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Building a Team You’d Want to Join

Imagine you’re interviewing a great candidate.

They’re smart, experienced, curious, and exactly the kind of person you want on your team. You’ve spent most of the interview telling them why they should want the job.

You describe the culture. You talk about the people. You explain the opportunities ahead. You tell them how much your organization values its employees and how much room they’ll have to grow.

Then the candidate asks a question you weren’t expecting.

“What do your best employees say they like about working for you?”

How would you answer?

Better yet, imagine two of your current employees are sitting beside you.

Would they agree?

Would they recognize the team you’ve spent the last 45 minutes describing?

That’s an interesting question because managers spend an enormous amount of time evaluating other people. We evaluate performance, attitude, potential, communication, teamwork, initiative, accountability, and whether someone fits the culture we’re trying to build.

This week, I’d like to turn the evaluation around.

If you knew everything you know about your team, but didn’t currently work there, would you want to join it?

And an even harder question:

Would you want to work for you?

Culture Looks Different From the Other Side

When managers think about culture, we often think at the organizational level. We think about company values, mission statements, employee benefits, recognition programs, annual surveys, town halls, and whatever words are painted on the wall.

Those things matter.

But your employees experience culture much closer to home.

They experience culture when they make a mistake.

They experience it when they disagree with you.

They experience it when someone else isn’t carrying their share of the load.

They experience it when they bring you bad news.

They experience it when they have a good idea.

They experience it when they need help.

They experience it when they do excellent work and wonder whether anyone noticed.

Most importantly, they experience culture through their manager.

That’s why two teams inside the same company can feel like completely different places to work. Same CEO. Same benefits. Same employee handbook. Same company values.

Different manager.

Different experience.

Managers don’t control every part of an employee’s experience, but they control far more of it than they sometimes realize.

The question isn’t simply whether your company has a good culture.

What kind of culture exists within 20 feet of you?

Daniel Coyle Went Looking for Great Teams

Daniel Coyle became fascinated by a simple question: Why do some groups consistently perform at extraordinary levels?

For his book The Culture Code, he studied organizations and teams known for exceptional performance, including Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs, Navy SEALs, and others. He wasn’t looking for motivational slogans. He wanted to understand what people actually did differently.

Coyle eventually organized much of what he observed around three ideas:

Build safety. Share vulnerability. Establish purpose.

Those three ideas give managers a useful way to examine their own teams.

Safety asks whether people believe they belong and can speak honestly.

Vulnerability asks whether people, including the leader, can admit mistakes, acknowledge weaknesses, ask for help, and say, “I don’t know.”

Purpose asks whether people understand what they’re trying to accomplish together and why it matters.

Notice what isn’t on that list.

Free snacks.

Ping-pong tables.

Company swag.

Culture isn’t primarily about making work more comfortable. It’s about creating an environment where people can do meaningful work with people they trust.

Gregg Popovich Built Belonging Without Lowering the Standard

One of the leaders Coyle studied was Gregg Popovich, the longtime coach of the San Antonio Spurs.

Popovich is an interesting leadership example because nobody would describe him as soft. He has spent decades coaching professional athletes at the highest level, where expectations are enormous and performance is measured publicly every night.

But Coyle found something underneath those high standards.

Popovich invested deeply in relationships.

He learned about his players’ lives. He brought people together for meals. He created conversations that had nothing to do with basketball. He communicated repeatedly, through countless small interactions, that the people around him mattered beyond what they could produce on the court.

And then he coached them hard.

That’s an important combination.

Managers sometimes assume they have to choose between creating a team people enjoy being part of and creating a team with demanding standards.

They don’t.

In fact, talented people often want high standards.

They want to work alongside people they respect. They want teammates who follow through. They want their own work to matter. They want to become better. They don’t want to spend their days compensating for people who repeatedly underperform while the manager looks the other way.

A team you’d want to join isn’t necessarily an easy team.

It should be a team where people are valued and challenged.

Where support and accountability can exist in the same conversation.

Where someone can hear, “You’re capable of better than this,” and understand that the sentence comes from a manager who genuinely wants them to succeed.

Would Great People Want to Work Here?

Patrick Lencioni describes the ideal team player using three characteristics in his book of the same name:

Humble. Hungry. Smart.

Organizations often use those characteristics to think about the people they want to hire.

Let’s reverse the lens.

Would humble, hungry, smart people want to work on your team?

A hungry employee wants to grow. Are you giving them meaningful responsibility, coaching, and opportunities to stretch?

A humble employee probably doesn’t want to work for a manager who needs all the credit.

A people-smart employee will quickly recognize a culture filled with politics, gossip, favoritism, or distrust.

Great employees aren’t only asking whether they’re capable of succeeding on your team.

They’re deciding whether your team deserves their best work.

That’s worth remembering when we talk about retention.

Managers sometimes ask why talented employees leave. Perhaps we should occasionally ask a different question:

What are we giving talented employees a reason to stay for?

When Alan Mulally became CEO in 2006, Ford was in serious trouble. The company would lose billions of dollars that year, yet Mulally encountered a leadership culture where executives were reluctant to admit that anything was going wrong.

He introduced regular Business Plan Review meetings where leaders used a simple color system to report progress.

Green meant things were on plan.

Yellow meant there were concerns.

