One year ago, when I was hosting a team brainstorm for continuous improvement in a high-performance team, I shared some public notes from Google’s elite teams. One staff engineer questioned me very honestly that the prerequisite at Google is to have competitive payment. In other words, let’s forget about high performance/excellence as we are not paid for it. Engineering managers often face the challenge of achieving engineering excellence, project excellence, and people excellence without salary excellence unless they are in big tech companies. It’s a very aggressive goal in normal companies. It’s hard for engineering teams as it often turns out:

  1. Team burnout occurs when members are constantly pushed to do more work. They struggle to meet increasingly high standards and frequently miss targets. Individuals may be singled out as blockers and even forced to leave. This ultimately leads to severely low team morale.

  2. Even when a team successfully achieves excellence on a special project, the business marketing may fail to deliver as promised. The team receives minimal recognition beyond a few thank-yous.

  3. Teams or individual members often fail to receive promised rewards after putting in significant effort toward ambitious goals.

To be honest, I have experienced all of the above. It’s a hard management problem. The key here is to have a proper reward procedure for the team.

First, you need to understand how much reward your team could have and how much it could be adjusted for all team members. Once you understand the reward budget, you can basically avoid issue #3. It also should be transparent for the team. I got serious complaint from one team member, he didn’t get properly reward after hard work. I was sorry that I was not crystal clear explain the company reward standard and left too many vague space that causes misunderstanding for both.

One common mistake is that soft rewards besides salary are underestimated. This is why my staff engineer was complaining. It’s the manager’s duty to create and highlight soft rewards. The challenge here is that soft rewards are hard to quantify/standardize with engineering tech but still possible. If you regard your team process as RL training, reward is the key to driving the team to excellence. Soft reward maybe be only available parameters you could adjust.

Once you have soft reward process, trust is the key. It’s very important to earn trust from stakeholders and the team. You may have to be EQ excellent, hands-on excellent, or academic excellent even humor excellent here. Another thing is It’s nature that you cannot set good reward process in the begin and you have to adjust it from the feedback. It’s okay as long as it doesn’t hurt the team a lot.

Second, as the manager, you must know the team’s capability for different scenarios like low-hanging fruit and moon goals. Don’t be afraid to discuss moon goals. In fact, I encourage you to always reserve some time for the team to discuss moon goals. We either land on the moon with massive efforts as pioneers or just land here with a space ticket, but we will all land on the moon eventually. If you don’t have a budget for aggressive/hard goals, be prepared for earlier adoption. This helps mitigate and resolve issue #1.

Finally, as the manager, you always get pressure to deliver features more often. Please hold it and try to offload extension features with self-service or automate them with tools/AI. It’s very important to minimize team work and only focus on high-impact features as they are the core.

My simple answer to archive engineering/project/people excellent is to follow elite team’s sharing from top companies with the team special reward process.