No, it's not good enough

You must set a high bar for your team.

This was a harsh lesson for me to learn.

As a new manager, when my team was underperforming, I let them off the hook without consequences. I tried hard to be liked by everyone.

By not holding my team accountable, I was doing them a disservice. They didn’t improve, and the performance suffered.

Here’s the thing …

I’ve learned you won’t get far without striving for excellence, setting a high bar, and demanding exceptional results.

The best teams are forged in fire, where the stakes are high, motivation is strong, and people help each other to win.

As the manager, you need to find a worthwhile challenge, bring the team together, and give them the support and mentorship they need.

Without being an asshole…

And that’s a fine line to walk.

Like a teacher who rejects bad homework, you’ll occasionally get some hate for doing that.

But if you do it with love, for their benefit, you’ll see that being a great coach is not about being liked.

It’s about bringing out the best from each team member, and you can’t do that by pampering them.

P.S. This may rustle some feathers, and that’s okay. I’m not saying to overwork your team and micromanage them to hell. Work-life balance is important. But so is solving hard problems on a project you care about with people who have your back. What do you think?

Best regards,

Taj

Here’s a featured comment from François on yesterday’s email (Takaways from the biggest tech outage) that describes an additional strategy:

*Regarding your assessment, there’s one strategy that I feel was lacking there, and is the cause of making this hard to fix: the absence of an automatable solution.

It’s best summarised by Theo (t3dotgg) in the saying: “Build safety nets, not guard rails.” Tests are good, but not having a disaster recovery plan can’t prepare you for this kind of scenario. I’ve had this happen a lot: software was well tested, except for some specific cases where human error or coverage blind spot allowed failure to creep in. Having a safety net helps in that matter (rollbacks, backup restore that is actually tested on every release, etc). Let your software fail (because it will), and be prepared for when it happens.

Cheers, François Best*