Leading a Team the Right Way

Guiding principles for any type of leadership

---

Effective leadership is the cornerstone of any successful team, yet many struggle to be effective.

Leading isn't just about giving orders or setting goals. It's about connecting disparate teams, aligning their efforts with long-term objectives, and ensuring products are developed efficiently and accurately.

Coordination

One of the biggest problems in most companies is coordination.

Whether it's time management, team coordination, or understanding the broader vision, lack of alignment causes long-lasting problems.

Many teams operate in silos, with separate roles being inherently insulated from others. The challenge is to connect everyone together for common goals.

A skilled leader speaks everyone's language and understands the nuances of every department. More importantly, they know how to align the company's vision with the resources available.

This means working with executives to understand the long-term strategy, collaborating with sales and clients to ensure that clients' needs are met, and working closely with the teams building the product.

This isn't just about filling in gaps; it's about preventing them from forming in the first place.

It's not a role for everyone. I'm sure this is why there's such a common stereotype of people disliking managers.

Nobody dislikes the person who is the literal glue holding the company together, they dislike the person who is not a good manager, doesn't help, and in some cases, makes things worse merely by existing.

Delegation

Effective delegation requires coordination and humility. It doesn't matter if you're the best at a specific job, your productivity is limited by the hours in a day. Someone who can effectively manage and coordinate work between multiple teams is exponentially more valuable.

It's the inverse of Warren Buffett's famous quote: "Nine pregnant women can't produce a baby in one month."

While one person is limited to a single result in a set timeframe, by leveraging others, you multiply your output. The key is understanding how to scale by delegating and coordinating.

Anyone who has works in a small startup or started their own company knows this firsthand.

For example, if I have an idea in mind, I might be able to complete it in a week. However, if I hand off the work to someone else, it might take a month. Communicating ideas and expectations is challenging, so even if the person taking over is equally skilled, the time required to transfer knowledge and context means the process will inevitably take longer. That's just the reality.

But here's the trade-off: instead of dedicating 100% of my time for a week do the work myself, I can spend 10% of my time over a month coordinating the development.

That leaves me with 90% of my time free to focus on other priorities.

Guiding Instead of Fixing

The old "give a man a fish" adage rings true for leadership.

When team members approach you with questions, resist the urge to provide a direct answer. Instead, prompt them to think critically.

• Ask guiding questions: "What have you tried?"; "Have you thought about X?"; "What happens if you Y?"; "What would you do if Z?"

• Foster independence: The goal is to help them arrive at the solution on their own. Prompt them to explore different avenues of thought. Often, they will come to the correct answer with minimal direction. Over time, they'll internalize this process, learning to navigate challenges independently.

Nine times out of ten, they just need a little nudge in the right direction. And once they get there, they're way more likely to remember how they did it, which means they won't keep coming to you with the same problems.

Stop Prescribing, Start Facilitating

Focus on outcomes instead of prescribing implementations.

If you find yourself in a leadership role for the first time, you might struggle with being more hands-off when it comes to physical work being done.

In general, it's not your job to dictate exactly how things should be done. Prescribing specific implementations for a task might feel helpful, but it stifles creativity and growth.

Your role is to set the direction and give your team the freedom to figure out the "how" themselves. Say what needs to be accomplished, not how to accomplish it, and then support your team throughout that process.

Let your team own their work and find the best solutions. By focusing on outcomes, you encourage independence and innovation, which ultimately leads to stronger, more capable teams.

When Prescribing is Expected

This isn't to say you won't ever need to step in and prescribe a solution or implementation. Some examples include:

• Architectural or Long-Term Vision: When decisions impact the bigger picture, your input is essential.
• Resolving Stalemates: When your team can't agree on a direction, it's your job to break the tie and keep things moving.
• Cutting Through Bike Shedding: If the team is stuck on trivial details, step in to refocus on what truly matters.

Encourage Independence

One of the worst things you can do as a leader is create a team that can't make decisions without you. You don't want to be the bottleneck. You want a team that knows when to move forward and how to handle situations on their own.

• Set clear expectations and step back: Give clear objectives, but avoid micromanaging. Let your team figure out the details and come to you only if needed. If your team knows the end goal and what's expected of them, they won't need to come to you for every little decision.
• Delegate decision-making: Involve your team in key decisions, allowing them to weigh in and own the outcomes. This builds confidence and trust in their abilities.
• Encourage experimentation: Promote a culture where trying new approaches is valued. Let your team explore creative solutions without fear of failure, reinforcing their autonomy.

Your team should be able to run without you constantly steering the ship. That's when you know you've done your job right.

