Building Trust Quickly is Critical For Developing High Performance Technology Teams
Summary:
In this episode of the HR Impact show, Dr. Jim interviews Don Brown, the Head of Technology at Premier International, about the importance of bias for action and speed in building a high-performance organization. Don shares his insights and experiences as an IT leader and highlights the significance of trust, understanding capabilities, and letting go as key factors in building a high-performing team. He emphasizes the need for leaders to trust their team members, delegate responsibilities, and provide opportunities for growth. Don also discusses the importance of self-reflection and continuous learning in leadership development.
Key Takeaways:
Trust is crucial in building a high-performance team. Leaders need to trust their team members' capabilities and delegate responsibilities.
Understanding the capabilities of team members is essential for effective delegation and project planning.
Leaders should let go of the need to control everything and prioritize tasks based on organizational goals and team capabilities.
Building trust and providing feedback fosters a positive work environment and encourages team members to take ownership of their work.
Leaders should invest in their own growth and development to better support their team members and meet organizational objectives.
Chapters:
[0:02:02] Importance of letting go and trusting the team
[0:06:49] Framework for building capacity and letting go
[0:09:03] Shifting from task management to project-focused leadership
[0:12:16] Increased need for team efficiency during company growth
[0:14:18] Investing in team growth and building trust
[0:19:19] Trust yourself and trust your team
[0:20:26] Actions to build trust and capability
[0:22:28] Shining the light on the team's success
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Transcript
He's currently the head of technology at Premier International, a data migration and data governance organization based in Chicago. He is a long time vet. of the it space. So he's been in tech since 1999. He's got experience in just about every aspect of it. Most of it from a management perspective. One of the things that he's passionate about is how tech can be a partner to the business versus just a cost center. Don Brown, welcome to the show.
Don Brown: Thank you.
Dr. Jim: Looking forward to your perspective in this conversation.
ng . Before we dive into the [:Why don't you fill us in on anything that you feel is important for the listeners to know about your background that I didn't cover in your bio.
Don Brown: You've covered a lot. When I say that I've I've been in every aspect of tech it quite literally means everything from building the computers from the ground up to creating software, mobile devices, and things of that nature, moving into leadership, that was probably the point at which I would say my career really took a turn and started at least personally to provide The most value to me just because I tend to enjoy helping others be successful.
And now I, I get to do that in a leadership role. So that's probably 1 little key detail that feeds into the topic today.
that inform your leadership [:Don Brown: I will say that it's the thing that eventually forced my understanding of letting go. And so one of the things that's important to me, is realizing that your team, they have a specific talent that you hired them for, and you, as a leader or a manager, you can't do everything, even though you might get into situations where you can do it faster, you can do it better, it doesn't provide opportunities for other people.
at it and who's not good at [:Which helps with team selection. But it also created this sense, as I said earlier, that I might want to do it myself because I can do it faster or better. And when things are at a time crunch, there's oftentimes this pressure to do it that way. But it also led to my realization that. As my team grows and as my responsibilities grow, I can't do everything.
And so I need to learn or I needed to learn how to trust the team that I hired that they are capable and competent. And I need to put them in situations that will allow them to express that competence and be successful. And in doing so I'm able to actually juggle more balls as an organization than if I were to just go it alone.
Dr. Jim: You brought out the point. You can't do everything, even though you might be able to do things faster or better than what the team can.
How did you [:Don Brown: I will actually say that's an ongoing thing.
I, I learned early on in my career, there's always going to be too much to do, and you always run into situations where everybody thinks something is a crisis or it's urgent and it has to be done today. And the truth is it doesn't all have to be done today. There are not enough hours in the day to do everything that everybody thinks that they need done.
And so as a tech leader, it's our responsibility to try to assess. What is the priority and focus on those things and what we end up finding out is. The squeaky wheels and the things that align with the corporate strategy, or the goals of the organization. Those are the things that are always going to rise to the top.
ngs are handled, and they're [:important things. And in the end, somebody else came to me and said, Hey, this was more important. It's usually a case of they come to the realization that there's something more important. Part of that is through communication. If somebody comes to me and says, I need this done and I need this done today.
One of the approaches that I tried to take is Saying to them, okay I've got these things and these things are important for this reason. If yours is more important than 1 of these things, then we need to sit down with those individuals and have a conversation around is yours more important or there's more important.
say based on the properties. [:But ultimately it's about communication and about prioritization.
