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| Steve sporting his Buffalo Bills toque |
Co-incidentally, just days earlier, I had watched the ESPN documentary Four Falls of Buffalo, about the team's singular achievement of reaching four consecutive Super Bowl games in the 1990s, only to lose every single one of them.
The show took me back to my younger days. It was enthralling to hear the stories of the stars of those Bills teams - quarterback Jim Kelly, running back Thurman Thomas, all-world defensive superstar Bruce Smith and the cadre of talented receivers.
I have vivid memories of those seasons; at the time, I had so much invested in the outcomes of those Super Bowl games. I remember sitting on the floor of my girlfriend's apartment - she had a better TV than me! - wearing my team's colours and holding my breath at every twist and turn in the action.
But here is where the twist in my own story comes: in those games, my team was the Dallas Cowboys. In fact, I hated the Buffalo Bills and rejoiced in their humiliating defeats, two years in a row, at the hands of the Cowboys.
Somewhere, somehow, in the intervening thirty years, my loyalty switched. I lost interest in the Cowboys and became every bit as passionate about the Bills.
A sports fan's loyalty can be notoriously unshakeable, defying all logic or rational argument. It is driven by passion, by love for their team. Maybe it is tied to their place, their city or region, even their country as with the nationwide appeal of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team.
We fans plunk down hundreds of dollars to buy the jerseys of our favourite players. Yet our attachment is not ultimately to the player. The sports-world cliché is that we root for the laundry as much as the person wearing it. When the player abandons us, leaves us for more money or a better opportunity elsewhere, we move on from them but remain loyal to the team.
The players rarely share this loyalty. Whether they are drafted or traded or however they land on the team, for most players, it's a business deal for them. And that loyalty of convenience cuts both ways. The player could become a free agent and sell their services to the highest bidder. Or the team could cut them or trade them.
As an Engineering Manager, I want to foster loyalty in my teams. I want them to love to come to work, to feel like they belong, to value what we are building, both as a team and as a whole company. I want them to wear the company laundry, so to speak - the branded swag, sure, but more than that, to have a commitment to our team and to each other, even in the midst of turmoil or turnover.
There are a few critical elements for building a dedicated, loyal, low turnover culture in my teams. Things that I have focused on through my years in this role, and reaped the benefits of a team that worked well together and that stuck together through thick and thin for an extended time.
In the spirit of my Buffalo Bills, I will use them to spell out the word "BILLS":
B - Balanced responsibilities - a team needs to feel that the weight of the challenges they face is shared between everyone on the team. Balanced does not mean equal - some are naturally able to shoulder more, by virtue of experience, skillset, life situation and other factors. By fostering a sense of balanced responsibilities, the team knows that everyone is pulling their weight and contributing their share to the group's success.
I - Individual recognition - the team is not filled with faceless drones, each tackles their own challenges and feels their own sense of accomplishment or failure. It is important to find ways to recognize them on an individual basis. Whether that is in a large setting like an All-Hands meeting or in the more intimate setting of a regular 1-on-1, this feedback and recognition helps to foster their commitment to you, to the team and to the company.
L - Love them - it is important to actually care about them as people, and to find ways to show them that you do. Stay on task, yes, but be sure to make room for small acts of personal connection. Do you care enough to learn the names of their partner and children? what animates them outside of work?
L - Listen - engineers are very smart people, listen to their ideas about the direction of the product or company, or their suggestions for how you might improve in how you set them up for success; engineers are also human and have ambitions, needs, crises, conflicts. Listen to them, whether they are chatty or more the strong, silent type, and understand what they are saying, both in their words and in their sub-text. Let them know they are heard and act on what you hear.
S - Safety - build a team space that is a comfortable and safe place to try new things, to take risks, even to screw up on occasion. When working under a cloud of suspicion or fear, people rarely do their best work and will often seek to make a change, to find a less stressful environment. Giving them a culture of high expectations but low judgement fosters loyalty, commitment and ultimately greater achievement.
With these practices shaping the culture of your team, and ideally the larger company, I as Engineering Manager can influence and increase the loyalty of my team to one another, to our goals, and to the company.
And it works. In my 7+ years managing engineering teams, I have only had four times that a team member gave me their two-weeks' notice. Such a small number of times when I had to say goodbye to a "free agent" former teammate. They are easily outnumbered by the times that I have had to go through the hard conversation of letting someone on the team go.
Yes, like the business side of sports, the ending of the relationship, the breaking of the mutual loyalty, goes both ways. Whether for reasons of under-performance, project termination, financially driven cuts or others, those are times we remember that, as much as we foster love and loyalty, it is still a business, not a family.
So how did my NFL team loyalty shift? How did I give my notice to the Cowboys and go park my fandom with the Buffalo Bills instead? I spent some time in the city of Buffalo. It was a reasonably short drive from where I lived and, for a few years, we would spend a couple long weekends a year in Buffalo. I saw up-close the beauty of the area, the stunning Art Deco architecture, and the beautiful, warm people. I experienced what some of those football players expressed finding when they moved to Buffalo and lost all those Super Bowls - a place of safety and love, of space for individual accomplishment in a balanced environment.