to other engineering leaders interested in fostering ownership on their own teams?

Trust your team. Give them a chance to grow. Delegate. In the beginning, it’ll mean more work for you to hand things off correctly, but the overall career growth and delivery of your team will accelerate when everyone is allowed a chance at ownership.

Teach your leads how to delegate and to coach from the sidelines, that way they’ll experience ownership too. Have reasonable expectations and be fair — don’t assign a junior-level member as “project lead” on a senior-level project, or one that is high priority and requires a quick turnaround. The pressure and stress will create a negative feedback loop. Maintenance or bug fixing can be “owned” as a project the same as feature work, and has lower stakes.

Help your team learn to walk before they run. Give them a chance to fall down without needing a trip to the hospital — or metaphors aside, without getting yelled at by stakeholders or executives. Ultimately, you are accountable for what your team does, but that doesn’t mean you need to micromanage everything they do along the way. Act as an umbrella so that your team knows they are covered, but allow some rain to land on their shoes so they understand the stakes are real.

You got this.