Build Teams, Not Committees

Being part of a committee makes everyone cringe, but being part of a team can bring joy. If they are both just groups of people, why do they make us feel so different?  Use this simple comparison chart to understand why your company should rethink committees and focus on team building instead:

Teams	Committees
One clear leader, the head coach, who brings everyone together and is ultimately responsible for success or failure	No clear leader and no mechanism to unite members
Additional leaders empowered at every level of the team including skill-specific coaches and team captains	Power struggles and power grabs when leadership is unclear
Team members have clearly defined positions and roles for working together	Members may not understand their contribution
Defined timeline and ways to measure success throughout the season, as well as pre-season and post-season expectations	Vague goals, arbitrary timelines
United against an opposing team or united for a singular achievement	Opposition often comes from within the committee and personal goals take precedence
Well defined tasks for each and every time the team gets together come in the form of practice routines, game plans, and even a task to share fun with pizza socials after games	Meetings may be scheduled in advance but members may not know what they are intended to achieve, agendas and summaries may not be offered to members
Keep members motivated and acknowledged for their efforts and achievements	Fail to recognize the value members bring and their individual contributions

Simply reclassifying committees as teams is not enough if you lack motivating leaders and empowered members who are trusted to execute their well defined tasks and coached on paths to improvements when they fall short.  We like sports metaphors because they generally make us feel good about ourselves and others, work should be able to do the same.

Salesforce Lightning And Juggling Ideas Together For Rapid Development And Rapid Training

When you employ rapid development techniques, you need a documentation and training tool that can quickly introduce new capabilities and concepts and later allow you to expand on that knowledge with added content. Salesforce uses Trailhead as that online learning tool to introduce users around the world to new features associated with the Lightning Experience and other platform capabilities.

While Salesforce's traditional documentation and training resources contain a multi-course buffet of information, Trailhead provides resources more comparable to a delightful cocktail party. The content is lighthearted and approachable and comes in bite-sized portions that are quick and easy to consume.

For developers and administrators who want to gain familiarity with the new Lightning Experience before unleashing it for end-users, Trailhead offers a great introduction with four new badges (pre-Dreamforce '15): Lightning Experience Basics, Features, App Customization Lite, and Rollout.

Being able to offer training content quickly and update it easily has been a benefit of Trailhead, a unique and innovative free training offering from Salesforce.

For the team involved in creating Trailhead, customer enthusiasm for the training modules has been rewarding. "I've never stumbled onto anything this big," says Josh Birk, Developer Evangelist at Salesforce and the developer behind the initial Trailhead prototype. According to Josh, "this last year has been the best year of my career for being part of a team of people with such a passion for improving customer experience."

We can learn from more than the content since, as a project, Trailhead has a lot of lessons to teach businesses by example.

According to Josh, "At Salesforce, we aren't just trying to make things work, we are trying to make things work better." In this case, Salesforce executives lent their support when they discovered multiple groups working independently on an area where the company was already doing good work, according to customer feedback, but individual employees had a desire to move beyond good to great.

Moving a product from good to great might seem like a luxury to companies that are stingy with resources and believe success comes from doing what you did well once before, years ago. Companies like that typically suffer from business short-comings like risk-aversion, groupthink, management by perkele, and bystander apathy resulting in management that gives a cold shoulder to new ideas or any ideas that don't come from the top down. But the culture at Salesforce avoids all of those pitfalls.

Josh feels lucky to work for a company that supports compelling ideas born from employees asking themselves "what if we could give our absolute best?" In this example, Salesforce executives demonstrated their interest in helping employees achieve their best by encouraging their efforts.

Executives knew that multiple people were exploring good ideas and gave those people time to collaborate on what they were all trying to achieve. Managers guided the teams to discover how they might fit their ideas together. Open collaboration is part of the Salesforce culture to keep moving forward, keep progressing and keep being innovative.

For Josh and others working on creating Trailhead, their original ideas to give their best sprang from interactions they had with individual customers. Face-to-face at workshops, online in the Chatter communities, everywhere they found customers, they took the opportunity to think about what might make things better for each of those individuals.

