You are thoughtful in your interviewing process and selective in your hiring. You’ve assembled a team that gets along, executes well, and has been delivering. It seems like you’ve put together a great team, but how will they perform during an emergency?
It’s an inevitability that no amount of planning can completely prevent, and anyone who’s spent any time in the professional ranks has experienced. Maybe your team made a mistake that caused the crisis, maybe someone else at the company did, or maybe the emergency just happened to you and there’s no one to blame. It doesn’t really matter, because now the emergency’s yours and it’s up to your team to deal with it.
While no one wants to be in this situation, it does provide an opportunity to find out what your team is really made of. It’s easy to deliver when times are good, but existential challenges are when a team’s true character shows. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by. While you’re running around with your hair on fire in a near panic, take note of your team. Who’s hiding? Who’s asking questions? Who’s arguing? Who’s shifting blame and pointing fingers? Who’s jumping into action, doing whatever is necessary to solve a part of the problem?
The day before Labor Day weekend
Yesterday morning (the day before the start of the Labor Day weekend), before most of my team had arrived, an executive came into the room where I sit with the entire product team and announced that a bug that we had known about for a while had to be fixed before the end of the holiday. We had been executing a plan to solve the issue and expected to have it out in the next release, but were told in very certain terms that that timeline no longer worked.
My concerns about this change in plan revolved around one major issue: two members of my very small team were in their second week on the job, and few of the rest of the team had any experience at all with the part of the application where the error was. I had to instruct people to pull down code they’d never seen, and fix it under extreme pressure. I wondered just how much of our holiday weekend was going to be spent in that office getting to know each other better under pretty terrible circumstances.
As I started giving out assignments, heads went down. Our normally boisterous room where we sit elbow-to-elbow got pin-drop quiet. People moved from their seats where they sit every day to sit next to the people they needed for their new assignment. Not one word of complaint, not one hint of hesitation. No one in that room was responsible for the issue, but that didn’t matter. You could read it in the body language, we may not have caused the emergency, but it was ours now to solve and that was it.
The senior engineers helped the junior engineers get started on their work, and then immediately flew into their own. I hadn’t given some members of the team an explicit assignment, having only enough of a plan at that point to give out a few tasks. Even so, everyone without something to do, found a way to help. It was inspiring.
We came up with a plan, presented it to leadership, and spent the rest of the day executing on it. I can’t say it was fun, it was far too stressful to be described that way. I will say that it was as pleasant as that type of experience can be, and by the end of the day we had made enough progress that everyone was able to leave at a reasonable time, and only a few simple tasks were required over the holiday. Problem addressed, crisis averted.
Proof
When your team is faced with an emergency, who among them will panic, who will hide, and who will pull up their sleeves and get to work? Will you be able to get everyone pulling in the same direction when it counts the most? There may come a time when the future of the company depends on it.
I knew we had a good team before this episode. They had gelled extremely fast, seemed to genuinely like each other, and were producing code at a crazy pace, but I didn’t really know what they were made of until yesterday. How do you find people like this? If you have any ideas or advice on how to spot candidates who will rise to the occasion and deliver when the pressure’s on, please leave a comment below.