Post by Cheeng Tse Ho

Peter Drucker once said: “Your first role [as a manager] is the personal one. It is the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence, the identification of people, the creation of a community. This is something only you can do. It cannot be measured or easily defined. But it is not only a key function. It is one only you can perform.” This has been on my mind as I engage our people. We talk a lot about Agile, AI, product thinking and better engineering practices. All of these matter. But I am increasingly convinced that none of them gets us very far without the right team dynamics underneath. A team can adopt Agile ceremonies without being willing to challenge one another. It can introduce AI without the trust to experiment, fail and learn. And it is difficult to practise genuine product thinking if people do not feel safe questioning assumptions or saying, “I think we are solving the wrong problem.” So a surprising amount of my engagement with staff has ended up being about something much more fundamental: how we work together. Building relationships and trust. Creating space for difficult conversations about what is not working. Being able to disagree without making disagreement personal. Making it safe to acknowledge where we are lacking and ask how we can do better together. And, importantly, creating an environment where everyone feels they have a voice and that their contribution matters. Sometimes the simplest things help. Regular team lunches, taking time to celebrate milestones and creating occasions such as birthday celebrations to just enjoy one another’s company can go a surprisingly long way. Trust can be accumulated through ordinary moments together. These things are difficult to measure. They do not appear neatly on a transformation roadmap. And there is no tool, framework or AI agent that can do this work on a leader’s behalf. Perhaps that is precisely Drucker’s point. Before transforming the way a team works, we have to build the kind of team that is capable of transforming itself.