How to Guide your Direct Reports to work as a “First Team”
This is part two of my series about working as a “first team” with your peer leaders or managers. Read part one to dive into what the “first team”-approach is and how to work with your peers as a “first team.”
As a senior manager, how can you delegate more and better? Once you’ve hired a few managers who report to you, how do you help them be effective? And how can you finally get out of the weeds and focus more on strategic work? -
One of the most impactful things you can do as a middle manager to not just uplevel your own role, but your whole organization, is to help your direct reports become a “first team”:
Working with their peers as their primary team, they prioritize supporting each other and solve problems together, instead of solely focusing on the teams that they run and escalating to you.
In this article, I will show you how you as a senior manager, Director, or VP, can help the leaders who report to you to work as a “first team”, with examples from my own experience and contributions from Maggie Litton, Engineering Director.
Many senior leaders to whom I suggest this approach are skeptical at first, so let’s start by diving into who this is for and what makes it useful:
The “first team”-approach is especially valuable for middle managers
This mindset is useful at all levels in your organization, and I want to focus on the most common and challenging setting:
You are a middle manager or executive, e.g. VP Engineering, Engineering Director, Senior Engineering Manager. You manage managers.
Your direct reports are in leadership positions like
Technical leader, staff or senior staff engineer, principal; they are responsible for a larger technical domain and/or strategy and don’t have people management duties
People managers, like line managers, (senior) engineering managers, team leads, with people management responsibilities
The “team number one” approach isn’t limited to people managers: I’ve worked with groups of very senior engineers and technical leads who started collaborating and radically transformed their organizations.
Working as a “first team” levels up your own work, your direct reports, and your organization
You and your direct reports improve leadership skills and grow toward more senior roles
Leaders who work as a “first team” build essential skills that they need to get ready for higher-level leadership roles, and that organizations need. The more senior a leadership role is, the more your job is about systems: Thinking, understanding, changing, and building them. Your role is to view your organization and the company surrounding it holistically and make decisions that are in the best interest of the organization as a whole. That’s why, whenever leaders ask me how to gain the necessary experience to move to a more senior role, I always recommend working more with their “first team”: It helps prepare you for roles of broader responsibility.
Growing your group of direct reports into an effective “first team” is also an important experience for you as a middle manager: Showing that you can build effective management teams prepares you for roles of broader responsibility.
Your organization needs aligned leaders who create lasting change
Collaboration across leaders is a powerful tool to create lasting organizational change. Sustained organizational 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.
Working closely with peer leaders also helps align and create clarity across teams. Individual contributors (ICs), like engineers, always sense when leaders aren’t aligned. That leaves ICs confused about who really represents the “official” opinion and undermines all managers' credibility and effectiveness.
On the flip side, when leaders focus mostly on the teams that report to them, it can lead to siloing and micro-optimizations instead of decisions that are best for the organization. Focusing on looking “down” on the team you run often becomes a source of political maneuvering and conflicts over who gets what resources and budgets.
You need to handle less work on your own and a group that you can delegate to
You, the middle manager, can’t do everything or spell everything out. You’ll have to be able to rely on your line managers to bring their own intelligence and creativity to bear to make meaningful organizational changes stick.
And don’t forget that you, too, also have a “first team” - your VP or other executive peers, fellow directors, or senior managers. You, too, need time to work with them on problems that concern your domains or organizations.
When your direct reports work as a “first team”, it creates space for you to handle less yourself or on your own. It also creates a delegation opportunity: You can share larger issues with them, instead of handling them on your own.
Leaders need a social group they belong to
Leadership roles and the ambiguity that comes with them can be hard and feel lonely. All of us need an outlet sometimes. For leaders, the primary group to talk to should be peers, never our direct reports (and venting to your boss isn’t always a good or option either). Having close relationships with peers helps.
Having leaders at all levels who work as a “first team” with their peers has great benefits. So why isn’t everyone doing it? And what are the challenges you should be aware of when you want your direct reports to form a “first team?”
Forming effective “first teams” is tricky because organizational incentives aren’t always aligned
Ideally, leaders take the initiative on their own and start working closely with their peers. In reality, many leaders struggle with working as a “first team.” Here are the most common issues and how to address them.
