You can build an excellent team

What's the job of the manager?

The job of the manager is sustainably creating the highest performance in their team.

Andy Grove, renowned Silicon Valley leader and Intel CEO, describes it like this in the aptly named High Output Management:

The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.

Grove, Andrew S.. High Output Management (p. xvi). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This leverage over your team's work is something you can build no matter where you are.

My second job, doing great work in a mediocre setting

My then girlfriend (now wife) found a job in a different city, and I changed jobs to go live with her.

My second job as a software engineer. I was excited!

But on my first day at work, I thought maybe I made a mistake.

Instead of an R&D lab where we were building innovative technologies, I was now in a big company's IT department. Everyone wore dress shirts, the computer monitors were small, the machines were old, and the desks were tiny.

This wasn't a proverbial tech company.

But my manager Bob, it turned out, was great. He built a very high talent-density team, and we pushed the boundaries of the company's technology. On top of the company's legacy, 20-year-old software, we created a new layer of a much superior web application.

The team kept growing, and we continued to keep the team's high-performance pace. More and more of the company's work moved on from the legacy to the new technology.

At the time, I didn't appreciate the challenge Bob had overcome with attracting, retaining, and creating an environment where top performers could thrive amid mediocrity. But he did.

Eventually, we all parted ways, but my team members on that team showed a disproportionate career trajectory of excellent performance compared to other groups at the company.

One of my co-workers went on to be my right-hand person, following me to two other companies.

Another handful of my co-workers went on to be successful engineering leaders in top-tier companies.

Including my manager Bob.

People care which team they're on

In the book Nine Lies About Work, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall go through a series of "lies" we believe about work, and the first one is, perhaps deliberately, shocking: "People care what company they work for."

Why would they say that people caring about what company they work for is a lie?

Because the data shows that teams, not companies, make or break an employee's experience at work.

And the manager is responsible for the employee experience in the team.

When people choose not to work somewhere, the somewhere isn’t a company, it’s a team. If we put you in a good team at a bad company, you’ll tend to hang around, but if we put you in a bad team at a good company, you won’t be there for long. The team is the sun, the moon, and the stars of your experience at work.[..]

When we push on the data, and examine closely its patterns and variations, we arrive at this conclusion: while people might care which company they join, they don’t care which company they work for. The truth is that, once there, people care which team they’re on.

Buckingham, Marcus; Goodall, Ashley. Nine Lies About Work . Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition.

As a manager, you enormously impact whether you have a fully engaged team. The most crucial areas for a team's good work are in your control.

[..] team members who said they trusted their team leader were twelve times more likely to be fully engaged at work.

The good news in all this for you, the team leader, is that what people care most about at work is within your control. You might not be able to weigh in on your company’s parental-leave policy, or the quality of its cafeteria, but you can build a healthy team.

You can set clear expectations for your people, or not; you can position each person to play to his or her strengths every day, or not; you can praise the team for excellent work, or not; you can help people grow their careers, or not. And you can, over time, build trust with your people, or not.

Buckingham, Marcus; Goodall, Ashley. Nine Lies About Work . Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition.

The employee experience can significantly differ within the same company, especially in performance-affecting areas. This variation largely depends on the team they're on.

In fact, this data shows that employees' experience will always vary more within a company than across companies – no matter the company!

There shouldn’t be variation from team to team, because the day-to-day experience of working at this particular company should remain mostly consistent.

But that’s not the case — in fact, it’s never the case. The statistical measure of variation is called range, and we’ve found that these scores always have a greater range within a company than between companies.

Experience varies more within a company than between companies.

Buckingham, Marcus; Goodall, Ashley. Nine Lies About Work . Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition.

While shocking at first, in hindsight, it's not surprising.

A team is the best unit of work for high-scale collaboration, and the manager is at the core of any team's experience and performance.

And manager performance in companies is anything but uniform.

Focus on your locus of control

How do you start improving your team's performance?

It's tempting to focus on how our team's dependencies should be improved: Recruiting, Product, Platform, Sales, etc. If only they'd be better, my team would be fine.

But other teams' performance is outside your locus of control. Only your team's performance is within your locus of control.

While your team's work is interdependent with that of many other groups, the most significant leverage you have to improve the performance of your team is directly improving your team.

It's OK to nudge and influence other teams to try to improve and adjust to your needs, but the majority of your time should be spent working on how your team must improve.

So take a step back.

Write down "How can my team improve further?"

• If there are many areas where your team could improve further, start strategically planning to work on improving them.
• If there are few areas for your team to improve on, chances are you're not well versed in management yet. That's OK. The amount of good literature on management is vast, and improving in management depth is now your area of improvement.

If you don't know where to start, start with reading Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall's Nine Lies About Work

To hold yourself accountable for sustainably creating the highest performance in your team, you must first accept that you have the autonomy to do it.

And I'm here to tell you that you do.