The Team that Managed Itself: A Story of Leadership (Empowered Teams)

by Christina Wodtke

Unspoken assumptions kill marriages as well as team health.

She had learned more in her two years there than her entire career before and had paid in blood.

“Not everything can be calculated. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith.”

“Not firing is also a sign of organizational issues. If you keep a bad hire around, it causes a lot of issues. If they don’t work hard, everyone wonders why they should work hard. If they work hard, but are a jerk, people don’t want to work with them. If they are incompetent, it undermines trust in management . . . it goes on and on.”

If you are in meetings all day as a manager, you’re doing your job perfectly. You have to be able to talk to people. Give them feedback. Broker deals with other teams. You

“A bad employee will bring down two good ones. How much worse is it at the exec level? He doesn’t understand that the CTO is a people manager. People write code. People need to be inspired, to be coached, to be focused.”

“You do want to scare people off—people who will fail in the job. Don’t throw a wide net. Throw a tight one and catch the person you really want.”

But if someone has been doing a crappy job and you have not been giving them warnings, you are also doing a crappy job. Letting bad behavior continue is sanctioning bad behavior.”

“If you hear one thing when it happens, you can really hear it and change. If you hear twenty things you get overwhelmed. You’ll probably just work on one or two.

“First, you have to change your thinking. There are no bad employees. There are employees who don’t know things yet. And there are employees who resist change, but don’t know that they are losing power and influence because of their behavior. They conflate behavior with identity. And there are employees who are a bad fit. This last one is very difficult.”

“It’s not about firing, it’s about giving clear feedback. And then making sure that there are consequences to a person’s behavior if they choose to ignore the feedback.”

People management is a completely different job from any front-line job and requires completely different skills. It’s not a step up, it’s a step sideways.

People management has three core components: hiring, firing, and feedback in between.

no matter how hard and long you work, there are only twenty-four hours in a day. This means you have to make active choices about where you spend your time. Delegation is a survival tactic.

A learning team shares a commitment to progress.

You’ve heard that you must break a leg again if it’s set wrong. It’s the same situation when a team has settled into bad (or even so-so) patterns.

What makes a team successful is a shared purpose. Everyone must agree on the answers to some key questions: What are we going to accomplish, and why does it matter? How do we know we’ve done it?

An Objective is like a mission statement, only for a shorter period of time. A great Objective inspires the team, is hard (but not impossible) to do in a set time frame, and can be done by the person or people who have set it, independently.

I highly recommend baking your OKRs into your weekly team meetings (if you have them) and your weekly status emails. Adjust your confidence levels every single week. Have discussions about why they are going up or down. The cadence is what makes OKRs work.

keeping teams focused is the entire point of the OKR.

OKRs aren’t about hitting targets, but about learning what you are really capable of. Failure is a positive indicator of stretching. OKRs are designed to push you to do more than you knew you were capable of and to learn from experience. If you shoot for the moon, you may not make it—but it’s a hell of a view.

You have to figure out if each person is going to be able to fulfill the role you need them to play on the team. And if not, what then? Do you fire this person? Do you change their role? Do you coach them?

Successful people need coaching, advice, and a listening ear as much as those who struggle.

If you have someone who’s been great and is suddenly not great, you need to understand what happened. Sometimes it’s something personal, like a divorce or a life change. You support them through it, and push them to do the best they can. And sometimes it’s just that someone is bored, and you help them find interest in the job or move to another job.

You can never stop watching over and helping your people. There’s a reason they call it people management. Not because you’re bossing them around, but because you’re helping them be the kind of person the company needs and the kind of person they want to be.

When you assume you make an ass out of you and me.

Design the team you want to be part of. Design the team you need to succeed. Design the life you want to live every day. Or choose to accept whatever dysfunction (and inaction) shows up.

“I’m not pro-failure. I’m pro-learning.”

Be the person who makes answers happen, not the person who has answers.

autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These three conditions are the largest predictors of happiness,

It’s not enough to become a functional team. We want to be a learning team, a growing team, an ever-getting-better team.

The humans who work on the project are the biggest asset. Shouldn’t you invest in them?

Commit to your team, commit to each other, and commit to your shared future. Renew those vows every week.

The job of a manager is to make yourself as unnecessary as possible.

A teacher who only lectures is no more valuable than a YouTube video. A teacher who asks great questions makes life-long learners.

Innovation is hard, and if you really want it you’ll have to make a safe place for risk taking.

If you only give individual feedback and never examine group dynamics, you’ve only got half the puzzle.

So I recommend starting with feedback about how we are together, rather than starting with the more difficult “This is how I see you.”

Do not use the company’s schedule as an excuse not to have difficult but necessary conversations.

At the end of the conversation, ask your report if they have any advice for you, either about your feedback style or leadership.

It’s easy to tell yourself a narrative of who you are. We probably do it all the time. “I’m a good person, a good leader, and a good teammate,” but am I? Are you? How would you know?

What goes around comes around, often with interest.

Sometimes being kicked out of a place where you struggle is a gift. Not always. But sometimes.

“You have to share what doesn’t work, so we can get better.”

Never shut down an idea, only unpack it.