What Reliable Teams Are Given

Ask founders what they want most from their team and the answer, in one form or another, is nearly always the same. Reliability. People who take things and see them through. People you do not have to think about. Ask the same founders why they do not have it and the answers point outward: the market for talent, the generation, the individuals themselves, the impossibility of finding people who care the way an owner cares.

I have spent three decades around businesses of every size, from the boardroom to the operating seats, and I have had the chance to watch a good number of genuinely reliable teams at close range, the kind a leader can hand something to and stop holding their breath. They had something in common, and it took me longer than it should have to see it, because it was not where I was looking.

It was not the hiring.

The reliable teams were not made of unusually gifted people. They were made of ordinary, capable people who had been given three specific things, and the giving was deliberate.

The first was a whole area rather than a stream of tasks. There is a difference in kind, not degree, between a person who completes assignments and a person who owns an outcome with edges: this area, this standard, this result, yours. Ownership is where initiative comes from. A founder who parcels work out as tasks and then wonders why nobody takes initiative is asking for the fruit while withholding the tree.

The second was context. Most founders carry the whole reasoning of the business in their head, the why behind every standard, the constraint behind every no, the picture of what good looks like, and hand their team only the conclusions. Then they are puzzled that people cannot decide the way they would. Nobody can decide well with half the information. The reliable teams knew what their leaders knew, not every detail, but the shape of the thing: what mattered most, what could flex and what could not, and why. Sharing context is slower than issuing instructions, once. It is faster forever after.

The third was room to get things wrong. Judgement is built in exactly one way, by making real decisions and living with the consequences, and there is no shortcut through it, human or otherwise. A team corrected every time it steps forward learns, quite sensibly, to stop stepping forward, and its caution then gets read as incapability, which invites more correction. The reliable teams had been allowed a learning period in which their way of doing things was rougher than the founder's, and the founder had held their nerve through it. That nerve-holding, unglamorous and invisible, is the actual price of a team you can lean on.

Notice what all three have in common. They are gifts, and they are all in the founder's hands. That is the genuinely encouraging thing hiding inside the complaint. "I cannot rely on my team" feels like a fact about other people, and if it were, you could do little about it. In practice, the levers that produce reliability sit almost entirely on your side of the desk, which means the situation is workable from where you sit, starting now, with the team you already have.

It is also worth saying what is not on the list: replacing the people with something more predictable. The current enthusiasm for swapping teams for software solves the inconvenience by discarding the asset. Ordinary capable people, given ownership, context and room, compound. Year after year they get better, notice more, and carry more. That compounding is the whole game, and it is available to any founder willing to do the giving.

To see how you are currently operating across the eight roles a business runs on, the people role among them, the Entrepreneur Gap scan gives you an honest outside read in about five minutes, free.

Continue reading: The Monday Morning Signal →

Or find your blind spots: Take the free 5-minute Entrepreneur Gap scan →