How to work with your peer Leads as a “first team” and why it matters

The most successful leadership and management teams work more closely with their peers than with their direct reports. This may sound odd at first - after all, isn’t it our job as leaders to support the people who report to us?

Learning about the “first teams”-mindset and putting it into practice fundamentally changed how I treat my role as a leader. I’m still invested in everyone who reports to me, but realized that the more time I spend with my peers, the better I’m able to do my job.

In this article, I’ll share with you why working as a team with your peers is so important, why it doesn’t mean neglecting your direct reports, and a checklist with 12 signs that help you notice if you’re working as a “first team”.

What’s a “first team” or “team number one”?

Working as a "first team" with your fellow leaders is a mindset and operational mode in which you prioritize supporting your peers instead of your direct reports. You build close relationships and work together to solve organizational problems, make decisions, hold each other accountable, collaborate to achieve the company’s objectives and support each other in achieving your goals. Also called “Team Number One”, the idea stems from Patrick Lencioni’s works on leadership and organizational health in his book “Five Dysfunctions of a Team”.

I find that the most powerful aspect of the “first team” mindset is that it aligns incentives: It captures very clearly that everyone’s goal, no matter at what level, is to optimize for what’s best for the organization - not for their team, domain, or department.

Baked into the notion of “first team” is the answer to a very fundamental question: As a people or technical leader, what’s your job? That’s why the “first team”-mindset is a really helpful framing to focus on our primary job as leaders: Achieving business goals.

The positive impact of becoming a “first team”

I’ve been part of strong “first teams”, have helped managers in my organization become a “first team”, and have been working with dozens of teams to facilitate their transition into a “first team”. Every time, the most significant impact I see is in how leaders treat their jobs:

The “first team” approach will profoundly shift how you view your role as a leader: Instead of focusing on what’s best for the group below them in the hierarchy, you’ll prioritize what’s best for the business as a whole.

In addition, this approach helps you…

• Create lasting organizational change: This sustained change is not made by individuals acting in isolation. Organizational change can be initiated or coordinated by individuals, but by definition, organizational change involves, well, everyone in the organization.

• Learn to optimize for the business when you switch in how you think and work from “What’s good for my team?” to “What’s good for the business?”

• Get out of the weeds and out of work that’s too low-level

• Collaborate as a leadership team and lead by example

• Improve the quality of your leadership and management 

• Particularly as a line manager, shifting to a “first team”-mindset can also help you see more clearly how to balance organizational and team needs

It’s easiest to see how much of a difference it makes to work as a “first team” when an organization is not working this way. In companies where leaders primarily focus on supporting the team(s) that report to them, I often see:

• Leaders optimize for the good of their team(s) instead of for what’s best for the business as a whole, which often leads to conflict between leaders at different levels or across different departments

• Leaders working too low level, with high degrees of micromanagement

• Leaders struggle to level up their skills because they have low to no exposure to higher-level business concerns and contexts

• Siloing of information and knowledge

• Poor coordination and collaboration

• Conflicts about resource distribution like budgets

• Finger-pointing and putting blame on others, political maneuvering

Now, many of these issues are so grave that a “first team”-mindset alone likely won’t solve them. However, many of these issues are addressed when incentives are aligned and everyone is optimizing for what’s good for the organization - instead of what’s good for just their team, or their personal gain and power.

When is the “first team”-approach a valuable tool?

In my work, I keep seeing two primary use cases where the “first team”-approach can be a really useful tool:

Rallying your peers to improve how you manage up and down

Scenario 1: I’m a VP of Engineering reporting to a CTO. The engineering department’s operations are run by a team of three leaders: VP Product Engineering (me), VP Platform, and Chief Architect. The three of us run the department’s operations and want to:

• Build a coherent culture across all of engineering 

• Ensure consistency in the context, understanding, and expectations of everyone in the department 

• Make sure all managers and employees have the same experience, no matter who they report to 

Scenario 2: An Engineering Director is part of a team of 10+ leaders, a mix of technical leaders (staff+ engineers) and people managers, all reporting to the CTO. The CTO is very busy and doesn’t have a lot of time to manage this large leadership team very closely. The Engineering Director wants to rally their peers to 

• Solve organizational problems together instead of waiting for the CTO to take the lead

• Collaborate more closely as a leadership team

• Communicate better with each other and the CTO

• Get out of the current mode where the CTO is the bottleneck in many areas

• Break down silos between departments

• Manage up as a team so the CTO can spend more time on strategic topics

Encouraging your direct reports to work together more effectively

Scenario 3: I run an engineering department with the managers of managers (Engineering Directors) reporting to me.

Scenario 4: An engineering manager of two closely related teams has four technical leads reporting to them.

The engineering manager and I want to be able to

• delegate more to them,  

• help them level up their skills and

• get better at identifying organizational issues and address them together. 

• Get out of being a bottleneck and

• work at a higher level myself.

In all these (and similar) scenarios, the “first team”-approach was a tremendously helpful tool. The second part of this series covers how you can help the managers reporting to you work as first team.

Does working as a “first team” mean that I’ll neglect my direct reports?

Many managers who hear about the “first team”-idea for the first time are concerned about whether it means they’ll neglect their direct reports or that they don’t actually have time to work this way. That’s very understandable - after all, many engineering managers get into this work to support engineers in their growth.

In my work as a leader, I do want to make sure that the teams and leaders in my organization are getting the support they need - while I treat my peers as my primary team, in order to make sure that we deliver the results that the business needs. So, let’s get one thing out of the way:

Working as a “first team” with your peers does not mean you should not care about your direct reports anymore. However, it will impact how you think, make decisions, and spend your time (and, in the long term, you will likely spend less time with your direct reports).