Leaders don’t know the concept
People may not have heard of the idea of “team number one”, or how to form one.
How to address this: Here’s an introduction, and I recommend reading Patrick Lencioni’s “Five Dysfunctions as a Team”, it’s a great book for any leader.
Incentives are misaligned
Peer leaders may have different incentives that are not aligned. This is especially true if:
The first team you’re trying to form spans different functional areas. The classic example is product development and customer support, two organizations whose success is measured very differently.
Executives or middle management have set up conflicting incentives within the organization, like hiring large numbers of people quickly while also insisting on unrealistic skill sets.
Some teams or managers are perceived to be less important than others, e.g. because they’re maintaining a product line that’s not a primary revenue driver and not actively built out further. People are less inclined to collaborate if they believe their team repeatedly does the boring work for another team.
How to address this: Review your group of direct reports. If you find potential for misaligned incentives, speak about them with your reports.
Companies overemphasize individual over team impact
Cultural norms in many Western workplaces work against creating strong first teams:
Compensation and promotion systems tend to focus on individual impact. People get less credit for things they can’t claim sole responsibility for. Frequently, companies don’t have language or compensation and promotion structures that accurately and appropriately describe and reward group accomplishments.
Even if fostering some degree of teamwork is part of leaders’ roles, it can often take them a lot of time to learn this: Most leaders have been trained to focus on themselves and their own impact in their careers so far.
How to address this: Make sure that people get credit for teamwork. Assign clear ownership and highlight contributors for each task that the “first team” handles (see more below), so that individual impact is still clear.
Your direct reports are missing context
Line managers may not be aware of priorities and strategies at the higher organizational level. This is more common than middle managers realize, especially in newly forming, rapidly changing, or remote organizations. The organizational goals should be a binding force across all teams and line managers. And yet, unless middle managers consistently and constantly explain those goals and map them to team charters, line managers often struggle to make the connections.
How to address this: As a middle manager, it’s your job to overcommunicate context and strategy in any interaction you have with your teams. Send a weekly email, talk about it in your staff and department meetings, put it into your templates for those meetings so you remember.
Handling power in a peer group makes people uncomfortable
People don’t always instinctively know how to handle the power in a group. It makes people uncomfortable and can perpetuate a focus on their own teams. It also leads to uncertainty about how one can make a first step or decision and shows up as cross-team work dragging on or never getting started. Many leaders I’ve spoken with about this also say they don’t feel like they can actually start working with their peers, or worry about asserting themselves, and fear that their peers may think they’re grabbing power or invading their territory.
How to address this: Bring it up yourself, or encourage your direct reports to raise it with their peer group: “I think it would be helpful for us to work together more on issues that cross our teams, but I don’t want to step into your area of work. What do you think, what’s a good way to do this?”
Leaders are bogged down in work with direct reports
A very common issue is that leaders, especially line managers, don’t think that they can work with their “first team” because they have too much work to do with their own direct reports. A prerequisite for working as a “first team” with your peers is that you are running a team that’s operating effectively.
How to address this: I believe that working across teams is an essential part of any manager’s job, so I treat the lack of capacity for this work as something we need to address. I usually coach and partner with the line manager to identify where the issues are, by digging into areas such as:
How are they spending their time? - This includes reviewing 1:1s, group meetings, their frequency, and their value to the leader and team
What does it take for them to build alignment? - Many line managers especially have to spend a lot of time in alignment meetings that we can replace with better planning, more effective processes, or clearer guidance from higher-level managers
How is their team setup? Where does the team need the most support? Where can the team step up and take more ownership? How/where can team members support each other more, and rely less on the leader?
Leaders struggle with handling ambiguity
One of the biggest growth markers for engineers and leaders is the ability to handle ambiguity: Going from reliance on getting concrete, particular expectations and tasks to do, to big and ambiguous business problems that need to be solved. Working as a “first team” requires team members to handle this ambiguity, but many early-career leaders struggle with this aspect.
How to handle this: Gradually increase the ambiguity of the challenges you’re handing to your direct reports; more on this below.
