I wrote this ~1yr ago.
My thoughts on what a high-performing team looks like, drawn from experience with previous teams I have had the privilege to work with.
To me, a high-performing team is a collection of high-performing individuals that efficiently progress toward a common goal. These are people who have a shared vision, who have passion, and who get it done. The team can be a married couple, a football team, a research group, or a company. Below is what I think it takes to create a high-performing team. They are in no particular order. This is from an engineering and product company point of view. My thoughts and this essay may change.
Exceptional Communication
The goal is to relay information and have a common understanding among all parties as quickly as possible. This permeates all communication forms: face-to-face, over the phone, text, group chat, and email. Nothing is assumed, nothing is implicit, and the most obvious of information is clarified by someone asking about it. The asker may already know the answer to their question, but they ask to ensure everyone is on the same page. Individuals in high-performing teams understand this. Nothing is assumed, and no one jumps to conclusions, especially when you can accidentally kill your teammates.
When we become experts in a field, we often compose a glossary of terms and acronyms reserved for that field and those in it. This is often unnecessary and reduces communication. Someone outside the field or organization should not have to learn a glossary to understand what is going on. Communication is direct, to the point, and spoken in plain, 3rd-grade English.
If you have a problem with a person or the way they did something or if you need them to help solve an issue, you go straight to that person. Company hierarchy and who reports to who should only be for who gets paid what and who is giving performance reviews to whom.
SpaceX, no bullshit. If there was a problem, I could and would go straight to the person. If I had a problem with something on the launch pad, I went straight to the person, tech, or flight controller who was working on it or dealing with it. I didn’t first go to my manager, and then have them go to that other person’s manager or any of that. Just go straight to the person you need.
Pragmatism
To me, this is looking at bell curves. What is the set of actions with success as the most probable outcome? Leave emotions out of it. Don’t be an asshole. First principles thinking. What are the fundamental truths? What are the fundamental equations? Are your joules of energy being spent wisely (i.e. your body’s chemical energy, your product’s battery, etc.)? Have you violated the laws of physics? etc.
Transparency
High-performing teams possess complete transparency. All members have equal access to all information at all times. All members have equal access to all other members of the team. E.g. It's normal for an intern to directly contact the top execs if they feel it is important. Lack of access to information slows progress and inhibits informed decisions. It is easier to solve an equation when as many variables are known.
When in doubt, include the entire company in the email chain (literally). High-performing individuals know how to filter irrelevant information.
Teams were debriefed on top exec meetings and on Elon meetings. Everyone had access to everyone else including Elon (e.g. everyone had Elon’s cell). No one worked in an ivory tower. There was little to no barrier to accessing the information I needed to get done what I needed to get done.
Ego
Humans like status and recognition. This is our ego and must be put aside. Nothing is more important than the current vision. We are defined by what we are doing right now, not by what we have done in the past. 1,000 successful launches do not guarantee the 1,001st will be successful. Each team member on a high-performing team has humility and understands that there is an immense amount of knowledge they can learn from each of their team members, no matter the walk of life they are coming from or the number of accolades they have.
Individuals on a high-performing team don’t take anything personally. They don’t take it as a personal attack on their knowledge when someone asks why they did something the way they did it, for instance.
Leave the emotions out of it. You're on the team to achieve a common goal, that’s it. Those with egos are left behind because high-performing teams naturally filter them out.
I’ve worked on teams where this was a hindrance to progress and my ability to do my job.
Trust
I am lucky to have worked on teams where I trusted others with my life and where others trusted me with theirs. However, that doesn’t mean that you don’t double-check your teammates’ work.
Great teams and great leaders foster an environment of vulnerability. Demonstrated by a willingness to make mistakes, fail, and get it wrong. This in turn fosters a culture where the team solves problems faster.
High-performing individuals are self-aware and understand their weaknesses and strengths. They are not afraid to share them with their teammates nor afraid to ask for help. Teammates fill in each other’s gaps.
I trusted my team not to blow me up in a big methalox plume, they trusted me to not short a circuit and blow them up either.
The Leaders Care
Great leaders lead by example and lead from the bottom up. They don’t act like they are better or above others. They support their people and dig deep into the problems they are solving. Top execs strive to understand the core engineering problems. Instead of merely stating the high-level vision while failing to understand how the team will get there. Knowing how involves understanding the underlying technical problems. When they are disconnected, they make decisions that slow their team’s ability to make progress creating resentment.
It was extremely motivating when SpaceX execs dug deep into the data and into the technical challenges facing the team. Or when they made the effort to understand what exactly I was working on and offered resources and support, even as an intern! They were in the weeds helping solve the most challenging technical problems. Sam Patel (great engineer, great guy!) asked me what I was working on and how I was getting it done. We discussed solutions, alternatives, and strategies. He asked what I needed in order to get it done. I said I need more manpower and I need no launchpad operations for a week and we’ll be ready to execute. He said ok, done. He gave me what I asked for and my team and I got it done.