Dr. Jim: Normally we're calling out frameworks and work processes at the end of the show, but just in that little bit, we've already mapped out a framework or work process that we can actually employ when you're building the skill or building the learning and the capacity to. Realize that you can't do everything and you need to remove yourself from every little thing that pops up.
It's critical for you to be able to communicate, prioritize, build consensus and gain agreement. So there's a four step framework right there. And we're not even 10 minutes into the conversation.
you think about your career [:That you had that really accelerated your ability to build a high performing team.
Don Brown: Ultimately it's trust. As leaders, we have to hire people that have specific skills for What it is that we're trying to work on, whether that's software development, whether it's cloud architecture, whether that's security, you're going to hire people that fit within.
Sort of the requirements of the role. And if you've done your job as a manager or a leader, you're picking people who have the right skills to make that role a success. As I said, being somebody who was an individual contributor, I got really good at my job. Being an individual contributor doesn't make you good at managing.
That's more about organizing[:If you're a leader that hasn't had experience in the roles that you're leading oftentimes you're going to struggle because you don't know if what they're telling you is correct, or if, if it's just what they think you want to hear. For me, being an individual contributor, it made it hard at first to let go because I, I want the company to be successful.
I want the team to be successful. And what I found early on was that I would struggle with. That idea of I can do it better. I can do it faster. Therefore, I'm just going to do it. That oftentimes would breed some resentment because there's opportunities that I could give to somebody that I'm not getting.
in my career where there was [:They started coming to me looking for. Feedback looking for advice on how to tackle different issues. In the end, it started to garner more trust from them to me and me to them. And it shifted more from task management to here's your project now. Let's work on the skills needed so that you can be successful at and so it's less of a me assigning work and more of a here are the things that I see you do well and here are the things that I need you to work on so that this will be a little bit more successful.
u mentioned that I, I'd like [:What were some of the steps that you took early on. That helped you better understand capability on the front end so that you could build the trust in those people to let go.
Don Brown: The answer is relatively simple. It starts with a conversation during the planning phases of just about any project.
There are a set of requirements for everything that needs to get done and going through those requirements with the people that are going to be working on it allows you to understand where they're comfortable and where they're not. When they're not comfortable with a specific area, you've got a couple of options.
them to be more successful, [:Or a mentor that has a little bit of experience with that, that can guide that portion of the process for them.
Dr. Jim: Really solid there. There's another thing that I'd like you to expand on. You mentioned that once you've understood the capability, the scenario that triggered you into letting go was you realizing that you couldn't control everything. You had too many responsibilities that were pulling you in all sorts of different directions.
I'd like you to share a little bit about what was happening between your ears. That made you feel like you needed to do something different.
Don Brown: The moment that I had that sort of epiphany. It
ty at the time and as a lean [:And at that moment for my team, there was a lot going on just in making sure that we can help increase the capabilities of the organization and to modernize several of the key aspects of our infrastructure and our our main application. We had very few individuals on the team at that moment.
There were a lot of things that I was juggling, both from a management perspective, from a leadership perspective, and realizing that As the company grows, there is an increased need for my team to deliver in a very efficient and cost effective manner.
zation that something had to [:But for now, to me, they're not the most important thing based on what is going on within the organization. And then I took a look at my team and I said, okay, who can help with some of these things? I need to start expecting more for my team. And I need to give them the opportunity to grow. Just this situation has given me the opportunity.
here won't get you there. I [:So I applied that same concepts to my team and I started to see as I mentioned earlier, a shift in the team itself. We started to get more done and there was this. Sort of palpable realization that the rest of the management and the rest of the leadership thought we were accomplishing quite a bit and we were getting great accolades.
lt their confidence from the [:It was a self repeating pattern where things just kept getting better and they got more excited about their role and they were more interested in saying, Hey, I want to learn this because I think it'll help us when we get to this activity.
Dr. Jim: I absolutely agree. With your realization, what got you here, won't get you there. That's an important concept for every leader to, to think about, especially if you're early in your career, because what often happens is that, many organizations right or wrong, look at the high performers at the technician level, and we look at any function, your highest technically performing person usually gets promoted into management.
