Unlocking Team Potential: How One Book Transformed This VP's Leadership Approach

Oh boy. Um, I've read this book. Uh, well, I, I read a lot of books and it had been mentioned in a whole bunch of other books that I've read, like the Phoenix Project and uh the Unicorn Project and the DevOps Handbook. It's been mentioned several times, and then I was like, maybe I should read this book. It's called The Five Dysfunctions of the Team. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And um. That really just gave me kind of an aha moment about team dynamics and, and how to really get a high-performing team, um, you know, challenging each other in, in a way that's productive. Um, and I found it so useful that, you know, I got our whole leadership team to read it. Um, and then I started sharing it, uh, in my one on ones with the other people on the engineering team and other folks in the, in the lab. Um, and, you know, I think, you know, just the whole, whole idea of, of not being afraid to To be candid and have that kind of candor with, um, you know, your team, uh, and, you know, making it a sort of a safe place for, for, for this back and forth conflict. But then, you know, Also, working as a team, you know, we, we can decide together to do something even if we disagree. I, I thought it was a really, really effective way to, um, to have teams work. And, um, I'd, I'd much rather have someone challenge, uh, you know, an idea that I'm presenting to make it better, right? Rather than just go along with it and then later say, oh, I never thought that was a good idea.

Um, I think that, uh, the key lesson in the book is, is really one of, um, Teams, especially high performance teams, work better when there is a high degree of transparency, uh, honesty, and, um, Uh, a willingness to To take ideas and, and build upon them with better ideas based on solid feedback.

Uh, it all comes down to people, man. Like, it all comes down to people. No matter what you're doing, no matter what you're building, um, even if you're not building, if you're, if you're serving your operations, you're in marketing, uh, in a business, it comes down to the people and how they communicate with one another. And, you know, you have to ask yourself the question, do you want to be At maximum effectiveness, uh, as, as an organization or as a team, or a team of teams, or do you want there to be uh sort of frictional components that, that slow you down? And the aha moment for me was like, yeah, you know, I see some of these things in, in, in interactions, right? Especially, you know, you get around the table and there's some like very senior person at the table. There's fear of like, Asking the question, right? Uh, and, uh, there, there, I think that when you, uh, encourage people to bring their ideas, you know, who cares what level you are in the organization, right? If, you know, we, we hire smart people, we hire people that have ideas, we want them to just kind of bubble them up. And, you know, we, we want everyone to contribute to making the organization better. Um I mean, I've read a lot of technical books, um, and, and books about the Um, you know, AI industry. But, but this one I think was, was really, really significant to me just because it, it, it, it touches on so many aspects of, of working with people in order to, to do great things.