When it comes to managing and leading teams, there are some principles that are borrowed from managing highly available systems. As an Operations Managers, your job is to keep the systems up and running. As a manager of your team your job is to consistently keep your team executing at a high level . A few things to think about
- Can you handle a person or two leaving from your team with minimal effect?
- Can your other resources handle the increased workload/pressure that may come due the above departure?
- What is your MTTR(Mean Time to Recovery) to get a replacement resource?
- Is there a cluster of critical skills that only live with 1 or 2 people? What would you do if they left or threatened to leave?
- How do you re-energize your team regularly? (akin to server restarts)
A few ways to make your Team Fault Tolerant :
- Make sure that you spend time in adding processes and sharing programs so that you can survive an employee departure or two.
- Ensure that you have a great training and on-boarding program for new employees as this program will be used regularly.
- Have a skill matrix of your team (more on this in a later post) to help find skill risk hotspots for your team.
The median length of employment is 4.1 years as mentioned here. This means that if you have a team of 10 people expect a churn of 2-3 people per year on average. The statistics tell us that churn is expected. But when an employee departure actually occurs a manager is typically caught off guard. Readiness to handle the eventuality of employee churn with minimal impact to the team is expected out of a good manager.
Filed under: Management Tagged: | leadership, mgmt, team
It would be interesting if you commented as well on how a manager makes a compelling case to their boss for the added expense of the human redundancy