Leadership and Team structuring

I have been working as a Support Engineer for almost 5 years now. I have worked in a team which was tightly hierarchy bound and now I work in team which is completely flat. This indeed was a big and a very cheerful transition. Now having seen both sides of the coin, if I were a manager/team-lead I would like to follow some best practices while structuring my team and defining the work flow:
1. Have trust and respect each of your team members. Trust and respect play a very important role in development and growth of any team. Often I have seen that respect usually comes with your experience, which I totally disagree with. A person who contributes to the team and to the organization deserves the best irrespective of experience. Well in hierarchy based companies this is mostly ignored.
2. Maintaining knowledge base. This is the most basic requirement of any support team. A knowledge base helps people to understand and fix known issues faster. It also helps in knowledge sharing which is very important. Transparency in the team is critical. I have come across people who try not to share their trade secrets just to be in the limelight. This kind of behavior is disgraceful and against the team. Such behavior can be easily identified and must be curtailed. I would give equal marks for an innovative resolution and addition of knowledge base items.
3. Using the right tools. Tools should be easy to use, such that it is not a burden on the team. Also there should be provision in the tool, to define a distinct workflow. One should not try to track an insane number of parameters through the tool mainly because, it makes the tool unusable and leads to confusion. We just switched from IBM lotus notes to Zendesk and it has made life more comfortable.
4. Distribution of work load. Being in support would mean that you have some real tough days or days where you don’t have any work. This also means that you can use time the way you want. I have a seen a lot of problems around work load balancing in teams, as load is very subjective. Priority of a issue, complexity, volumes can all be parameters defining work load. Daily-Stand-ups is one way of introducing the transparency in a team. Now what does a Daily-Standup involve?
Members of the team huddle up and talk briefly about the following:
1. What did they work upon the previous day?
2. What they plan to work on today?
3. What are the blockers they might have?
Having such a discussion gives the team insight on what is happening and all remain on the same page. This also gives a TL/PM a clue of any critical blockers which might blow up and hence a chance to act upon them.
5. Review of issues is the next one. At my previous job, we had a one hour ticket review session which at times involved the manager. It is really funny how my feeling about this session changed with my experience. During my initial days, I hated this session. Reason being, my tickets were always non-compliant or had some wrong troubleshooting. But as I grew in experience I enjoyed this session, as I could notice similar mistakes by new guys coming in. In my belief this was becoming a pattern for everyone. Now why would you allow a new guy to come in and commit mistakes and then later in the week waste your time reviewing the mistakes? If one follows the Dialy-Standups and maintains KB, mistakes can be avoided in the first place. Unfortunately some people find more pleasure in finding mistakes in others and in that way trying to establish their importance. Also some teams do not believe in review of tickets, which is again a very bad trend. Tickets need to be reviewed to assure quality and track SLA's.
6. Responsibly and ownership are two important qualities that the team should develop to deliver in a reliable manner. In an unhealthy team, you would always notice the baton being passed around. While in a healthy team, people standup to these. This is something which is purely driven by leadership. If as a TL/PM, you express confidence in a particular individual and then entrust him with a responsibity, the chances are that he/she will deliver. Where as in a team, where responsibility is just dumped on you because of a shortage in staff, results are hard to come by.
7. Escalations. This is very controversial topic. How much access should a support team be given to the development team? I will be discussing this in my next blog post.
Last but not least, as a leader of the team, one should always try to set aside their egos and be as neutral as possible. Treat everyone with respect and dignity; after all we are in a corporate environment and not in a war.