Teamwork
~4 mins read
However hard you work, the results are limited by a single person.
Nothing great is built alone but by working effectively in groups.
A team in harmony covers weaknesses and amplifies strengths.
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Almost everything is people and communication.
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Everyone on the team should clearly understand why we are doing this in the first place
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Explain the intent
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People trust surgical teams with their lives because everyone in the team is an expert in their job, they trust each other and work together, leading to unparalleled professional prowess
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Mastery and Respect lead to Trust, trust leads to autonomy and harmony
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Company Culture is a result of Hiring decisions
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Lead by example, words are forgotten but actions not
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Highly trained and talented leaders, autonomous in decisions of their area
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Make sure that every area of responsibility has a definite owner
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Consistency and certainty in rewards and consequences
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The right person in the right place
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Due diligence
- Empower people. If people are not autonomous and empowered in their areas, how can you expect Creativity?
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Lead by inspiration
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Build projects around motivated people. Provide the environment, remove obstacles
If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up people to collect wood
and don’t assign them tasks and work,
but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- Focus on the important few
Do One Thing At A Time And Do It Well
‘Manage the top line, and the bottom line will follow.’ What’s the top line? It’s things like, why are we doing this in the first place? What’s our strategy? What are customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus on.
Steve Jobs
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Balance data with intuition and experience
- Not every important thing is measurable
- Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
- There is no single leadership style that suits all
44 Engineering Management Lessons
What not to do
- Trying to prove your worth
- Insecurity
- Micromanaging
- Not delegating
- Competing with reports
- Complaining
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Treating people like kids, the workplace is not day-care
- Single management style, mostly the style in which you prefer to be managed
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Hiring people like yourself
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Being all-business, viewing people as “resources”
- Impatience
- Not listening well
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Not asking the right questions
- Don’t let people pressure you into decisions you don’t believe in. They’ll hold you responsible for them later, and they’ll be right. Decisions are your responsibility.
Also see this 1944 CIA memo, on how to infiltrate an organization and make it dysfunctional
