Your Team Is the Engine Driving Everything You Prioritize Above the Team

Companies frequently reach out to see whether I can facilitate a half-day or day-long session to “get the team aligned” or “build better habits”. My response is consistent:

No.

I also don’t train for marathons three days before the race, and for the same reason.

Investors, boards, and founders agree: the team is essential to a company’s success, especially in the early stages. The time devoted to optimizing the team tells a different story. In a typical retreat, offsite, planning session, board meeting, or even the weekly executive team meeting, work on the team is largely an afterthought. When any attention is devoted to the health and growth of the team, it usually takes the form of superficial team building exercises or updates on the caliber of individual talent. Most of the time spent in any of these meetings is devoted to planning, OKRs, product development, customer acquisition, market trends, operational performance, customer success, competitive analysis, fundraising, and any number of other things that we know are essential to the success of the business. This misses an essential point:

The team is the engine driving every one of those components.

For being one of the elements most associated with company success and invest-ability, that’s a stupid miss and an entirely unforced error. There’s nothing mysterious or intangible about teams. We know that psychological safety correlates with performance, and we know how to increase it. We have tools to test for team health, and we have outcomes we can point to that demonstrate team performance. If you still associate team building with trust falls and ropes courses, you’re living in the past. A smart founder should be a smart investor, and teams are a dead simple investment.

The quality of your product development is a function of having a great product lead, but it also stems from cooperation among marketing and engineering at a minimum. The quality of your sales forecasts comes from solid sales leadership but also from the collaboration between sales and finance. The quality of your recruiting stems from a head of people who understands talent management and the company’s culture, but it also depends on how that person works with other leadership to identify and define people needs and standards for success.

Where there is trust, openness, and clear intentions, teams execute these activities with confidence and little rework. Where those conditions do not exist, team members do a lot of checking up on what other people did or didn’t do, they waste time with gossip, they unmake and remake decisions, they fail to keep commitments to each other and the company, and they take a ridiculous amount of time in doing all of that. That dynamic wastes time, misses opportunities, and costs a fortune.

It’s simple, really: where do you think the decisions in your company come from?

Everything that happens in your company relies on coordination and collaboration—the functions that most precisely describe what teams do. Teams are force multipliers for the vision of the company. They do on behalf of the vision what founders and executives cannot do alone. Teams perform all of these activities to a better or worse degree depending on how well they understand what they need to do and how inclined their members are to trust each other in working together. This is where the work of growing teams lives. This is where the ROI lives.

Think of it this way: for any physical activity we want to engage in, the attention we pay to the health and strength of our bodies will increase our performance and satisfaction when we engage in those activities. Eating nutritious food and getting plenty of water keeps our bodies healthy. Lifting weights increases strength. Cardio builds stamina. Stretching increases flexibility. They all work together to create fitness. Obvious, right?

So it’s probably also obvious that if you don’t run for a month, eat cheeseburgers on the regular, and stay awake half the night, that one day when you pull on the sneakers and head out the door for a quick six miles is going to suck. You haven’t taken care of the engine—your body—and your performance and satisfaction are going to suffer as a result. In fact, you might just end up avoiding anything physical altogether. We all know where that leads.

Why would it be any different for your team? If you and your colleagues don’t make giving and receiving feedback a regular part of your work, how will you give or receive feedback well when it really matters? If you aren’t clear on your decision-making processes, how will you make critical decisions? If you behave in a passive-aggressive manner during most meetings, how will you address conflict when it inevitably happens?

What you do every day prepares you for what you need to do when things get hard.

Just as you can’t go into the gym for 12 hours one day to get fit, you can’t build good habits in your team in an hour or a day or even three days. You can commit to learning and practicing new habits in a day—and you really do need to take the time for this—but the key to creating good team habits is to practice those habits day in and day out.

Great teams act with confidence and purpose. They take risks knowing that others on the team have their backs. They waste less time with gossip and pointless detours. They drive results and profitability, and they do it at a lower cost. Team performance is tangible: it shows up on the bottom line.

Growing a great team isn’t easy, but it is simple. It just takes the will and discipline to choose excellence every day, and that means prioritizing the work of the team above what we often think of as the work. You have to give your team the time and attention it requires. Anything you prioritize above the performance of the team is likely to suck a little more than it should.