16Take Care of Those Peeps
Take care of your people, and they will take care of you. While it sounds simplistic, employees have two basic rights that should always be honored:
- The right to know who they report to
- The right to know what they need to do to be successful
If a software engineer believes that writing a new Application Programming Interface (API) every month is excellent performance, and your basic expectation is a new API every two weeks, you have a mismatch. If that engineer is cube-neighbors with a bossy co-worker, the engineer may be taking direction from the neighbor, not their actual manager. These conditions are morale killers, and they occur more often than you think. While Agile is an amazing tool for developing software, it often creates ambiguity in the reporting structure. Who's in charge: my supervisor, the scrum master, or the product owner? If this is not made clear, the most dominant person becomes the de facto boss regardless of the leader's intent. Above anything else, be sure these basic rights are met for your employees.
Taking care of your people does not mean free Mountain Dew and a foosball table. Those things are nice perks, but they're also superficial. There are 10 tactics for taking good care of your people:
- Ask people what they want from their career.
- Spend the most time with your best people.
- Provide career development planning.
- Always support your team, even when they're wrong.
- Be a diode.
- Have a real open-door policy.
- Listen.
- Only ...