One of the things I realized as I was managing a team of 7 engineers, is that even though each of my teammates had its own perspective and expertise in different areas relevant to their role, the knowledge was not being shared with each other.
My teammates were getting knowledge through social media, conferences, books, and wide engineering syncs, we didn’t have an internal team forum where engineers could talk to each other about their interests, discoveries, or experiences. I created a goal to myself to reverse that and create a team that has the space to share their knowledge comfortably.
The first thing I did was setting up a 30-minute weekly meeting where engineers could add their topics and talk to the rest of the team about them. In the beginning, there were not a lot of topics being added by the engineers, but slowly the list kept growing, to the point that sometimes we had to skip some topics to the next week. Why? Because of a change, I did in my one on ones.
Anytime I was in a one on one and I noticed something that the other person was sharing and it would be worthy of sharing with the rest of the team, I would encourage the person to add the topic for the 30-minute weekly sync. I did this really aggressively for a while until the topics were being added without me having to encourage folks to do it. Why? Because they developed the habit of sharing knowledge and got more comfortable in public speaking to the rest of the team.
That meeting became one of my favorite times of the week. It was a mix of content sharing, open questions, request for help. Teamwork at its best. The engineers felt so comfortable speaking to the members of their team, that we also used the meeting to practice talks that were then being shared with the wider engineering team. It was a success.
In conclusion, whether you are seeing a lack of content being shared within your team, or you are noticing some specific individuals lacking the confidence to do so, I strongly believe that one of the manager responsibilities is to create a culture of knowledge sharing by creating the right space using tools like your one on ones to encourage individuals to share their unique point of views.