Successes Are Theirs, Failures Are Yours

When your team succeeds, it's because of their hard work — and your guidance. But when they fail, that's on you. Either you didn't provide the right support, didn't give enough direction, or missed a critical piece of the puzzle.

Don't be the person who assigns blame when things go wrong and takes credit when it goes right. Nobody likes that person.

Blame

Avoid assigning blame. Your responsibility is to solve and prevent issues, and pointing fingers doesn't accomplish either goal.

Often, when something goes wrong, the cause of it occurring can be traced directly back to a breakdown of processes. The correct approach is finding out why something happened, and how to prevent it from happening in the future.

Positive Failure

This also ties back to the idea of guiding instead of fixing. If your team is failing, let them fail. Jumping in at the last second to "fix things" is wrong for multiple reasons.

First, you'll burn out trying to juggle everyone's tasks on top of your own. There's only so much you can do in a day. Second, it sends a very clear message that you don't trust your team. And third, your team will never learn.

Failures are valuable learning experiences for both you and your team. The most effective leaders are often those who have witnessed mistakes firsthand or made them themselves.

You can't compress a decade of failures into a lesson for someone else. Experiencing mistakes personally gives you a deeper understanding of what went wrong and equips you to quickly course-correct or avoid similar pitfalls in the future.

Have Strong, but Flexible Opinions

At this stage in your career, you should have a substantial repertoire of failures under your belt, your own and others'. You've seen what doesn't work, learned what does, and forged strong convictions from those experiences.

But you should also be willing to change your opinions for good reasons. Sometimes an opinion becomes outdated, or maybe you were wrong about something, and someone gives you solid evidence to back it up. That's great — it means you've learned something.

Being at either extreme, whether apathetic or inflexibly dogmatic, is a mistake.

Having no convictions at all makes you a weak leader. You can't guide a team when you refuse to take a stance. This includes situations where you might not have all the answers. In those cases, make the best decision you can based on your understanding. The key is that you made a decision.

Conversely, being so firm in your beliefs that you never change them is equally, if not more, detrimental. Nobody is right 100% of the time, that's just not statistically possible.

If you refuse to adjust your thinking when presented with new information, you're going to be wrong more often than not, and you'll be a pain to work with.

Keep a Record of Everything

Keep track of everything: your work, your team's progress, successes, failures, weird hiccups, ideas that you had in the shower, notes from a meeting or conversation. Really anything that feels important.

When you need a spark of inspiration, a reference point to explain a decision, defend a team member, provide tangible examples for a promotion, or revisit a fleeting idea, those records become invaluable.

It also allows you to have a living timeline that can help show you what's working and what's not. When you've got records of what went right and what went wrong, you can make better decisions moving forward.

Document Everything

Documentation is one of the most valuable assets for any organization, yet it's often neglected.

Knowledge is hard-earned but can be lost in an instant. People leave the company, teams reorganize, and work gets done in silos, sometimes disappearing without a trace. If a team has a low "bus factor" in key areas, you're risking the loss of critical knowledge entirely.

That's why it's essential to foster a culture of documenting everything — tech specs, work planning, feature implementations, anything.

If someone is working on something, there should be documentation to go with it.

An added benefit of thorough documentation is that it can enhance the quality of the work itself. Engineers, who may not always excel at articulating their ideas through writing, often discover that explaining their work compels them to deconstruct it, leading to a deeper understanding.

This process of breaking it down for documentation fosters clarity and can unveil areas for improvement that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.

It's like solving a problem by working backward. Writing out the details helps them see how their piece fits into the broader product or vision, and it can lead to better code and better outcomes overall.

Be Extremely Strict with Your Time

Time is the one resource you can't make more of or get back.

How you manage your time directly impacts the value you bring to your team and the organization.

Being overly available or spread too thin means it's harder to focus on things that really matter, and worse, you're not letting your team step up. Your time needs to be used wisely and intentionally.

• Delegate effectively: If someone else can do a task, let them. You don't need to be involved in every little decision or process. This not only frees up your time but also empowers your team to take ownership of tasks.
• Protect your focus: Don't let your schedule get filled with unnecessary meetings or constant interruptions. Block off time to focus on high-level strategy, planning, or problem-solving that only you can handle.
• Prioritize: There will always be more things you could do, but not everything is equally important. Be clear about what your priorities are and spend your time on the things that will have the biggest impact on the team's success.

Saying No

You need to learn to say "no" to things.

On the flip side, saying yes to everything will eat up your time and productivity, which will be a problem. Learning to say no when needed is one of the most important skills you'll need as a leader.

Managing your time well as a leader doesn't mean you're detached or unavailable—it means you're choosing to focus on the areas where your input has the most value, allowing your team to handle the rest.

Establish Processes

Good leadership requires clear processes and frameworks for everything your team does.