Failure and Feedback
I like closed-loop feedback systems. They can be calibrated and optimized. Individuals in high-performing teams constantly illicit feedback. They understand that they can always do better and be better. They strive for greatness. High-performing teams are dynamic and have a high-frequency development cycle to make up for the extra inertia that feedback systems create.
Feedback in a team should be a norm and should be done in a structured performance review manner at every set interval. Feedback should be concise, specific, and actionable.
Failure is always in the set of outcomes. It provides negative feedback to a closed-loop system. Failure is not desired but expected. However, a lack of innovation is not tolerated. I.e. things will go wrong and new things will go wrong, that’s fine, but not working to fix the things that go wrong is not fine.
Problems and constraints become apparent once you start building the thing. Start building the thing as soon as possible. I.e. constantly question whether what you are spending time working on is actually a constraint to progress. A lot of times it’s not. Also, planning is good, just don’t let it get in the way of actually building the thing.
Time
Economies are how we store and trade time and energy (literally! i.e. our brains/bodies need chemical energy aka ATP!). Right now we have cash economies. We pay money for products or services that we find useful, that make our lives easier, and that ultimately allow us to allocate our time and energy to more fun things.
Individuals on high-performing teams understand the importance of time. They understand that what we do, the money we earn and spend, and the progress we make are just a manifestation of how we allocate our time and energy. High-performing teams can pivot and reallocate time quickly. Team members respect their teammates’ time and know not to waste it. I.e. there is always a sense of urgency because our life spans are finite.
Meetings
High-performing teams understand that meetings are generally not where actual work gets done and contribute little to making progress. There is an understanding that anyone can join any meeting if they feel it necessary or leave any meeting if they feel it is not useful to them.
This was literally an explicit statement in SpaceX employment docs.
Extreme Owners
There is no “I” in a team, but when it comes to responsibility, high-performing teams have extreme owners. They own a subsystem, a task, or a project, but nothing is ever assigned to an entire team or department. You cannot walk up to a “team” or a “department” and ask them why a thing isn’t working that you need to work! You must be able to go to and ask a single person.
Pick your battles wisely
High-performing teams don’t make things harder than they need to be. The simplest solution is often the most beautiful and eloquent. Don’t make your life harder than it already is. Understand the difference between a solution that works and the optimal solution. The slow solution is often the wrong one. Choose what you are innovating wisely as almost everything can be optimized further. And don’t focus on incremental improvements. What are the sets of actions with the highest probability of moving the team toward their goal the fastest? Focus on those sets and pick 1.
No excuses
There should not be excuses for not making progress. High-performing teams quickly identify what is blocking them from making progress and work toward resolving those blockers. Low-performing teams often spend time on problems that are not important, on problems that if solved contribute little progress, or on problems that don’t even exist.
Maintain a critical path
A high-performing team is crystal clear on where they are going and how they are getting there. The “where” is the team’s common vision (or a company’s mission statement). The “how” is the critical path. The path that poses the most problems, the greatest slowdown, and that if not solved, the goal certainly cannot be reached.
Work hard
Is success hard work or luck? It is 100% luck, in my opinion, but the harder you work the more luck you will have, therefore, you must work extremely hard. Nothing good comes easy and you don’t want to fail because you didn’t work hard enough. There is no doubt that high-performing teams and individuals work extremely hard, you may just not see it. A 40hr work week is a part-time job. Work-life balance? You can have balance when you’re dead. But you can still have balance while working 50+hr weeks, just be better.
SpaceX engineers work really really long and hard because time is valuable. They also know how to have a whole lot of fun.
Embrace change
New ideas often come with problems. New technologies often come with hype, followed by skepticism, followed by eventual adoption. E.g. PC of the 1970s, Web1.0 and dot-com of the 2000s, and currently, artificial intelligence and Web3.
Low-performing teams don’t fix what isn’t broken. High-performing teams aren’t afraid to break things that were already working if it means a potential speed up toward their vision. They embrace change and work to solve the problems that change creates.
Don’t look at others in the race
Sprinters don’t turn around to look at their competitors. High-performing teams focus on their own race and not others.
Always Learning
There’s always more to learn, it keeps the brain churning. You’re never an expert, once you are an expert you stop learning and growing, and then you’re no longer an expert. There’s always a new thing, the next thing.
Fun
Great people and great leaders don’t take themselves too seriously. But they do know when to be serious and when not to be. We all die eventually, so might as well have some fun while we’re at it.
Engineering Algorithm
They do this.
- Make requirements less dumb
- Delete the part or process
- Optimize
- Accelerate
- Automate
Final thoughts
I hope others are also optimistic about the future. I think it will be one of abundance, like the Wall-E Axiom Mothership. I think we will have sustainable energy generation and consumption, automation of all the things, societies on multiple planets, personal jetpack flying machines, Striking Vipers virtual worlds, and no traffic 🎉. But achieving this world will require more truly exceptional high-performing teams. I think building those great teams requires the characteristics above. These are the people I want to work with. To all the high-performing individuals whom I have had the opportunity to work with and learn from thus far, thank you. Y’all are badass.
Do you agree? Do you disagree?