Building the dream team
Since taking the reins at Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella has made a point of cultivating a culture that encourages a personal growth mindset among its employees.
The idea is that rather than orienting hiring, promotions, compensation, and training around the belief that people have certain fixed attributes, companies should trust that people can grow if given the proper space and incentives.
As I’ve written about recently, it’s much easier to build an organization with specific values in mind when starting fresh — new leadership in an established organization trying to cultivate this kind of culture will run into momentum, things people in management have assumed are their mandate, and the reward structure they’ve been operating under.
Those managers are mightily influenced by career risk: they’d rather keep doing what has been known to work (for them, not necessarily the organization) than risk looking like an idiot for trying something that might improve things, but also might blow up in their face.
This behavior can be maintained for shockingly long periods of time in organizations buoyed by a successful hold on a particular market of customers, followers, or members. While I’m skeptical it’s been wholly pervasive, I’m impressed with Nadella making any progress in shifting Microsoft’s course against these winds.
A new group lives or dies based on whether it can maintain a cohesive founding group until it achieves some of that momentum. Instilling that sense requires having visible traction — evidence that the group is making some progress toward its goal — and then sustaining effort in that direction by making improvements to the group’s processes that compound.
Accomplishing this demands leaning into the strengths of a small group: distributing responsibilities that in sum lead to progress in the direction of the overall vision or goal among the team so that it’s clear what each individual is obligated to deliver, and giving those same members the agency to take action and incorporate feedback they get back from their efforts (using this broadly — could be metrics on a product, donations collected, participation in hosted events) to identify ever-more ideal approaches to their specific challenges. Whenever possible, avoid bullshit: “We agreed to do it this way! It wasn’t a bad approach, you just couldn’t execute! Follow the procedure we agreed to before we started!”
In fact, go further. Reward people for making the tough choice to abandon the script and make a change that fundamentally improves the group’s odds of sustained progress towards its goals. This doesn’t mean bonus compensation — there’s research that indicates that can actually hurt long-term motivation — but instead, offering things with very little cost: appreciation and autonomy.
I’ve been shocked to see how much longer people are willing to spend outside their comfort zone, working just beyond what they know they can do or doing what they know will work, when I thank them for it.
“That was a tough call but I know it was good for us. Thank you for raising that point, pushing us to make that change. I’m sure it felt like it might be read as a disappointment, but it was the right thing to do and we’re all going to be better off for it.”
“I know you haven’t had to build/design/write something like that before. I’m sure you felt uneasy moving ahead without a clear example of what it should look like. But that work gave us something to respond to, something to iterate on. We wouldn’t have our shared sense of direction without it, so thank you for carrying that burden.”
This gratitude, stated plainly and regularly, creates a safe space for experimentation and innovation. If some of that experimentation leads to negative results — well, that learning is its own progress. It informs thinking that will go into future experiments.
Over the course of multiple iterations, these efforts should lead to increased confidence in certain elements of the overall approach, and that confidence should be rewarded with additional autonomy. As long as there’s a clear vision and understanding of what progress toward that goal would look like, authority on how to address a challenge should be held by and grow with the person who has demonstrated a willingness to work at the edge of their ability and continually improve themselves. In this way, you can give increased responsibility without it feeling like a burden — instead, it feels like a gift of appreciation and trust.
Thinking this way changes how you think about building a core team in the first place. It’s tempting to think purely in terms of what a “dream team” would look like — break down the tasks you need to complete, and bring in folks who’ve demonstrated very strong proficiency in those exact tasks (or more commonly and far worse, folks who’ve been affiliated with organizations known for accomplishing those tasks).
But if you know you’re going to instill this kind of culture of personal growth, you can look for something a bit different: people with adjacent skillsets who demonstrate an appetite for learning and agency. Investing in this kind of group member is an arbitrage bet: you’ll end up paying less than someone who looks like an obvious fit, and you can get outsized returns from the fact that they won’t feel the urge to do exactly what they did in their previous role (and therefore their previous organization) but instead optimize for finding and improving on the right thing to do in this specific context.
The team that prospectively looks like like the dream team is almost bound to disappoint. In “Talent is Overrated,” Geoff Colvin exemplifies this point with “All Star” or Olympic teams composed of the best players from different world-class teams coming together and failing to be the sum of their parts. These folks are amazing in specific environments — take them out of those circumstances and ask them to work with people they spend most of their lives engaged with as competitors, and you get a recipe for lackluster results.
He contrasts this with the case of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger at Berkshire Hathaway. 50 years ago, no one would have thought that an investor in Omaha and a lawyer in Los Angeles would come together to build one of the most impressive records in the history of investment, but once they started collaborating they nurtured each other’s best habits around building accurate models of the world and making effective decisions. It’s better to build the dream team that only looks that way in hindsight than one that looks like it should be but never gets there.