“Alone you may go fast, but together you’ll go far”

You’ve led a lot of teams throughout your career, what is your strategy for selecting new team members?

I would say there’s sort of the minimum, you know, here may be some specialized skills or niche expertise that’s needed for a role, but assuming we’re past that, to me I would say attitude is much more important than aptitude, in the sense that I look for candidates and team members who are passionate about learning, who enjoy working in teams.
There’s a recent saying that I came across which has really stuck with me, which is, “alone you may go fast, but together you’ll go far.” And it really resonates with me, the notion of we get everything that we do, we get it done through working with teams.
So, you need to be someone who loves collaborating with others, who loves making sure everybody is winning together, who has a sense of humility to know that you don’t have all the answer and you never will, and that you’re able to trust and delegate work to others.
Those are some of the things that I try and look for. I think as a people manager, if I’m thinking of sort of bringing on new team members in that role, they really need to embody that mindset of humility. And it’s a collective team that wins. And it’s important to think about what does a healthy team mean to them? How do they cultivate healthy behaviors in their team? How do they empower each individual in their team to be able to do their best work? Those are some areas that I try and focus on and bringing on some new team members.

You’ve just brought up a lot of interesting questions. So, what are the most important things to remember when you’re leading a high-performance team? How do you cultivate all the things that you brought up?

A few things come to mind, but it really is sort of a little bit of what I’ve mentioned earlier. You need to create a safe space for team members to bring in their entirety of their experiences, their skill set, their ways of working so that they do their best work.
And as a manager, then you make sure you’re putting people in the right roles, you’re giving them the right kind of work, you’re removing roadblocks for them, and that as a team, they’re performing really good work that’s going to take them all far together.
I think building a high-performance team is an everyday activity. Once a team is performing well, it does not mean you can stop doing some of the things that I just mentioned. I think you need to invest in making sure that that team is functioning well every day.
You need to give them the right set of goals that are ambitious, but that also feel achievable with the right mindset and the right resources and the right investment that they need. They need to feel appreciated and recognized for what they are doing.
Roadblocks that they face will need to be always kept an eye on and removed wherever possible. They need to be in an environment that has. Of the right amount of or the right kind of tools and the right kind of processes in place so they can get their work done, versus facing friction in what they’re doing.
I think those are all the things you need to keep in mind to make sure the team is performing well.