Delivery and Deployment

TH13 Building a Stronger Team, One Human at a Time

10/22/2020

1:15pm - 2:30pm

Level: Introductory

Angela Dugan

Cloud Solution Architecture Manager

Microsoft

Building the "perfect team" seems like an impossible task these days. Can a truly "cross-functional" team even be built? How do you get introverts and extroverts (yes, they DO exist in IT) to play nice? Seems like these days you practically need a degree in psychology to get this right. But you don't.

Over the course of my career, I've worked with my clients and my company to develop high functioning teams. I've found that regardless of focus (software development, marketing, sales), there are patterns to what makes teams successful, and what can hold them back from greatness.

  • Are you spending time understanding what the individual members of the team need to be successful or are you trying "one size fits all" solutions?
  • Are you creating a safe and supportive environment to foster experimentation and learning, or are you doing the same old stuff you've always done, wondering why you don't see better results?
  • Are you leveraging people's individual strengths and balancing the team as a whole or just putting whomever is available on a team and hoping for the best?

In this talk, I'll cover a couple of tools for understanding the needs and strengths of your individual team members, identifying strength gaps, and action items for creating a happy and well-balanced team that can get it done!

You will learn:

  • Uncovering your team members preferences and strengths
  • Skills to build to be a great team leader
  • Easy tools to start the preferences and strengths conversation