And the sooner you can realize that what got you here won't get you to the next level. Once you're in management, the better off you're going to be. The other thing that struck me about what you were talking about is when we think about customer vendor relationships and you're looking at getting into.
Some sort of [:If. Your executive team is looking for who is accountable for team performance. But if you as the manager are the bottleneck to anything getting done across the team, that really slows things down. And that's what struck me about your observation .
Feel free to correct me if I'm misinterpreting what you're saying.
Don Brown: That is
absolutely correct. That is nobody ever intends for that to happen, right? It just develops organically the faster we can come to that realization, the faster we can move out of the way. And then it's more of a guiding the flow through the pipeline instead of being that gate check.
absolutely agree that nobody [:How do you build trust? How do you build that that understanding capability?. Let's look at it from a lessons learned perspective, when you think about all that stuff that you went through and you're talking to that early stage leader in whatever organization that they're in.
Knowing what you know now, what are the things that leader needs to watch out for?
Brown: I would say that the [:If you find yourself saying, I'm going to take that on because it's important and because I'm not sure that I can trust other people to do it. Then that's an issue and you need to deal with that sooner rather than later. If you are running into a situation where you're not able to assign something to your team very often and it's a skill issue that's an issue that you need to deal with and you need to deal with it quickly.
r not assigning something to [:Or it's a trust issue on your part. If you don't take the time to say, I'm going to trust my team because I hired them. I know what skills they have. I hired them for a reason. Therefore, I'm going to trust myself.
That's going to be a failure right there. Almost everything that I just said really starts with whether or not you trust yourself. If you trust that you hired the right people, then you should have no problem going through and assigning people responsibilities and having faith that they're going to get it done.
And you become that mentor.
igh performance organization.[:I want you to tie this together, when we're thinking about doing the things that we need to do to build a high performance organization, what are the right actions that need to be taken at speed that will help you build that organization, build trust, build capability?
Don Brown: As you go through this process, trust becomes a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. The minute you say, I'm going to trust this individual your relationship changes. And as long as you take the actions that are appropriate for that type of relationship, Then you're going to start to see things snowball.
nute, but where you see them [:That builds additional trust outside of you just trusting them to accomplish a specific project or task. Making sure that you give them critical feedback, frequent feedback in the moment. Feedback is going to help with that trust as well because. If you're delivering it the right way, it becomes, I believe in you.
Here are some things that I need you to work on, and this is why they're going to help your success. It changes the dynamics of the relationship, and it becomes less of you dictating work and more of you helping them grow. And those two sort of actions build this repetitive speed where they trust you more.
s because they want it to be [:It's less about you as a leader and it's more about shining the light on them. And that creates this need to get things done faster so that they can be, they can show their success and their growth.
Dr. Jim: I like how you wrap that up at the end where you said it's it's less about you and more about the people around you and how you can put them into positions of success. when we're talking about the right kind of speed, the right kind of bias for action, you have to be oriented to be outward focused, to be team focused and people centric versus you centric. Don this has been a great conversation.
having a bias for action and [:Don Brown: It's going to start with an internal look. One of the things that I try to do is look back at all of the situations. That I encounter over a week, over a month, over a quarter, a year, whatever. And I try to be a little bit self reflective and say, is there something that I could have done differently?
Is there something I could have done better? And try to get to the bottom of what was the cause of that reaction or action. And then in figuring out what the cause is, you're usually able to identify what you could have done different. differently and then start to apply that going forward.
ng. It's usually because you [:And the 1st thing you do is start to trust. The next thing is figuring out what you need. And what you need to grow from the perspective of helping your team grow. Your responsibility is to help your team be successful. And in order for that to happen, you have to grow, but you have to grow in a way that you can provide what the team needs in order to be self sufficient and successful.
ut I would say those are the [:Early,
Dr. Jim: Where can people find you if they want to, have a more detailed conversation about the things that we talked about?
Don Brown: I'm on LinkedIn. They can reach out to me. It's real easy.
Dr. Jim: Speaking from a personal perspective, Here are the things that stood out to me one was your comment about watching your inner voice and really taking inventory About what it's telling you, because depending on what it's telling you, it should inform how quickly you're assigning things to the team, how deeply you're observing the results coming from what you've assigned, and then your bias for action to coaching them to the desired results and then communicating the vision and how that connects to everything that you're trying to do in pursuit of the company goals.
with us their game changing [:
