...rants by Asheesh Mehdiratta on Coaching, Transformation and Change

Category: challenges

Trust: Your Teams Superpower !

Imagine a team where ideas flow freely, challenges are tackled head-on, and success feels like a collective win. That’s the power of Trust.

Trust isn’t just the foundation of a successful team—it’s the magic ingredient that transforms ordinary teams into extraordinary ones. Imagine a team where ideas flow freely, challenges are tackled head-on, and success feels like a collective win. That’s the power of Trust.

In today’s dynamic tech landscape, innovation is the name of the game. Trust is the superpower that can set your team apart. Your team is coding the next big app. They are ensuring seamless IT support. In both scenarios, Trust will be the force that propels you to new heights. Let’s explore why Trust matters. We’ll also look at how to build it to create a WOW factor for your team.


Why Trust is Your Team’s Superpower

  • Ignites Innovation: Trust cultivates a dynamic environment where bold ideas and experimentation thrive, driving the advancement of breakthrough technologies.
  • Turbocharges Collaboration: When Trust is high, teamwork feels effortless. Ideas, feedback, and support flow naturally, boosting productivity.
  • Builds Resilience: Teams with Trust bounce back faster from setbacks, viewing challenges as opportunities for growth.

Example: Picture a tech team at a game-changing startup. Without Trust, they might hesitate to share that “crazy idea” that could revolutionize the user experience. With Trust, they bring it forth, and suddenly, they’re the company everyone’s talking about.


How to Build Trust That WOWs

  1. Lead by Example
    • Action: Embody the values of integrity and reliability. Let your actions speak louder than words.
    • WOW Example: A CTO not only leads product discussions. They also sit in on customer support calls to understand pain points firsthand. This commitment to every aspect of the company builds immense Trust.
  2. Encourage Radical Transparency
    • Action: Share everything from successes to challenges with the team.
    • WOW Example: A CEO of a cloud services firm sends out a “State of the Startup” weekly email. The email details wins, losses, and lessons learned. This openness creates a culture where Trust is the norm, not the exception.
  3. Supercharge Team-Building
    • Action: Design experiences that are memorable and meaningful.
    • WOW Example: A tech company organizes an annual innovation hackathon. Teams not only build products but also bond over challenges. The event becomes a legend, with every participant feeling a deeper connection to their peers and the mission.
  4. Celebrate with Impact
    • Action: Recognition should feel authentic and impactful.
    • WOW Example: A team leader at a software company avoids sending a generic “Great job” email. Instead, they create a custom video montage. This montage showcases each team member’s contribution to a major release. The personal touch makes everyone feel seen and valued.
  5. Create Psychological Safety Zones
    • Action: Make every meeting a judgment-free zone where ideas and feedback are welcomed.
    • WOW Example: A product manager introduces a “Fail Fast, Learn Faster” session. In this session, the team shares what didn’t work. They also discuss what they learned. The result? A culture that celebrates growth and continuous improvement.

Conclusion: The WOW Factor of Trust

Building Trust is like planting seeds for a flourishing garden.

With care and dedication, it grows into something beautiful and powerful—a team that’s unstoppable. When Trust is at the core, teams don’t just meet goals; they exceed them, delivering WOW moments at every turn.


Let’s Create WOW Moments Together!

Ready to transform your team and unlock the superpower of Trust?

Follow me for more insights on building high-performing tech teams and creating a WOW factor in everything you do.

👉 Contact me for tailored coaching sessions or workshops designed to build Trust and drive extraordinary team success! Let’s make your team the one everyone talks about!

Do you ‘Attach to Detach’ in your coaching?

attachment detachment

Change agents (read Agile / DevOps / Lean coach’s etc.) are always interviewing, observing and empathizing with the teams and individuals. Attachment and Detachment – are part of every change agents personal journey.

Attach-Detach cycle

As part of the transformation journeys, we perform Coaching Kata’s and tend to enter the space of ‘attachment’ and then start to expect our teams to behave in the way we think they should. We get really attached to our teams and sometimes individuals, who look upon us as we start to show them the new ways of thinking.

5 Coaching Kata Questions

Sometimes we are able to help them see the new ways and other times we may not succeed, but finally at some point we have to ‘detach’ ourselves from the engagement for various reasons (sustainable model built, benefit-costs ratio achieved etc.)

But this engage-disengage cycle takes a heavy toll on the change agents, who have to be able to maintain a high level of stability, calm composure to the external world, though internally they might be facing anger, frustration or sometimes loss of the relationships built. Therefore, this detachment is never easy and the below quote summarizes it beautifully.

” The root of suffering is attachment “

the buddha

Dilemma – Solution ?

It is always a constant dilemma on how much ‘attachment’ you bring to your coaching engagement (empathizing with the team/individuals), and maintaining your inner peace and scorecard, which honors the inherent change inertia (read – you cannot really change any one!), and then be bold enough to detach with a smile on your face.

” The cessation of suffering is attainable through detachment”

The buddha

The solution is always within us, and each one of us have to learn to detach ourselves. We should let the team/individual chart their journeys at their pace, while we can only enable them and if possible show them the new ways.

So here’s wishing you ‘detachment’ from your ‘attachments’, as part of your coaching and transformation journeys, in the new year.

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Top 3 challenges in your DevOps journey

The 2014 State of Devops survey report clearly shows higher organizational performance linked to the performance of the IT group and it’s DevOps practices. But most organizations are still struggling in their IT-DevOps journey  – “only 21% of those familiar with it are using it“. In the DevOps journey the main objective of “Collaboration between the Dev and Ops” faces many challenges! Let me attempt to highlight the Top 3 challenges faced by most organizations.



TOP 3 CHALLENGES 

  • No Shared Ownership


Most programs typically have Development and Operations as separate teams, with conflicting goals.

The top down goals for development teams are to build features (potentially shippable increments) at short regular intervals so that they can be deployed, with all incentives promoting ‘faster’ build cycle, versus the operations team goals favor operational stability with changes minimized, in order to maintain existing system reliability and high availability, with incentives for reducing operational costs.


These conflicting goals setting lead to development teams “handing off” the code to operations after development, and operations “pushing back” almost every time.

The overall impact is that the feature ‘go live’ date is delayed, with both the groups lacking “shared ownership” for reducing the overall feature delivery cycle time from an end customer view point.


  • Physical separation


Development and Operations teams are separated by distance, and mostly do not share the same physical location or work area. Most organizations will have centralized operations teams, possibly across time zones for larger enterprises.


The silo’d physical structure is also carried in the silo’d organizational structures with different reporting heads for both the teams, thus ensuring that local optimizations rule the day, with the Operations team members managing and running multiple applications, in closely guarded areas, with restricted access or interaction opportunities with the Development teams.  


How can you relate to someone whom you have never met face to face and never talked? bye bye collaboration !!


  • Cultural differences


Cultural differences are visible in the behavior and actions of both the development team and the operations teams. 

The lack of trust and transparency on both sides is what manifest in the communication gaps on both sides, with the development team having minimal visibility on deployment activities and feedback on production systems (read  infrastructure metrics), and the Real business metrics and similarly the operations teams having minimal visibility on what is the expectations on the features wrt.  scalability, run books, or reliability that they should care about to maximize the applications potential and operate as expected by the development team. 

The lack of shared evidence and the missing Shared ownership clearly comes out and creates a sense of mistrust and results in overall delivery delays.


“The developer and operations divide in IT is almost like humidity at times. You can’t see it, but you feel it,” – This quote from the Starabucks devops post sums the challenges….  

what are the challenges do you see in your devops journey?


Look out for my next post which will try to address possible solutions for these challenges…

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