The greatest challenge in building a team is finding good people. But as difficult as finding those people can be, keeping them motivated and in the building after you hire them is where the real work begins. Almost the entirety of our improvement program in the Global Test Center (GTC) is based on talent management. Metrics? Nope. Maturity models? Nope. Best practices? Nope.

They only way we are going to improve the state of testing here (or anywhere IMHO) is by focusing on hiring, training, and motivating the best testers in the industry. And the approach we’ve taken has three parts:

1. Creating an environment of honesty and transparency
2. Building a development structure focused on training, coaching and mentoring
3. Transferring control and quality of work to the teams

A Case for Transparent Management

The greatest advice I ever got on hiring managers was from one of the best people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work for, and her motto was: “People don’t quit their company; they quit their manager”. There is a lot truth in that statement, and it echos a Forbes article published last year that boiled down all the “top 10” reasons why talented people leave companies into one:

“Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring.”

Want to run your best people off quickly and efficiently? Make them work for uninspiring leadership that treats people like children by not sharing information. In “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization“, Peter Senge talks about building a learning organization through honesty and actively sharing information. I tell my teams everything I possibly (and legally) can so they aren’t confused about my thought process and as a result, buy into my decisions.

Don’t judge me on my access to information – measure me on the decisions I make with that information. That’s where my experience and skill as a manager comes in to play and differentiates me from my peers. Withholding information from your teams is a very standard practice for frightened or immature managers, and is incredibly damaging to the culture of your team. Transparency is probably the most important – and completely controllable aspect of your management style that will impact unwanted attrition.

Failure = Success

I may have a slight bias from watching him play basketball for the Chicago Bulls, but Michael Jordan’s perspective on failure encapsulates my approach to developing people: “I’ve failed over, and over, and over again in my life – and that is why I succeed.” Letting people fail means you are setting them up for success. Unfortunately, most of the training programs I’ve seen run on the premise that you can transfer knowledge to people through strictly explicit means. The problem is that most of what we need to learn (and specifically to try and fail) only comes from tacit knowledge, which by definition isn’t easily learned through reading and writing.*

We have structured our GTC University into three distinct areas: training, coaching, and mentoring. Training is all the stuff we need people to read and understand to do the basics of their jobs. That’s focused on functional knowledge, white papers and books on testing, videos, etc., all stuff they can digest in their own way and time. Coaching takes people through specific techniques and approaches and then lets them practice while we watch with an immediate feedback loop. Test Management Mentoring is our program of pairing “up and coming” test leads and managers with senior test managers they don’t report to and focuses on large, strategic testing problems.

Without all three, and especially coaching and mentoring, you run the risk of a shallow development program that only delivers the lowest value knowledge acquisition. People need to try and fail in a safe environment so they can have confidence to suceed in real projects. I think this quote my mom left in my notebook when she dropped me off for my first day at college sums it up nicely:

“And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers, – it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small.” – H Melville

A Players Hire A Players – B Players Hire C Players

Weak managers will actively discourage autonomy to maintain control. Talented people in creative, intellectual activities (like testing software) HAVE to have a large amount of autonomy to be successful. In his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, Daniel Pink suggests a terrific technique for gauging how much autonomy the people in your team really have. Autonomy audits put your control issues somewhere on a scale between a “North Korean prison and Woodstock”. If you are not giving people control over their own work, you can only expect them to hire teams whose work they can control.

Once you’ve let go of control and really trust your teams, let them take responsibility for the quality of their culture. I encourage my teams to make it difficult to join them as I want them to set their OWN barriers for entry and not let just anyone into our club. And now that they truly own their work and environment, they hold each other to standards I could never enforce as a manager. Great people aren’t easy to find or grow, but I believe if you work in a transparent way, deliver all three elements of development, and give people ownership of their work, your chances of finding and retaining your A players are greatly increased.

*For more on that topic I HIGHLY recommend Michael Bolton’s writing and the excellent book he introduced to me by Harry Collins.

“But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.” – Thomas Jefferson

To inspire intelligent, thinking people to work together to solve large, organizational problems is a tremendous challenge. Creative people should not be constrained by process or managerial constructs that don’t add any value to their work.

I truly believe, as Daniel Pink illustrates in his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, that getting the best performance out of people requires heavy doses of autonomy, and truly getting out-of-the-way.

