During the several years that I have spent as a hands-on developer, consultant and leader at various levels, the aim was the same, to understand and give real value to the customers and team members.

Positive feedbacks led to the (logical) next step, do it on larger scale, provide services for more customers, share experience/buzz with a greater audience.

With this intention in mind – looking at our, relatively small organization - I’ve got a burning question at hand.

What is the key to build a good, long term viable team?

Especially in the IT industry, the value of your current knowledge – programming languages, algorithms, and management and administration skills - decreases over time. You can prepare for it, identify and keep your skills up to date – for a couple of years it might help to survive.

Is it as simple as this? Strengthen and actualize your existing skills?

Is it enough to train the team on facts, show them what our ‘best-practice’ processes and tools are? They provide well-tried solutions, based on a lot of past experiences.

No, it isn’t as simple as that even best-practice processes are just a minor factor in long term viability.

What should you prepare your team for then? What is the ever-lasting factor to preserve and enhance your team?

The only way is to prepare your team for real life. Real life does not care about your current abilities, skills.

When challenged, you might withdraw and say ‘it is not for me’. Sticking to what we know is comfortable, safe, you can lean back and be happy with your achievements so far.

Withdrawal however means a missed chance to improve, to be better. Accepting challenges requires consciousness, steadiness and power.

Facing new, unknown situations and task naturally means chance to do mistakes, to fail; unreasonable fear of them have paralyzing effects.

The courage to fail and knowledge of how to deal with tough situations are the key to the viability.

The value of a team depends on how it reacts, how it faces up to challenges, the gift of flexibility, ability to learn does not diminish over time.

This is the only Eau de vie.

Prepare for the inevitable, show the team patterns how to face challenges.

Use according to your taste, create an inspiring organization where failure is an accepted, well-known part of the life and accepting challenges are welcome, risks are not just things that need to be mitigated.