The Justice League

Could you share a brief example of a high functioning team? Either one that you yourself led, or one where you were a member. And how was this team unique, would you say? What were the factors that made it successful?

Well, I would like to say that the teams that I’m with today, both part of and leading are highly effective. But this has been a relatively new experience. I’ll use an example from Chronicle, where there was more external validation that the team that I led was highly effective. I mean, people have commented on it, and still to this day, bemoan the fact that they are not working with that team.
And I think making the expectations very, very clear, as to what we were trying to accomplish, and just hiring people who had a passion for what we were doing. It helped me clarify in my mind, what is it that I was doing well, and not doing well? You know, somebody who was had heading up a North American enterprise team, he said what he liked about our team was that I made it very clear where the line was, where it was an unacceptable level of risk, and below that, that we were willing to work with them as much as possible, to help the company be successful.
And also, I mean, I tried to promote a very strong team identity, our tagline at Chronicle was, “Give good the advantage.” And so, our team was the justice league. And so, we are, in our tagline on the legal team was: “Do good the right way.” So, it was all a rallying cry around that, I’m trying to recreate that at Stairwell. I have a broader team now, it’s operations, so we call ourselves special ops.
So, we’re in the process of creating…we’ll have to come up with our own purpose statement or tagline, but we’re going to have our own swag. And so, it’s just like having that strong sense of team. But we also want to be part of the larger company as well, and not be isolated. So, it’s having that balance.