Cultivating Adaptability and Commitment: A Guide for Engineering Managers to Drive Team Performance and Resilience

Inside Leadership starts with talent. The most critical step in leadership is ensuring the right people are on your “bus” (See Jim Collins’s Good To Great). But talent alone isn’t enough. You need roles that challenge people and provide purpose — this is where job design comes into play.

Growth mindset and skill variety drive adaptability, while task significance fosters deeper commitment.

How Hiring Philosophy Can Make or Break a Team

[Edit: in my original posting of this, I left this section out to reduce reader fatigue but have since received loads of questions about hiring philosophy]

Hiring practices make or break a team. If you’re serious about building a high-performing team, you need to be ruthless and rigid in your approach. Loose hiring practices sink ships! Interviewers who are unprepared and wing their questions won’t cut it.

Here are some guidelines to get you started:

1. Identify the essential qualities and skills your team needs, like React or Node proficiency, confidence, and curiosity. I could spend a lot of time here on what are the ideal qualities but I’ll leave you with one recommendation: filter for growth mindset candidates before anything else (see next section for more on this).
2. Create questions that reveal these qualities and skills. LLMs can be a big help here. For engineering managers: always include a live coding exercise. At the contributor to team lead level, it’s the most effective way to see if a candidate is worth their salt.
3. Organize all questions in a spreadsheet or your preferred tool, then test the timing to make sure you can cover everything in the allotted interview time.
4. Use a clear scoring system — I use a simple 1–5 for each question, with whole numbers only.
5. MOST IMPORTANT: Train your interviewers. Their job isn’t just to ask a question and move on — they need to dig deeper. Surface-level answers are common, so effective follow-ups are key to understanding the candidate’s true skill level and experience. Be very selective about your interviewer pool — they are the gate keepers to quality people.
6. Interviewers should take detailed notes. I want to look back at interview notes and feel as if I were in the room, able to justify each score.
7. Regularly review this process with your panel to keep standards consistent across interviewers and adapt to changes in your industry.

A clean and well-structured hiring process is essential to get the right people in the door. Top talent thrives around other top talent. Keeping the wrong person around is like a virus. Their work ethic will eventually poison their peers or cause attrition (See Law of Crappy People). Be proactive in rooting them out and helping them find more fitting homes. If you have a large team, this will become unmanageable without using metrics.

Leverage a Growth Mindset Through Skill Variety

Recognizing challenges as opportunities for growth is a hallmark of top talent — something Dr. Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset has made clear as a foundation for success.

Assuming you got the right people on your squad, let’s focus on skill variety. A job with a high skill variety challenges employees to use a wide range of their abilities rather than performing repetitive tasks that require a narrow skill set. If your job description is limited to writing tests or building buttons day in and day out, your leader is neutering your intuition, curiosity, and grit — essential characteristics of self-sufficient engineers.

Here are some suggestions for ensuring a high level of skill variety:

1. Rotate tasks among engineering staff, such as ensuring more than one person on the team can handle deployments.
2. Rotate staff across different teams to ensure a well-rounded understanding of the product or service.
3. Promote cross-functional relationships to broaden skills and perspectives.
4. Offer training programs in various areas of expertise. For example, I know my recruitment funnel prioritizes hard skills for contributors so I often lead workshops on communication, influencing, and negotiation — skills that have considerably helped me throughout my career. Consider the gaps on your team and find ways to fill them.

Here are some warning signs that you have low skill variety:

• Frequent complaints about boredom and monotony.
• Same person often handles the same tasks.
• Lack of innovation and creative problem-solving.
• Low engagement and enthusiasm across the team

Skill variety builds adaptability. The real test is: how well does your team perform when a critical member is out of office?

Unlocking Purpose Through Task Significance

Ever wonder why you ask your team to complete a simple task and it takes them months, but when they’re facing a problem, they turn the world upside down in minutes to solve it? That’s the power of task significance.

Not every task is thrilling, but each one counts. Start with why to show purpose, then explain what needs to be done. When team members understand how their work contributes to the organization’s larger goals, it gives them the drive to see it through.

You can reinforce this by highlighting user feedback, showcasing success stories, or demonstrating how a feature can boost user engagement. I’ll never forget when we built a more compassionate approach to debt recovery during the pandemic. No one was excited about the task at first, but once they saw the positive impact it had on both customers and the company, the team was energized.

It’s about making sure they understand that their efforts make a tangible difference for the company or for people. Product managers or business stakeholders should typically provide the narrative and the relevant metrics, but be prepared to do this yourself if it’s not common practice for your company.

Lack of task significance warning signs:

• Unclear impact of work on end users or the organization.
• Low motivation and engagement.
• User and stakeholder feedback is rarely shared.
• Team members often question the purpose of their tasks.
• Projects feel like just another requirement, lacking a sense of contribution to larger goals.

Task significance and commitment are two sides of the same coin. Once team members grasp the significance of their work, their commitment is guaranteed, ensuring they take ownership of their work, strive for excellence, and remain resilient in the face of challenges.

Building a Team That Thrives

Given varied and meaningful work, the right people can adapt to changes, push through challenges, and elevate the whole organization. The real value of Inside Leadership is creating a team that not only performs but also feels ownership over what they do. Keep honing these elements, and you’ll see your team grow in ways that even the best strategies can’t always predict.