But what if you need to change the way a team operates? What do you do if you need to change the perception of your testing team across an IT organization with thousands of people, spread across multiple time zones and continents? How do you get people to not just understand your goals, but more importantly, realign their behavior to meet those challenges together?

As in my earlier post in this series, the only way I have succeeded in improving the performance and perception of testing, is to align the foundations of our work environment. Starting with the shared values that underpin our approach, I then outline the principles of managing testing that everyone – from senior test managers to test analysts, can pattern their behavior. The following principles are from our orientation that everyone in the my teams attends, and are expected to show in their work. They define how we measure and manage careers and are the anchor points for what we call “What we Expect out of You”.

1. People start ignoring testing when it is no longer relevant

If people are ignoring the information being produced by the testing team, in my opinion – that’s the test teams fault. Good testing produces some of the most vital information to make business decisions about risk, release dates, and coverage – how can that information be ignored! Speak the language of your project to understand what “value” means to your business. When you align your testing strategy and reporting methods to those, I guarantee you will not be ignored. In our organization, the responsibility of ensuring testing gets the focus it deserves lies with the test team, and no one else.

 2. Being responsible sometimes means rocking the boat

Software testing is the primary deconstructive process in a largely constructive activity. People who do analysis and development are going to be naturally biased towards confirming that something works and occasionally, you are going to have to tell them…wait for it…that it doesn’t! So what! I understand that testers want to be seen to be contributing to progress, but being a “service” to a project does not mean you are a “servant”. Critical thinking and challenging ideas to test them means you are going to rock the boat, and in fact, being “responsible” almost ensures it. Not everyone is going to like you…if you want a friend – buy a dog!

3. No one has the market cornered on good ideas

I’m pretty sure you don’t, but if you think your manager, or their manager, or the head of your company have all the good ideas – you’re wrong. You know where you’ll find loads of good ideas – all around you! Get to know the people next to you, on your team, on another product group – in the industry, so that you can learn from them and REUSE their ideas! Being efficient with project resources means discovering and using those resources no matter where they originate from. Get to know your peers and you can use the force multiplier of combined experience to tap in to all those great ideas lying around you.

4. Never stop asking why – question everything

The question “why” is the hammer in the tool box of the thinking tester. In “An Introduction to General Systems Thinking“, Jerry Weinberg states “As we work in less and less familiar situations, our inherited and learned perceptual capacities become less and less effective.” A great measure against the degradation of our perceptions is to continually clarify them through a rigorous course of “why”!

5. Invest 80% of your energy in your top 20%

The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. I use this review my schedule to make sure I am spending my time on the right meetings and people. I also use this approach for managing teams. It cuts across the trend to reward everyone for participating, but I believe we should be spending our time on the people who contributing the most to achieving our goals. And those people are not always the management team.

It’s also a great tool to help manage your career. Finding out what is important to your company, what the leadership team values, and then aligning yourself towards those gives you a better chance of being in the right place at the right time. No one is going to advocate for your career better than you, so find out who is in that top 20% and chart your own path.

6. Leadership = Simplification

Due to various factors in the testing industry, the state of training and education for testers, and very often the project environments we find ourselves in, over complication can be a crutch employed to prove our value. Stop! The technology and projects are complicated enough, (and getting worse) and when you add all the people problems, complexity goes through the roof. Leadership = Simplification.

The ability to distill a complex set of ideas into simple expressions is an advanced skill, and sign of maturity. Your value as a tester is not measured in degrees of complexity in expression. Decisions are often made on less than complete and perfect information, and in my business, at a rate that requires quick and agile thinking. As a very senior manager once told me “Keith, you’re giving me the Ph.D version and I need it in Crayola!”

7. Don’t take it personally

Executing against any of these principles or in alignment to our values, is almost impossible if you are personally attached to your ideas. As a reminder – you are NOT your ideas. Your ideas are made up of multiple variables with diverse and complicated origins, that are then viewed through the often times, foggy lens of your immediate perception. All those factors work together to put a thought bubble above your head. Some days that bubble has a light bulb  in it…other days, a scribble. Change any one of those factors and you would get a different idea. If you are too attached to what is floating around in your head, you can’t take on new perspectives or view and more importantly – change your mind.

8. Think first – then do

Lastly, if we are living all are values and adhering to our principles, we will be self-reflective in our decision making process and extremely agile in their implementation. We will not be chained to personalities or bias and have the ability to change our mind without fear of failure or repercussion. All of this will allow us to get on and get things done for the test team and the organization.