Red meant there was a problem.

Week after week, Mulally reportedly looked at a sea of green.

Think about the absurdity of that.

The company was losing billions, yet everything was green.

Why?

Because people had learned that admitting a problem could be dangerous.

Eventually, executive Mark Fields showed a problem as red.

Imagine that moment.

Everyone in the room is watching the new CEO.

Mulally could have interrogated Fields. He could have expressed disappointment. He could have demanded to know how the problem happened.

Instead, Mulally applauded.

Then he asked how the team could help.

That small response communicated something larger than any corporate values presentation could have accomplished:

We can tell the truth here.

Soon, more yellow and red began appearing.

The problems hadn’t suddenly multiplied.

People had finally become willing to talk about the problems that were already there.

That’s culture.

And managers create it in moments exactly like that.

What Happens When Someone Brings You Bad News?

Think about your own team.

An employee walks into your office and tells you that a project you’ve been counting on is going to miss its deadline.

What happens next?

Maybe you stay curious and ask what happened.

Maybe you immediately become visibly frustrated.

Maybe you interrupt.

Maybe you start assigning blame.

Maybe you say, “Thank you for telling me early. Let’s figure this out.”

Whatever you do teaches the employee something.

If bringing you bad news results in humiliation, anger, or blame, people will eventually stop bringing you bad news.

The problems won’t disappear.

You’ll simply learn about them later.

The same thing happens with ideas. If every suggestion is immediately met with an explanation of why it won’t work, eventually people stop suggesting things.

It happens with disagreement. If challenging the manager always ends badly, meetings become wonderfully agreeable while the conversations that actually matter happen afterward in the hallway.

It happens with mistakes. If every mistake becomes evidence that someone can’t be trusted, people learn to hide mistakes.

Managers teach people how to interact with them.

Usually without realizing they’re teaching anything at all.

Trust Requires Authority

There’s another characteristic of teams talented people want to join: people are trusted to make meaningful decisions.

The Ritz-Carlton has long been known for creating unusually clear service standards while also empowering employees to solve guest problems. The combination matters.

Standards without authority create bureaucracy.

Authority without standards creates chaos.

Give people both and something interesting happens.

They can exercise judgment.

Think about what it communicates when you’ve hired someone because they’re talented, experienced, and capable, then require your approval for nearly every meaningful decision they make.

Eventually they stop making decisions.

They bring them to you.

Then you become overwhelmed and wonder why nobody takes ownership.

Sometimes the team isn’t lacking initiative.

Sometimes we’ve trained the initiative out of them.

A team I’d want to join would make expectations clear, establish appropriate boundaries, and then trust me to operate inside them.

I’d want my manager available when I needed help, but I wouldn’t want to need permission to do my job.

My guess is your best employees feel the same way.

Are People Better Because They Worked for You?

This may be my favorite question of all.

Imagine one of your employees leaves your team three years from now for an incredible opportunity.

Will they be better because they spent those three years working for you?

Will they communicate better?

Will they make better decisions?

Will they understand themselves better?

Will they know how to handle conflict?

Will they be more confident?

Will they have skills they didn’t have when they arrived?

Will they someday lead someone else differently because of something they learned from you?

Managers naturally think about what employees contribute to the team.

Great managers also think about what the team contributes to the employee.

The best people I’ve worked for didn’t simply get work out of me. They added something to me.

That’s a legacy available to every manager.

Try the “Would You Join Your Team?” Test

This week, I’d like you to evaluate your team from the other side of the table.

Imagine you know everything you currently know about your team, your organization, and your manager.

But you don’t work there.

Now answer these questions honestly:

Would I apply for a job on this team?

If I received an offer, would I accept it?

Can people tell the truth here, especially when the truth is uncomfortable?

Would I recommend this manager to someone I care about?

Would the most talented person I know want to work on this team?

Am I likely to become better because I work here?

Don’t rush through those questions.

And don’t answer them as the manager you hope you are.

Answer them as someone who has watched you lead for the last year.

If the answers make you proud, keep building.

If one makes you uncomfortable, pay attention to it.

That’s useful information.

Build the Team From the Inside Out

Managers spend plenty of time asking how to build better teams.

How do I improve engagement?

How do I retain good people?

How do I create accountability?

How do I get people to communicate?

How do I build trust?

Those are good questions.

But occasionally we need to stop trying to fix the people around us and examine the environment we’re asking them to work in.

Would people choose it?

Would great people thrive in it?

Would you?

You don’t need to transform everything this week.

Find one reason you wouldn’t want to join your own team and start there.

Maybe people need more clarity.

Maybe they need more autonomy.

Maybe you’ve allowed an accountability problem to linger.

Maybe you need to listen better when someone disagrees.

Maybe your strongest employee hasn’t had a meaningful development conversation with you in six months.

Maybe your team needs to know each other as people again.

Culture is built through hundreds of moments like these.

And tomorrow, you’ll create a few more.

So create the kind you’d want to experience yourself.

Because one day a great candidate may sit across from you and ask why talented people love working on your team.

Build a team where you don’t have to think very hard about the answer.

Managers: Become a premium Boundless member to build your leadership with coaching, peers, and proven tools.

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Business owners and executives: Develop managers who build stronger teams and create environments where talented people can do their best work.

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Onward.