This means creating structure around meetings, feedback, support, and even how decisions are made. This reduces ambiguity, ensures consistency, and lets the team know exactly how things operate.

• Structured meetings: Set clear agendas, time limits, and outcomes for every meeting. This keeps things on track and ensures everyone's time is respected.
• Feedback loops: Develop a regular cadence for feedback, both giving and receiving, so it becomes an expected part of the process rather than an afterthought.
• Support channels: Make sure there's a defined way for the team to ask for help—whether it's technical support, project guidance, or personal development.

Having these processes in place creates a predictable, efficient environment where your team knows what to expect and how to operate within clear boundaries.

Make Feedback a Priority

Regular feedback is crucial to maintaining clear communication. Whether your team is small or large, you need to talk to everyone.

If your team is large enough that you don't have direct contact with every member, schedule "skip level" meetings—talk to people a few levels junior to you.

This gives you a more direct line to what's really going on day-to-day, away from the filtered feedback you might get from direct reports.

These meetings are not just about performance reviews; they're about understanding general sentiment, hearing thoughts on the business, and identifying pain points that might not be visible from your vantage point.

One on Ones

One-on-ones are crucial, not just for you, but especially for your team.

This is where you need to put yourself in their shoes—it's much harder for them to get your attention than it is for you to reach out to them. Setting aside dedicated time for individual conversations helps them feel more comfortable and open when talking to you.

It's equally important to ask for feedback—be straightforward about it. We all have blind spots that only an outside perspective can reveal. Getting your team's input helps you see things you might otherwise miss, and their insights are invaluable.

The point of one-on-ones is to build trust and give you a clearer picture of the team's dynamics, while also making employees feel valued and heard at every level.

However, do not schedule weekly meetings without a clear purpose. And no, "weekly check-in" is not a clear purpose, it's a title that is just as vague as calling it "meeting".

There's no need for a fixed time, day, or duration. If the meeting can be 10 minutes, let it. If it's shorter, it could have probably been an email. If certain topics need to be addressed once a month while others arise twice in a week, that's fine.

The point is that you should let your team know that they can come to you at any time. Here's an easy yardstick you can use: if anyone mentions "weekend plans", the meeting probably didn't need to happen, or could have ended two small-talks ago.

Giving feedback the right way

Choose your words carefully.

When you're in a leadership role, your feedback carries a lot more weight than it used to. You're no longer just a coworker offering input—you're someone whose words can impact a person's career and confidence.

When you're in a leadership role, your words carry more weight than they once did, so it's essential to be deliberate and thoughtful in your communication, especially when delivering feedback.

If you're a normal person, you want to help, so approach these conversations with that intention (and make sure you do so without sounding like a cliché).

It's about being sincere and showing that you're invested in their success, because you should be. Altruism aside, you are your team, and their growth is a reflection of your leadership.

Empathize

Leadership is fundamentally about people. Your role is to connect with, understand, and guide the individuals on your team.

Every person is unique, with different personalities, work styles, and needs. As a leader, it's crucial to empathize and adapt your approach to fit each team member.

Take the time to understand each person's perspective. What motivates them? What challenges do they face? By showing genuine care and concern, you build trust and foster a more supportive environment.

Adapt your style. Recognize that not everyone responds to the same type of direction or feedback.

Some may thrive on detailed guidance, while others might prefer more autonomy. Adjust your leadership style to fit the needs of each individual, whether it's providing more structured support for some or giving others the freedom to take initiative.

Understanding your team on a personal level helps you create an environment where everyone can excel. It's not about fitting everyone into one mold but about recognizing and leveraging their unique strengths and preferences to achieve collective success.

Overcommunicate

It's better to overcommunicate than to leave gaps. Ideally, everyone should be aware of what others are working on at all times.

Surprises are never acceptable in any company. If someone is caught off guard, it means there was a breakdown somewhere—whether in sharing updates or in someone not doing their due diligence.

It's easy to get caught up in work and let communication slide, but the trick is to treat "communicating" as a task in itself, something you prioritize and check off like any other work item.

50 Shades of Ambiguity

Get comfortable with the fact that very often you will face a situation where there is no "right" answer.

When you're faced with two imperfect paths, the goal is to use your instincts, experience, and the available information to make the most informed decision given the circumstances.

Sometimes, it's about choosing the lesser of two evils—balancing trade-offs like speed versus quality, or short-term gain versus long-term risk.

The key is to weigh those options, own the decision, and be prepared to course-correct if necessary. It's better to move forward with conviction than to be paralyzed by overanalysis.

Stop Nitpicking

It's easy to get caught up in small details. While it's natural to want things to be perfect, constantly fixating on minor details can create unnecessary bottlenecks and slow progress.

