Reasonably smart people, given enough context, do reasonably smart things.

I remember a particular time at Netflix where we had a site outage. Of course we had more than one of those as most companies do at that scale. In this case the outage was caused by the decision of a single engineer. I don’t actually recall the specific details that led this engineer to make the fateful decision he made. But he made a mistake that appeared innocent enough but ended up impacting millions of customers.

This isn’t though what makes the story interesting. It is the response by leadership that taught me a lesson that I still learn from each and every day.

Continue reading “The Power of Context”

As Amanda & I thought about forming Teams Thrive, we had to ask ourselves is there something unique about our approach that we think the industry needs? There are a lot of fantastic executive coaches out there. What we came away with is that coaches are often focused on the leader of a team with a strong emphasis on the person in context of leadership & communication principles. We believe the fuller context of success is how do their teams function as a team (the Who), with a purpose (the What), with just enough process (the How) and still produce a great product (the What). 

Over and over we have seen that the right people with the right purpose working with the right processes create the best products. And leaders are only as good as the teams they produce. And teams are only as good as how they work together to solve real customer problems. We use these four dimensions as a “forensics” tool to evaluate where a team is. By looking at all four aspects we get a fuller picture of what needs to be done to move the team to a high functioning and thriving level.

Continue reading “The Who, Why, How, and What of Thriving Teams”