Lead your team to stand out from the crowd

Every organisation has a team people talk about. The one others want to join. The one that delivers without drama, where people seem to actually enjoy working together. If you manage a team, you’ve probably wondered what it would take for yours to be that team.

I don’t think the answer is hiring better individuals or working longer hours. Growing up, I listened to my family talk about being managed, and I saw how much difference good and bad management made to how people worked. Later, people like Dan Pink and Simon Sinek helped me name the pattern: teams work better when people enjoy working together and trust each other. And you can’t build that trust without honest, specific feedback.

Why trust is the thing to work on

When people trust each other, they ask for help sooner, admit mistakes earlier, and tell each other when something isn’t working. When they don’t, problems go quiet until they’re big. As a manager, it’s surprisingly hard to know how much your team trusts each other, or you. You see a slice of how they work together. They see all of it.

That’s why I like asking about trust directly. Not “is Sam a good engineer?”, but “do you trust Sam to review code constructively and promptly?”. Anyone on the team can answer that from their own experience, and the answers point straight at what to do next.

Build a feedback habit, not a feedback event

If your organisation runs reviews once a year, that’s fine, but it won’t make your team stand out. A habit will. Here’s the one I’d build:

1. 1
   Go first. Run an anonymous 360 on yourself before anyone else. Then thank the team publicly, share a little of what you heard, and say what you’ll do about it.
2. 2
   Ask about trust in real responsibilities. Write down what each role is actually for, and ask teammates how often they trust the person to do each part.
3. 3
   Make it regular. A short review for each person a couple of times a year, staggered so nobody gets five forms in one week.
4. 4
   Celebrate what people admire. The “what do you admire about them?” answers are some of the most motivating words people hear at work. Make sure they’re heard.
5. 5
   Act visibly on one thing. Each person picks one or two things to work on. You follow up in one-to-ones. The team sees feedback lead somewhere.
6. 6
   Ask again. A second review a few months later shows what’s changed. That’s where the habit starts to pay off.

There’s a full walk-through, from writing responsibilities to sharing the results, in the guide to running a 360 peer review for a small team.

Celebrate out loud

It’s tempting to treat feedback as a hunt for problems. Don’t. One of the two free-text questions I always ask is “When have they impressed you and what did you admire about them?”, and the answers are often more generous than the person expects. Mark, a manager who uses these reviews, put it well: those answers can be “uplifting”, “validating the effort they have already put into an area”.

Make space for that. Start one-to-ones about a review with what people admire. If someone’s comfortable with it, share a highlight with the team. A team that regularly hears what it’s doing well has the confidence to hear what it could do better.

Show your team’s progress, carefully

When it’s time to talk about your team with your own manager, “I think they’re doing well” isn’t much to go on. Trust scores over time give you something more concrete: how often teammates trust each other to live your values and carry out their responsibilities, and how that’s changed since last time. The scores on their own can feel a little arbitrary, but they can give real insight into the progress someone is making.

Your first three months

If you want to start, here’s a simple plan:

• ✓
  Month one: write down responsibilities for each role, agree your team’s values, and run a review on yourself.
• ✓
  Month one: share what you learnt with the team and what you’re going to do about it.
• ✓
  Month two: start reviews for each team member, a week or two apart.
• ✓
  Month two: talk each summary through in a one-to-one and agree one or two actions.
• ✓
  Month three: follow up on those actions, and celebrate what went well.
• ✓
  Later: run the next round a few months on, and see what changed.

Standing out is a side effect

The funny thing about teams that stand out is that they rarely set out to. They set out to work well together, help each other more, and get a little better each month. Standing out is what happens when they do. If you want to see what that feedback looks like in practice, have a look at the example review and the example summary.