This form of micromanagement not only drains your energy but also sends a message that you don't trust your team to make decisions. One of the most frequent complaints people have about their managers is micromanagement, and for good reason.

If you are spending time on something, you need to constantly ask yourself if it meaningfully affects the project's success. If not, let it go.

Provide guidance on the larger goals and trust your team to manage the details within that framework. This way, you can free yourself to focus on strategy and high-impact decisions while empowering your team to handle the rest.

You set the culture

You are the person that people look to for cultural cues. When people are looking to you for advice, encouragement, plans, etc, you need to be careful how you come across.

Unplug

Sometimes, everything goes wrong and working extra is required to save a project. But besides some extreme, rare occasions, do not be the person that is available 24/7.

With the rise of remote work, it's common for people to work at all hours. However, it's important to set clear expectations for the team. You don't want to give the impression that you expect them to be working outside of regular hours.

And this should be true of any job, anywhere. Unless you are working on a cure for cancer, or are part of NASA's manned space flight ground control, chances are very good that nobody is going to die and the company isn't going to go bankrupt if you don't answer emails on the weekend.

The only people that will remember your long hours at the office are your children

Monkey See Monkey Do

You need to be constantly aware of how you come across to others. Your work style, ethics, communication, and interactions all set the tone. When people look to you for guidance, they tend to mirror your actions, whether they're good habits or quirks.

If you want your team to communicate openly, you need to model that by being more communicative yourself. If you expect them to take deadlines seriously, you have to show that you do too by meeting deadlines consistently and being vocal about their importance.

Your actions shape your team's behavior.

Handling a Problem Team Member

This is one of the toughest parts of leadership, and a question I hear all the time: what do you do with a team member who isn't delivering?

Maybe they're not at the skill level you expected, maybe their contributions are causing more problems than they solve, or maybe they're just not making any meaningful impact. When this happens, it's your responsibility to address it head-on.

First, approach everything with empathy and remember that everyone you work with is a person, just like you. (Unless, of course, this is all just a simulation like I suspect.) You want success for everyone, including your team, so always come from a place of support and collaboration rather than letting anyone stumble.

Next, it's pragmatic to realize that it's almost always cheaper to retain employees than to hire new ones. So your job, first and foremost, is to help that person.

Start by figuring out what they're struggling with—are they overwhelmed, misaligned, or lacking certain skills? Once you understand the root of the issue, you can suggest ways to improve their performance.

Maybe it's additional training, breaking tasks into smaller, more manageable pieces, or shifting them into a role that better suits their strengths.

But sometimes, despite your best efforts, things don't improve. If you've provided coaching, guidance, and every opportunity for growth, and the person still isn't meeting expectations, it's time to let them go.

While it's more expensive to hire and onboard a new employee than it is to retain an existing one, it's far more costly to keep someone who isn't pulling their weight.

Not only does it slow down the team's progress, but it also puts a drag on morale. Letting someone go is never easy, but it's necessary for the long-term health of your team and the success of your projects.

Don't wait six months before taking action. By that point, it's entirely on you. You're reacting to the problem instead of being proactive in addressing it earlier.

Being Proactive

Being proactive means anticipating challenges and taking action before they become problems.

It's your responsibility to foresee potential issues—whether it's a bottleneck in the workflow, a resource shortage, or team dynamics shifting.

Waiting until problems arise and then reacting is one of the worst ways to manage, as it means you're constantly on the defensive, scrambling to fix things.

A proactive approach allows you to stay in control, mitigate risks, and keep projects on track.

In this role, nobody should know about an issue before you do—your job is to stay ahead of the curve, identify trends, and address them before they derail progress.

Anticipating the future ensures smoother operations, stronger team cohesion, and less wasted time fixing preventable issues.

Keep Learning

Learning People Management skills are crucial for effective leadership. Like any other role, leadership requires continuous learning and development.

If you don't already have a strong foundation of people management skills, it's essential to seek out training in key areas such as feedback delivery, delegation, coaching, and conflict management.

These skills form the backbone of effective team leadership.

As you're learning or advancing your skills in these areas, it's important to contextualize them for your specific team and setting.

What works in one environment may not be as effective in another, so adapting your approach to your team's unique dynamics and needs is crucial.

Wrapping it up

Leading a team effectively requires a delicate balance of hard skills, such as strategic planning and decision-making, with soft skills like empathy, communication, and emotional intelligence.

At the end of the day, being a great leader is about enabling your team to be great.

You're not there to fix things or hand out answers. You're there to help people find their own solutions, simplify the process, and make sure the team can function without you hovering over their shoulders.

If you can do that, you'll have built something way more valuable than the sum of its parts.