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Creating The Best Team Culture

Always exhibit the culture that you want to create.

I was reminded about this the other day.

I was wanted to have more insight into the work of a teammate who has the habit of not documenting himself very well .. or even at all. At this point you could shout “Definition of Done” at me a few times but let’s just assume that we don’t have that kind of a team. Yes he creates amazing work of very high quality very quickly, but there is little handover. While English isn’t his first language, my assumption is that he sees everyone else as brilliant as he is, and perhaps he’s too polite to over-explain. Perhaps this a cultural thing. Perhaps one day I will sit down with him and discuss this in more detail but with colleagues that is not always possible. We have to fix forward.

However, by not having enough insight into this work – gaps appear – a silo invisibly forms. So when I have to build something based on this work, I need to ask. On this occasion though, I saw that another clever teammate had been through the pain of learning his stuff and had pieced it together in a PR that encompassed pretty much what I needed to do. Instead of just blindly copy pasting her PR, I made myself create a Wiki page showing everything I could deduce from that PR and tied it back to the other pieces of the puzzle (pipelines, terraform) that the initiator had already created.

The result is some WIP documentation that everyone, including myself, is immediately grateful for, allowing me to complete my work both the next day and the day after that and in two month’s time when I next need it.

Better than that, our new team mates feel like they have insight, they have a foothold. We also have something to discuss.

So, hooray for documentation. Hooray for diagrams. Boo to silos.



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