This is a topic that I’ve been aiming to write about for a long time. It’s relevant to me because I’m in a tech leadership role, and have personally seen what works, seen what didn’t, and made most of the mistakes mentioned here at one time or another. And perhaps, because I happen to work at Culture Amp, a company whose bread and butter is the science of employee engagement and performance, I’ve become a bit of a “couch expert” on these topics, as well. At the same time, it’s not a topic I have often written about before, so I’m a little apprehensive about putting this series of posts out there. Having the courage to be vulnerable is a value I like to practice though: no more hedging, let’s get into it.
A little while ago ago I brought first an associate engineer, and a little later an intern, onto my team. Neither hire was a big deal at the time. They both scored well in our interviews, we had the capacity, we had the work, and at my company there is a lot of support for training the next generation of senior engineers, so it made a lot of sense. The effect this would have on the rest of the team went quite a ways beyond a simple “two extra people” though, and it reinforced something in my mind about how to build a successful team that I thought worth sharing.
Most conversations about building technology teams treat diversity, engagement, and performance as three separate problems. Hire a more diverse team. Run engagement surveys. Set performance goals. Tidy little workstreams, each with its own metrics, occasionally nodding at each other, but other than that pretty much just in their own little bubble.
I’ve come to think that’s the wrong way to look at it: these things are heavily coupled, and in fact form a feedback loop. Diversity, done thoughtfully, tends to produce better decisions. Better decisions, in an environment where people are genuinely engaged, tend to produce better performance. And teams that perform well, that can see their work actually mattering, stay engaged longer and develop the kind of trust that makes genuine collaboration possible rather than just aspirational.
Pull on any one of those threads and you end up at the others. So the job of a leader isn’t to run three separate initiatives. It’s to understand how they connect and build conditions where the whole thing runs in the right direction.
Why you need diversity and engagement
Culture Amp’s Engaging Growth benchmark looks at companies with strong engagement alongside fast growth. Those organisations consistently outscore peers by ten or more percentage points on innovation, leadership quality, and service excellence. What they have in common isn’t a particular industry or business model. It’s engaged people working in an environment that gives them something worth engaging with.
That combination is hard to achieve, which is kind of the point. A diverse team with low engagement tends to default to protecting territory rather than building on each other’s ideas. And a highly engaged but homogeneous team will execute well, just on the same set of problems it’s always known how to see. You need both, and the way you get both is through consistent leadership choices rather than any particular programme.
In the next few posts I’ll dig into each side of this. First, why diversity of experience on a team is a technical asset that most engineering leaders undervalue, and what I learned from my own team recently that highlights this. Then, what engagement actually means in practice, why most of the responsibility for it sits with the team leader, and what that looks like day to day.
This is the first post in a series on building technology teams that perform. In part 2, I will go into more detail on why diversity, and particularly diverse experience, matters.