Say, you’re an engineering manager and, with your peers, you want to work more as a first team. In practice, this likely means:

• You’ll meet more frequently with your peers, e.g., 1x/week instead of 1x/month

• You’ll keep your 1:1s, team meetings, and other ceremonies with your direct reports

• You’ll start thinking about how to get out of very low-level work with your team. - That’s where the “first team”-approach has a built-in forcing function: When your goal is to work closest with your peers, you need to put systems and structures into place that make this possible.

These systems and structures may include things like:

• Getting yourself out of the critical path, e.g. in decision-making or getting things done

• Setting up peer support structures for your teammates that don’t rely on your presence

• Delegating more ownership to your direct reports

Ultimately, setting up a system in your team that allows you to focus on bigger organizational issues is a critical task of any manager at any level - and the “first team”-mindset is a really good tool for that.

So how can you actually tell if a group is working as a “first team”?

How to work more as a first team, and signs that it’s going well

I’ve found that there are clearly observable aspects that show if a group is embracing and living the “first team” mindset. The main areas are:

• Language: How do the members of this group talk about their work and decisions?

• Behaviors: What behaviors are they exhibiting?

• Time spend: Who are the group members spending most of their time with? How are they spending this time?

Here are concrete steps you can take to work more as a “first team” with your peers:

1. You optimize for the organization: Your purview is the wider organization. Instead of merely focusing on the immediate needs of one's team or department, your emphasis is on the bigger picture:

• You may think: "Hiring another member would immediately benefit my team, but is it the best move for the other teams in my area? Would another team benefit more from hiring someone new?"

• When contemplating requesting a new software tool, you may consider, "This tool might speed up my team's tasks, but how will it scale across the company?"

• You work to align team and organizational needs: Instead of approaching situations with a "my team wants to" mentality, shift the focus to "the organization needs." For instance, "My team isn’t keen on introducing a new project management tool, but the organization needs it to help us improve the visibility of our work. How can I manage these changes for my team and help them understand the organizational need? And how can I support the organization’s goals without making it a large burden on my team?"

2. You collaborate closely with your peers

• You trust each other.

• Your fellow leaders are your main collaborators and partners.

• In discussions, you bring a collaborative “we’re in this together”-mindset.

• Your peers are your go-to people when you need advice or feedback.

3. You spend significant time together

• Your fellow leaders are the people you spend the majority of your time with. Depending on your organization’s size and your role, this time may e.g. include:

  • Annual budget planning, strategy setting, or revisions

  • Bi-annual calibration sessions during performance reviews

  • Quarterly planning, goal setting

  • Weekly or fortnightly group sync to discuss current issues

4. You solve organizational problems together instead of always escalating them to your boss. Instead of looping in your boss, you consider, "How can my peer and I solve this together?"

5. You have a shared vision.

• Even if you run different teams or areas, you have a shared vision for your domain or organization.

6. You identify problems together.

• You regularly discuss issues you’re seeing within your respective groups and compare: Are there any patterns? Are you seeing issues that you could address together?

• You bring those problems forth to your boss to check if they agree that these are issues and…

7. You solve problems together.

• You tackle larger projects together that concern the teams in your “first team’s” purview. Depending on your level and company size, those could e.g. be:

  • Line manager, engineering manager: Streamlining team metrics and data gathering, addressing developer experience issues, improving teams’ delivery process and tooling

  • Senior engineering manager, director: Introducing or updating a career growth framework, improving team interfaces, refining domain strategy

  • VP+: Setting and refining department principles, creating and updating strategy, defining efficiency improvement measures

8. You set goals together.

• You set goals for your peer group and present them to your manager.

• You review the goals for your respective groups with your peers to see if there’s potential for conflict or joining forces.

9. You communicate proactively and openly.

• Everyone in your peer group regularly shares updates with the others. You don't wait for others to take the lead: “Just keeping everyone in the loop about the project's progress."

• You check with each other for understanding, saying things like: "To recap our discussion..." or "From what I heard, you're suggesting X. Is that aligned with your thoughts?"

10. You’re genuinely interested in hearing each others’ thoughts

"Based on what I've observed, I think X. What are your thoughts?"

11. You communicate to your respective teams with one voice

• In my experience, this is one of the biggest tells for a “first team.” In the “first teams” that I’ve been a part of, our goal was to ensure consistent messaging towards our organization. While we’d disagree, often quite strongly, “one voice” meant that, firstly, we’d have to work out our disagreements and get on the same page, and develop a message that we could all get behind when giving updates to our respective teams: "After discussions, we collectively believe this is the best strategy."

• In practice, some of my “first teams” also communicated together, e.g. by sending a joint weekly newsletter to the managers in our teams, running a monthly department meeting together, or sharing context from executive meetings with leaders.

12. You hold yourself and each other accountable

• You deliver on your commitments and follow through on what you promised.

• You hold each other accountable for actions and decisions, and don’t wait for your boss to check in.

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As seen, the concept of the "first team" emphasizes how important it is for us as leaders to work closely with our peers over our direct reports. It fosters collaboration, reduces departmental silos, and reframes decision-making in favor of broader organizational goals. When we use this approach, we shift our focus to prioritize what benefits the organization as a whole rather than our immediate teams.

You can tell if a leadership team embodies the “first team” mindset based the way the collaborate, communicate, and solve problems together. Adopting the "first team" mindset reframes how we spend our time and make decisions, and can be a really powerful tool to level up your organization. Give it a try!