Teamwork & Transparency

When people feel like they're actually part of a team, not just a set of individuals who happen to share a manager, they go the extra mile for each other. And just as importantly, when something goes wrong, nobody's first instinct is to figure out who to blame.

Part of building that starts with something simple: know your teammates as people, not just names on an org chart. With roughly half my team based in Brazil, I've spent time learning Portuguese myself (unsuccessfully, btw), and it's led to some great conversations along the way, from regional accents to just learning more about the country. It was more just for fun, but it signals that you care. Not an act or a strategy, in my opinion a good people manager should always care about their people, and not just about the quality of their work.

I also try to be as transparent as I can. It's natural, and understandable, to filter what you share upward and downward: soften the bad news, hedge the uncertain stuff, wait for the “right time” to say something hard. I don't operate that way. If a decision is going to be unpopular, I say so before anyone asks. If I don't have an answer yet, I say that too, instead of pretending I do. People don't need every problem solved for them. They need to trust that you're not hiding the ball.

That combination, real connection plus real transparency, is what actually gets tested when you have to ask a team for more than seems fair.

A few years back, a partner deal got signed with a launch date nobody had cleared with me first, one that our team had no realistic way of hitting with our existing plan. Rather than downplay it, I told the team the situation was, frankly, kind of ridiculous (my Dutch bluntness showing again), and that I'd understand if they felt the same. I also told them exactly what the new plan was and what I was asking of them, and that I believed we could pull it off. We shipped one product early in a leaner form, moved everyone onto the deadline that mattered most, and hit it.

What stuck with me wasn't the deadline. One of my peers on the product side put it well afterward: “every time we find issues in solutions we've built, Mark's first response is let's fix it vs. a debate or a blame game on what caused it.” That's exactly the value of transparency. I've seen plenty of managers hide things when it isn't necessary, in an attempt to look like they're in control of the situation. And sometimes that really is the right call. But often it isn't, and you actually get more buy-in by just acknowledging it plainly: yes, someone messed up, it doesn't matter who, let's move forward and get this done, together. When a team feels like you're in it together with them, they take that extra step to make it a success.