Leveling Up Teams Fast and Slow

The best way to win as a business is to move fast. And the best way to move fast is with a smoothly functioning team.

There are many ingredients that go into an effective team – hiring, performance management, incentive structures, clear goal setting, streamlined processes, and more. But in the broadest sense I believe that there are two fundamental activities, one fast and one slow, that are essential to a well-functioning team and that anyone can put into place immediately.

Leveling up slowly: Teams never go backwards

The best way to ensure that your team gets better over time is to ensure that you’re constantly leveling them up, and that teams never degrade in effectiveness and performance culture.

Organizations have a natural gravity that will pull them towards the lowest common denominator that they observe around them. Let’s say that you have 5 teams, and one of them works at a slower pace, has worse outputs, or takes on a less strategic role. All of these weaknesses will provide air cover for lower performers on the other 4 teams, and ultimately bring down the quality of your organization.

The key, replicable activity to keep in mind: You should always spend some amount of time debugging your weakest team, and bringing them back up to at least the median of the rest of your teams. Over time, this will gradually improve your organization – and more importantly, it will do it in a way that is highly stable, as this evolution doesn’t require massive changes or sudden changes to multiple teams at once. At any given point in time as a manager, you have a weakest team: Some percentage of your efforts should simply go towards fixing them.

The simple fact is that it’s pretty hard to debug multiple teams at once. It is very rare to have a team that sucks for reasons that are purely their own fault. 95% of the time, once you begin debugging, you’ll find that the situation is due to some combination of poor incentives, weak partners, or misunderstandings – in addition to any raw competence gaps. And if you want to be fair (which you should!), that will require investigation and follow-up with some degree of nuance.

The solution is to focus on one team at a time, and make sure that you are always working on the most challenged team. That way, even when things seem fine in general, you’re building up a buffer of higher performance that you can bank on when times are rough.

Leveling up fast: Put the best in charge

But this inexorable shift towards higher performance moves slowly. If you can debug one team per quarter (which is not a bad rate at a scaled up business), that’s a positive trajectory but a gradual slope across an organization of dozens, hundreds, or thousands. So you need a faster lever.

My favorite quick lever for performance upleveling is simply to put the most competent people in charge, regardless of their vocation or title or the shape of the org chart:

• If there’s a complicated project, put a star performer on it.
• Tell everybody else that they’re in charge (implied – until they screw it up). Let one person hold the steering wheel so the car doesn’t crash.
• If they do well, their leadership will feel natural, as if you couldn’t have imagined any other way.

Companies that are >50 people hate doing this – it disrupts the chain of command, can create the perception of playing favorites, and doesn’t follow the MBA playbook. More significantly, it requires a degree of leadership resolve that is rare among career executives – it’s politically destabilizing to your organization, and the way that you tend to get ahead as a career exec is by making your team extremely politically stable.

But it works – because one thing that you find if you operate in fast-moving businesses for long enough is that the best members of your organization are often far more competent than the baseline team member (even on really strong teams!). You can ignore this, causing top performers to become more frustrated – or you can empower them and use them like battering rams that smash your worst problems into little splinters. The latter obviously works much better, and it works shockingly fast. Like, the project was screwed up this morning, but it’s 4pm and now the entire team has a skip in their step and confidence that they never had before.

The other reason that this works is that most organizations default to having a lot of hands on the steering wheel. This is a strictly worse situation – while some cars can be driven with 3 people holding the wheel simultaneously, it tends to require extreme competence, trust, and experience working together from every single person involved. I’ve seen this rapport get established between startup founders, siblings, or a combination of startup founders and extremely early employees (first 50), but never with any other group of human beings. For your situation you’re almost certainly better off just putting Jennie the Genius or Bob the Badass in charge and telling everybody else to shut up and fall in line.

People want to know that there’s a plan and that it’s going to be okay – and very competent singular leaders provide that drive and direction.

And I’ve also found that once you’ve established that leadership, the politics disappear. By constantly leveling up your teams (see part 1), you’ve hired good people. Good people love winning, and they love following a single great leader because that helps you win. And that’s all that anyone was looking for anyway.