Why Lead?
Who needs leadership?
Much earlier in my career, I had zero interest in what I thought of as leadership. All I wanted to do was solve hard problems, and to do it alone. My idea of teamwork came from forced school projects, where it always seemed there was one person who did 80% of the work and a bunch of others who slowed them down. Sometimes rather than do real work one team member would declare themselves the leader and try to order people around. In other cases, the most competent person would reluctantly assume the leadership role even though it would have been faster for them to do it themselves. In any case, I never saw how this structure benefited anyone other than bottom performers.
As I progressed in my career, I started taking on more serious projects that shifted my view on going it alone. For the first time, I was working on systems I could not deliver on my own. I needed help, and found with the right people by my side we could get more done together. This was different, and quite exciting. But I still didn't see why that meant someone had to be the so-called leader. If we know what to do, what value is there in someone bossing us around?
Fortunately, I had a couple life experiences that changed my views on the potential of a leader forever.
Team A vs. Team B
The first was a set of results that made no sense to me. The story was this: I worked on a team responsible for a complex subsystem. Let’s call it Team A. We had a goal in mind and worked hard toward it. We held design reviews with the team. We prototyped our system to figure out where it would fail. We tested together and reviewed the results together. We refined our understanding together. And in the end, we delivered something crazy complicated on time and on budget. On Team A, we left feeling proud, accomplished, and positive.
That wasn’t the weird part though. The weird part was the parallel team next to us who struggled to deliver. Let’s call them Team B. Team B also had a subsystem to deliver—of similar complexity, similar scope, and with a team mix of similarly skilled engineers. But they were consistently over budget, behind schedule, and fundamentally architected their subsystem to be far more convoluted than necessary. I watched Team B with perplexity, trying to understand what I was seeing. I noticed how much they didn’t do: they didn’t prototype, they didn’t sit together to review results, and they fell apart under high-pressure situations. They had hypotheses, but did not test them until the very end of the project, when it was too late to fix the underlying assumptions that turned out to be wrong. What happened with this group?
Discovering Leadership
Around the same time, I volunteered to commission into the United States Navy Reserve. I still had zero interest in leadership but I wanted to serve in whatever capacity I could. And what I found straight away was that at least 50% of my training was completely dedicated to leadership. We talked about it constantly, read about it, and practiced it. My peers and I gave each other critical feedback on where to do better (which is how I learned not to, for example, stand like a statue when public speaking). At first, it seemed so odd to me to focus on this topic. But I listened, and observed. I took in what I was hearing and then watched how dynamics would play in my civilian job where this type of training is scarce. And at some point it finally hit me: when facing tough problems, strong leadership is the competitive edge.
“When facing tough problems, strong leadership is the competitive edge.”
Sure, technology and resources matter. But fundamentally—how do you get a group of people moving in the same direction? How do you get them to rally when pressure builds? When plans go south, how does the team adapt? How do you get everyone to own their piece of the puzzle without putting up barriers for their teammates? The military is steeped in a history of victories and losses where leadership was the deciding factor. Because lives are literally on the line, the Navy invests deeply in developing it. And as someone obsessed with results, now working on systems in my civilian life that I could not deliver on my own, I slowly started to care. A lot. And that looked like paying attention to how teams function.
The Impact of a Leader
When I started to change my perspective, the fundamental difference between Team A and Team B became as clear as day: the person in charge of Team B was not a leader, and the person running Team A was. That drove everything—the culture of the team, how goals were decided, how disputes were resolved—everything. From then on, my obsession with getting the most out of a group of people began.
What Makes High-Performance Teams
I am far from having it all figured out. But in my opinion, high-performance teams are defined by one concept: leaving nothing on the table. No potential goes untapped, no stone left unturned. Rationally working through problems together is a starting point, but it only gets us so far. There’s more to it. To maximize performance is to find and ride the limit of what the team is capable of. That requires something deeper. And that push, that drive—it doesn’t come from the prefrontal cortex or intellectual reasoning about a problem. It comes from a shared goal and a set of values to achieve it. It comes from bonds built over time. It comes from grinding in the trenches together. It comes from our tribal roots. It comes from counting on the people to your left and right, and them counting on you. And it takes a leader to create this environment, where the team can perform at its highest possible level.
“When things are easy, nobody needs a leader. But when solving something truly hard, leadership is key.”
When things are easy, nobody needs a leader. By definition though, solving something highly complex in a competitive landscape is not easy—or it would be done already. In these cases, leadership is key.
Kyle