Differences in personality or leadership styles make it weird
The peer leaders in your group may not get along well. Differences in leadership styles and values may lead to disagreements about solutions or approaches that the group struggles to resolve. And sometimes people just don’t like each other very much and aren’t super keen on working together as a result: It’s hugely beneficial to hire managers with complementary skills, experiences, and perspectives that make for a heterogeneous leadership team. This approach is great in the long term. Still, it comes with an increased potential for professional disagreement and conflict or just fundamentally different personalities and leadership styles that don’t jive well. Even when the leaders can handle these disagreements professionally, it still makes it harder to collaborate.
How to handle this: It can be worth addressing this in 1:1 settings with the group members and discussing what we can do to improve. Otherwise, the main answer is: Being professionals.
Steps you can take to help your direct reports become a “first team”
In my experience, I found that being very explicit with your direct reports about them forming a first team is the best way to help them become one. Here are concrete steps that work well and help technical leaders and people managers become a “first team”:
Model the behavior you want to see
As with any leadership challenge, leading by example helps. If you are a command-and-control leader, don’t be surprised if your reports don’t make group decisions effectively. If you are never seen to be working with your peer directors, that’s the example you set for your reports. Similarly, suppose you never have a staff meeting where your line managers have meaningful group discussions beyond reading off a status report. This makes it less likely that they’ll see themselves as a group.
To model this behavior, I’ve often very visibly worked with my peers as a first team: I’d share with my direct reports some of my discussions with them, or just the fact that I had coworking sessions or made decisions with my peers. In my staff meetings, I often reserve a section for group discussions between my direct reports; I serve mostly as a facilitator, note taker, and observer during those.
Give your direct reports explicit permission to work this way
I found that giving people permission is a potent tool. Often, people just don’t know or aren’t sure what exactly is part of their role, they’re shy or hesitant to engage this way, or are afraid to ask out of fear of their manager realizing that they’ve been lacking in a specific area. So, just tell the leaders in your group that you want them to become a “first team.” You may say things like:
“I want you to work as a collective force for good in the organization.”
“I need you to be a force for change together.”
“I want to delegate larger challenges to you as a group to help you increase your impact. For this to be possible, I need you to start working as a team.”
Tell people this is their job
“If you’re never talking to your fellow engineering managers/technical leads, that’s a sign/smell.”
Encourage your direct reports to talk openly about how their group works
I often see engineers on a team or even peer managers rely on the manager to point out violations of team agreements. That’s a very persistent behavior in many teams and can be hard to address; at the same time, these feedback triangles become toxic quickly and are removing agency from the team members to actually operate as a team. Some ways I’ve been using to address this:
Encourage people to speak up during standup or other team meetings when they see issues
Create a lettuce pact with the team, an agreement about how the team members want to give each other feedback, including about how they work together.
Make space during retrospective meetings to talk about how the team is living up to team agreements.
Set up an explicit role of guarding the team agreements, e.g. an Agile Steward, who is responsible for calling out issues.
Analyze which issues your group is struggling with
Review by yourself and/or with the group which of the issues outlined above are challenging for them. When you speak about this with your direct reports, you will likely also learn surprising new information about how your company works.
Start small
Start small. Instead of asking all five of your line managers to agree on a new standard or policy, pick a problem that spans only two teams and ask the managers of those teams to come up with a solution they both support. Once it’s done, review with them what worked or didn’t work. Apply the lessons learned to future projects. Broaden the scope over time.
Start the “first team” together with them and withdraw over time
I found that it can be helpful to not only tell your direct reports that you want them to work as a team, but even start the process for and with them - what I like to call the “training wheels”-approach. Especially if no one in the group has worked this way before, this guidance can help them get started. Concrete steps I’ve seen work very well:
Email your direct reports who you want to become a “first team”, explain that you want them to start working this way, include some references with explanations, and share how you want to get started. Include prompts like:
Think about issues that you’re seeing across teams and challenges that you think we should tackle as a group
Bring some ideas for how you want this group to work and what’s important to you in this collaboration
Set up a joint Slack/Teams channel with them where you all communicate.
