It’s been almost two years since I published a A Mental Model for Leading High Performance Teams, and over 1 year since my last post. Although I haven’t been actively writing, I do see the comment and highlight notifications and I appreciate the readership the post gets. I owe you all another post, and this time I’m going to write about some of the limitations and challenges I’ve faced with the model and how to overcome them.
I still use the Mental Model to this day to lead and manage teams, but there are some practical limitations and challenges you may run into day-to-day while operating with the model.
The post will dive a little deeper into ambiguity with objectives, risks of siloing teams, and tradeoffs between autonomy and alignment. It will make more sense if you’ve read A Mental Model for Leading High Performance Teams.
Some Ambiguity with your Objectives is OK
I advocate having a crystal clear picture of your objectives, and while more clarity is generally better, the amount of ambiguity your team can tolerate depends on your team’s makeup. If your team is composed of experienced, senior engineers who are autonomous and comfortable with having unclear objectives, and you can rely on them to step up and provide some definition, then ambiguity is OK. If your team is composed of junior engineers, then the more clarity you’ll need to provide.
Don’t use Guardrails to Build Silos — Foster Collaboration and Trust
In the Model, Guardrails are used to ensure your team is headed in the right direction while maintaining autonomy, and to help eliminate noise and distractions from your team. It ultimately allows your team to focus.
You want to set Guardrails, but it’s not meant to silo your team off from others. You want to foster collaboration and build trust with other teams and organizations. If other teams need your help, try to help, but you have to understand the impact to their team as well as yours, understand the tradeoffs, and make a judgement call on what to do. If you’re not able to accommodate other teams, chat with their lead and see if you reprioritize or address it at a later point. Ensure you are forging positive, healthy working relationships.
Additionally, reader Paulo Melo, commented that it’s healthy to share external pressures with the team, and I absolutely agree. It’s important to make the distinction between positive and negative pressures. Pressure to meet a customer commitment is a positive pressure and can ignite a sense of urgency with the team which is ultimately rewarding if you celebrate your wins. This assumes that your team is able to focus on meeting those commitments. However, is the pressure is preventing your team from focusing, this pressure is negative and that’s something you’ll have to manage. Again, have a chat with the manager, understand their needs, and see if you can work something out.
Autonomy vs Alignment
If you’re managing subteams, it’s important that the teams stay aligned in their efforts. Trusting your team to make decisions enables autonomy, but if the teams are not talking to each other they may become misaligned or start to diverge.
If giving your team autonomy leads them to diverge in different directions, this is where you’ll have to ensure you set clear enough objects and guardrails and ensure there’s some convergence. Make sure the team’s are talking through regular syncs and 1–1s.
What do you think? Would love to hear your feedback.
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