According to Josh, "our approach was not looking at what other companies were doing but instead looking at what our customers needed." What started as a tool for on-boarding new administrators and developers is evolving with new content for more intermediate and advanced users, and of course offers new content around release features like Lightning as well.

For administrators rolling out Lightning Experience, these lessons in collaboration can be applied to the roll out. With the limited Lighting Experience available in the Winter '16 release, we have time to conduct workshops with users and brainstorm on what Lightning has to offer our teams to help them achieve their best. As administrators, we have the opportunity to juggle these ideas together into improvements for our companies as long as we welcome ideas from end users and think about making things better for them as individuals.

To hear more about Trailhead and innovation, sign up for Josh's session at Dreamforce 2015: Making of Trailhead in Moscone West.  

Nurture Creativity, Passion And Collaboration To Be Innovative

The Salesforce Trailhead online training modules are inspiring a lot of us to learn new features and exercise what we already know to earn points and badges. And to have fun with Salesforce. There are modules, or trails, specifically for admins or for developers and trails for specific activities like learning about Event Logs. There is even a trail for getting ready for Dreamforce.

These are definitely worthwhile exercises for anyone interested in encouragement to practice new skills. Once you get started, they draw you in with virtual rewards that inspire continuing with a just-one-more goal. And the list of trails is growing at great speed to ensure that just-one-more goal offers something new and different.

I wanted to explore how this popular project came to be so that I can encourage that kind of innovative thinking among my teammates. So I interviewed Lauren Grau, Developer Relations at Salesforce and a member of the Trailhead team, and here's what I learned.

According to Lauren, the Developer Marketing group was looking into ways they might improve on the existing training workbooks. While these were popular for learning Salesforce, they didn't always provide a clear path or define a way to progress beyond introductory steps. It was also difficult for the folks at Salesforce to gauge the usefulness of any particular workbook. Were people getting stuck? Were they making mistakes?

Coincidentally, while that group was looking into improving the workbook training experience and exploring new tools like those from Udacity, one of the developers on the Developer Evangelism team, Josh Birk, was working on a side project called "Medals". Josh intended to demonstrate using the Metadata API to verify changes in an org based on steps in training. As a group, Developer Evangelism is all about coming up with cool uses of the platform to inspire people and Medals was another project intended to inspire developers with the power of the Metadata API.

According to Lauren, this kind of creative exploration is not limited to any single team. Salesforce is willing to help "carve a space" for projects that employees are passionate about and the company is filled with people who are passionate about Salesforce products. Salesforce has even encouraged that sort of creativity with project challenges that eventually get released as Salesforce Labs applications on the AppExchange.

While marketing had started creating learning paths based on roles and flow charts of the "known universe" of the Force.com platform, the demo of Medals was catching fire among all who saw it. In some companies, these two efforts would continue on their independent paths, but at Salesforce, collaboration and alignment across departments is a huge part of the culture. They use Chatter to connect people and ideas and have a "great open door policy" according to Lauren.

This combination of technology and policy helps Salesforce overcome barriers to innovation that other companies find insurmountable. As a result, the people who could bring together the two teams, marketing and evangelism, did so, and brought in the documentation team as well.

The people involved in Trailhead are passionate about solving the problem of helping Salesforce admins and developers with the task of keeping up with the cloud. With Trailhead, Salesforce can provide training that offers real-time feedback and does not require switching back and forth between disparate systems like workbook and computer to execute training steps. The gamification elements ensure that training is fun and addictive while well-thought-out projects and paths make the skills taught even more meaningful.

Luckily for all of us who enjoy the training modules, Lauren tells me "there is still a lot we haven't gotten to do with Trailhead that we've got planned". New learning trails and badges are on their way, expanding beyond the platform to other clouds as well. There will also be trails for end-users. Just imagine pointing users to Trailhead for learning and relearning tasks like running reports and using filters to see just the data they need.

If you have ever wished you could create your own learning trails for Trailhead, you will get your chance as Salesforce expects to harness the power of its incredible community for content creation and review. Beyond that, we'll have to wait and see what ideas develop thanks to Salesforce nurturing creativity, passion and collaboration so that fun and innovative projects like Trailhead thrive.