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The cow in this article lives in the Fanal forest on Madeira, Portugal.
I met her on a hike, in fog thick enough to lose the trail in. When she walked over I stood still and trusted she wasn't going to run me through. I had that wrong. She was not pleased to see me. I was standing somewhere she wanted to be and she had been telling me so. I hadn't understood a "moo".
Nobody got speared and I got a photo.
The mistake was mine: I trusted on assumption, without doing the work of understanding what was being said to me. It is a small version of something I've been thinking about lately.
I've been reflecting on my leadership style and realized I've never written it down for anyone outside my immediate circle. So here goes.
Books have shaped how I lead and I've taken pieces here and there. There are a few...
Scaling a team past a few people (dare I say two) is challenging. So the first book I'd recommend is Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
Its message is simple. It names five ways a team fails and the order they fail in.
Lencioni draws them as a pyramid. What follows is my reading of it, redrawn to understand in a glance.
01
Five layers
The five are stacked.
At the base is an absence of trust: people hide what they do not know and do not ask for help. On top of that sits fear of conflict, because you cannot argue honestly with people you are guarding yourself against. Then lack of commitment, because a decision nobody argued over is a decision nobody owns. Then avoidance of accountability, because you cannot hold someone to a goal they never committed to. At the top, inattention to results: people chase their own standing because the team's outcome was never theirs.
Each layer only holds if the one below it does. That is the whole model, and it is why I keep coming back to it. It tells you where to look first.
The pyramid is drawn as the fix rather than the failure, with both sides written out. Each band is what a team does.
To its left is the failure that behaviour answers.
To its right is what the team gets once it holds. Read it from the base up.
Build trust
Absence of trustVulnerability
Resolve conflict
Fear of conflictCandid debate
Commit as a team
Lack of commitmentBuy-in
Hold each other accountable
Avoidance of accountabilityHigh standards
Focus on results
Inattention to resultsShared results
02
Start at the bottom
Most teams try to start at the top.
A missed target gets a new dashboard. A missed deadline gets a new process. Neither works if the problem is three layers down and it usually is. A team that will not argue in the open will not commit in the open and a team that has not committed cannot be held to anything.
Trust is knowing that when a team member does push you, they're doing it because they care about the team.
The fix runs bottom up and it always starts with trust.
The person leading goes first. Say what you do not know. Ask for help in front of people.
Brené Brown has written several books on this and Strong Ground is the one I would hand someone: the base of the pyramid is vulnerability and it is the leader's to lay.
Two other books I keep coming back to do single layers better than Lencioni does.
Jim Collins in Good to Great puts the hiring before the strategy: first who, then what. That is the trust layer applied to who gets a seat at all.
John Doerr's Measure What Matters is the commitment and accountability layers written down: a handful of objectives a quarter, in public, so everyone knows what they said yes to.
We ran Wine Folly almost entirely on that. It matters more now than when it was written. A team cannot be aligned on work nobody has agreed to measure and a few shared numbers are the cheapest alignment there is. Cheap to read, not cheap to write.
Most people have never set a goal of their own. They have been handed targets. Teaching someone to write an objective they will still own in week ten is coaching, not a template. That is where the method takes most of a leader's time.
03
Remote
The model did its best work for me at Wine Folly.
The team was remote from the first day (before Covid forced it to the masses) and spread across continents. Nobody shared a room, so nothing at the base of the pyramid happened by accident. Trust had to be built on purpose, in writing, or it did not get built. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson said as much in Remote: Office Not Required.
In a remote company, written communication is the culture. Write well or have no culture.
That is also why William Zinsser's On Writing Well changed how I ran a company more than any management book did. Colleagues have heard me go on about it for years. A remote team reads you far more than it hears you. Every sentence you cut is one they do not have to decode.
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.
Communicating is a skill you never finish learning.
Writing is the part of it you can practise every day and the part most people stop practising once they leave school.
How we write is changing right now. What a clear sentence does for the person reading it is not. It is worth working on for a whole life, not just a career. If you put effort into one thing in this piece, put it into the written word.
Writing well is now also how you prompt AI.
04
Three words, then one
When we wrote the company's values down, the five layers had simplified to three words: Communication, Trust and Respect. That is the base of the pyramid in our own language. Say things plainly, assume good faith and treat people as capable. Get that right and the layers above it mostly take care of themselves.
I have had time since to ask whether those three would hold if I did it again. They would. But the ring had a gap in the middle, and it took me longer to see than the three words took to write.
Unity forms around mutual care based in empathy.
The missing word is Integrity.
It is the glue.
Henry Cloud's Integrity is the book. His definition is the useful one: not honesty alone, but a character that holds together under load. Communication, trust and respect are what a team can see. Integrity is what makes them believable.
A leader who says things plainly but does not do them has communicated nothing, and the trust and respect go with it.
Lencioni's five layers are what I go back to when working together gets hard, because they say where to begin. Zinsser is the one I hand to everyone else. Cloud's is the one I came to last.
Got a leadership book you'd recommend? Hit me up.
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