Hello Reader
What we can and cannot install
If the previous post was about recognizing the intangibles of a team that is working, this one is about what we can actually do as leaders to make that state more likely, and I want to be honest about what is in our control and what is not. A great deal of writing about teams treats high performance as something a leader can simply install, and that has not been my experience either as a leader myself or as a coach to others.
The reframe
The first thing I would offer is a reframe: the teams under your purview are not just groups of people you are managing, but entities you are either cultivating or quietly starving through the daily choices you make about your attention. Once you start seeing teams in that way, much of what looks on the surface like soft work begins to look like the core work of leadership, because you are no longer simply assigning tasks to individuals but tending to the conditions in which a We can form.
Space, direction, and autonomy
The most powerful move I have seen leaders make is to offer their teams three things at once, and they have to come together rather than separately. The first is space, by which I mean time and attention that is genuinely protected from the constant churn of organizational noise, so that the team has room to actually think. The second is direction, by which I mean a clear sense of what the team is for, what it is being asked to do, and just as importantly, what it is not responsible for. The third is autonomy, by which I mean that the team is trusted to figure out the solution on its own terms, within boundaries you have made explicit. None of these alone produces a high-functioning team, but the three together create the conditions for one to emerge over time.
Guardrails, not instructions
This is where guardrails matter more than instructions, and the leaders I admire tend to be specific about constraints while remaining loose about methods. They might say, "There is no additional spend over a thousand dollars without coming back to me," or, "I would love for the four of you to meet, work through this, and bring me your collective thinking by the end of the month," or, "Here is the audience downstream of you, so help your team understand what those people need before you decide how to deliver it." These are not acts of micromanagement; they are the edges of the field, and inside those edges, the team has room to do the work of becoming a team rather than merely executing one.
The leader's job changes at every stage
The Drexler-Sibbet model I wrote about previously is useful here because it gives you a map of what a team is moving through, from orientation and trust building into goal clarity, commitment, and eventually high performance. What I would add now is that the leader's job changes at each stage along the way, because early on you are providing clarity and presence, in the middle stages you are removing obstacles and protecting the team from interference, and later, when the team is humming, your job is largely to stay out of the way and to defend the conditions that allowed the humming in the first place.
Teaming is a skill
There is one more piece, and it is the one most often overlooked, which is that teaming is itself a skill, and leaders can develop it in their people the same way they would develop any other capability. Almost no one will spend an entire career on the same team, because people will join teams, leave teams, form new teams, and dissolve old ones, often several times within a single year. The capacity to enter a new group of people and contribute to the formation of a real We, rather than simply executing tasks alongside others, is one of the most valuable capacities a leader can help cultivate, and you do it by talking about teams as teams rather than as collections of roles, by debriefing what worked when a team came together well, and by treating the endings of teams with the same seriousness that beginnings tend to receive.
If you lead other leaders
A final note for anyone reading who manages other leaders, which is that the teams under your direct reports are also under your influence, even when you are not in the room with them. The way you talk about teams, the way you ask about them, and the way you respond when one is struggling or thriving, all of this teaches the leaders below you what is valued in this organization. If you only ever ask about output, you will get leaders who only ever look at output, but if you ask occasionally how the team itself is doing as an entity, you will begin to grow leaders who can see what we have been talking about across these two posts.
A small experiment for this week
Here is what I would invite you to try this week. Pick one team in your orbit, whether you lead it directly or simply have influence over it, and spend ten minutes thinking about it not as a list of people but as an entity in its own right. Ask yourself what its current state is, what it needs from you that it is not getting, and what you would stop doing if you trusted it more than you currently do. Reply and tell me what you find, because I am genuinely curious where this lands for different leaders in different contexts, and the responses often become the seeds of where this series goes next.
Yours,
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