In the next post, I will talk about how I think you should go about linking your testing team to your company’s strategic objectives. Thanks

As I run large testing teams for fairly large organisations and have done so for some time now, the questions I get asked most often are about how to improve testings position and how do I talk about testing with “senior management”.

Quite frankly, I’ve failed more than I’ve succeeded in meeting all my goals in improving testing for the companies or clients I’ve worked for over the last 18+ years, but my approach has evolved significantly to set myself (and my teams) up for a better chance at success.

Over the next couple of posts, I am going to map out what I think are the essential elements for motivating, driving innovation, and improving the perception (and reality) in testers in any organisation…enjoy!

Test Management Values

Typically, the first thing out of my test teams mouths when asked “how can we improve the state of testing here”, usually relates to something that OTHER people should do. Very few people or teams take an introspective based approach to improvement, or state their management values, but the ones that do, typically have great success. Ray Dailo, who runs the worlds largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, has had tremendous success in attracting talent and has articulated a very self-reflective and personal vision for his team and how he expects them to run.

More senior management support, better appreciation of testing’s value, higher visibility into the organization – all the roads to those improvements start with YOU. And in my experience, the first step is defining your teams values. I talk a lot about values with testers, and after the look of confusion about why a testing team would talk about values, it usually starts to sink in.

I talk about values in testing, because they drive a lot of your behavior. Your values influence where and how you work, and with who and where you spend your time. Defining a testing “value system” is a great way to create common goals, align behavior, and lower the management overhead of your operation. In relation to the state of testing in your organisation, I find that defining your teams values in precise terms and being able to  articulate them with specific examples, is the first and most essential step to improving things.

The great thing about value aligned improvements, is that people can tie together stories they can propagate throughout the company. So with that, here are the values I outline for my teams during orientation and discuss on a regular basis .

Honesty

You’d think this would be an easy one, and it is for most of us – when it comes to being honest with other people. But I believe it is essential to be honest with yourself – and THEN with other people. If you are not getting the recognition you deserve, the right level of regard for your team, your testing is not respected – why is that? Is it because of everyone else…or is it because of you? When it comes to honesty, too often testers do not point their highly focused lenses of perception at themselves and what they are doing to add to their problems.

One of my favorite quotes is from French physiologist Claude Bernard who said “It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.” I try to live honestly every day, with every interaction with my teams – whether it be about finances, compensation, strategy, or any aspect of my operation.

HR departments have criticized me in the past for being TOO honest with people! Aside from being the right thing to do, I find being radically honest with people actually helps keep attrition down even through bad economic cycles, as teams manage their own expectations better. Additionally, we spend a lot of time and energy recruiting intelligent people, so why when would we then treat them like children when it comes to managing our business!

Regardless, a healthy dose of self-reflection and being open about our strengths, and more importantly our weaknesses, is the only way to level set expectations and understand where to start. Nothing will undermine your efforts to improve more than tolerating dishonesty or deceiving yourself – remember, the only common denominator in all your dysfunctional relationships – is YOU!

Integrity

Now that we’ve been honest with ourselves about what is and is not working, and more importantly, what we are doing to contribute to the situation, the next value to address is integrity. Learning about our strengths and weaknesses does not give much benefit if we don’t change our behavior to show that knowledge. Integrity is a key aspect to changing the perception – and reality of how your testing team is treated.

I’ve found that having the integrity to find shortcomings and change your behavior to address them is a sign of maturity that people in “senior management” typically identify with and respect. It sounds counter-intuitive, but learning from your mistakes is what earns you the right to have an opinion, because as the saying goes – all opinions are not created equal.

Accountability

Finally, not making excuses for why things are (or are not) happening and taking full responsibility for getting things done is at the very least a path to happiness. If you are being honest with yourself, have identified what you need to do to change, but then do absolutely nothing about it – well then, you shouldn’t be surprised when your role is processed, packaged, commoditized and shipped somewhere to chase FX rates around the world.

Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics, George Bernard Shaw said “The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.” Being accountable for taking ownership of getting things done – upwards and downwards – is what people expect out of their leaders, and will move the test team higher up the value chain.

So that’s step one. Defining, discussing, and living your values. Not a lot of teams, testing teams or otherwise, actually take the time to do something as simple as write them down, ask big questions, and then figure out how YOU want your team perceived. Taking control of that will bring a congruence of action that people will notice and give you a starting place for other improvements.

Next up will be the test management principles that are underpinned by these values…thanks!