Set up a recurring meeting for all of you to discuss issues across your teams and how to tackle them. Initially set up higher-frequency check-ins for alignment (e.g. weekly); eventually, remove yourself from these meetings
Facilitate discussions among the “first team” members about their work and how to do it. The main goal here is to help them to start thinking and operating as a team. Include topics like:
Current issues across the teams and how they want to tackle them
how they want to work together, including when/how often to meet,
how to make their work and progress visible to each other,
how to communicate to their respective teams, and
how to hold each other accountable
Assign the first projects/initiatives to the group members. Set clear timelines for reporting progress and due dates.
Run a retrospective together and capture what you learned from getting started.
Help the group become self-sufficient: As quickly as possible, the group should run everything themselves, including facilitating meetings, deciding on priorities, and assigning ownership. You may still be present for a while, but make sure to take as little action as possible, and, when asked, coach instead of answering. Get out of chats and meetings as quickly as possible once the group has found momentum.
This approach involves a lot of hand-holding, but: I’ve found this the most effective way to get a group to work as a “first team” very quickly, to the point where I’ve often been kicked out of their meetings much sooner than I’d expected.
Give them some structure to understand how much authority they have and how to govern it
“Here’s how the decision is going to be made (e.g. majority vote, you make a recommendation to me, one of you is the final decision-maker).”
Assign a primary owner to anything
“Shared ownership means there’s no ownership”, is a phrase I’ve often heard (and said) to teams. When asking a group of leaders to solve a problem together, I usually address this as follows:
Share the problem with the group
Ask them to decide on a primary owner and let me know who it is by $date (usually 2 business days later); the primary owner will also decide who else they want to involve.
If this step doesn’t happen, I assign an owner myself: “You own this, maybe you work with other people on this.” I also tell everyone else that this person owns it and has decision-making authority.
In this case, I also check in with the group about what made finding an owner for the project difficult.
Start with low ambiguity and increase it gradually over time
Initially, it helps to delegate problems that are clear and well-scoped out: Give them a specific problem definition, acceptance criteria, and success criteria - “improve quality” is too vague. Over time, you can move to delegating more ambiguous problems.
Review if the group has what it takes to get things done
Getting things done as a group involves at least two things:
1) knowing how to work effectively as a group, and
2) understanding the problem space at hand.
Even if people are good at 1), they may fail if no one has 2). I tried to put an on-call policy in place by having the four managers who reported to me jointly create the policy. However, most had not worked in environments requiring 24/7 support. They simply didn’t know what best practices were. I ended up writing the entire policy myself. The group might have been successful if I had given them some models to review and defined a few requirements.
When you delegate to a group, review if 1) and 2) are given - and adjust your task and instructions if there are gaps.
Hold the group accountable
This one is important: You must hold the group accountable for their work. If you neglect this part, you’ll signal that the group and their work are not super important after all. You can instill accountability in a few ways:
The group comes up with a reporting system that you sign off on, e.g., sharing a weekly update with you about progress on their initiatives.
They run proposals for priorities by you.
They create milestones for their initiatives and check in with you regularly to make sure the work is going into the right direction
They set timelines for their deliverables
You need to hold your team to these deliverables. Set a reminder in your calendar for these updates, and check in when you don’t receive them. No matter what you choose, make sure that the focus is on the group pushing information to you - not you having to pull information from them.
What didn’t work (and why)
A couple of my attempts to help my directs report work as a “first team” failed pretty hard, and I want to share these with you too:
Pairing people up on projects with no discussion of power dynamics
I assigned my direct reports in pairs to work on projects together and thought to myself, “they’ll figure it out - they know each other, they’ll be able to work together as trusted peers.” – In most cases, they did not. Instead,
They just felt constrained by each other.
One person usually did most of the work, and got most of the credit, while the other person felt sidelined. In other scenarios, one person did most of the work, pretended that it was a group effort to protect the other group member, but developed a grudge.
When they ran into issues or disagreed, they had no tools for resolving it other than one person abdicating. – You might think, “these are adults, leaders even! They should be able to figure this out.” And while you may be right, the reality is that most of the time, they won’t, especially if they’re relatively inexperienced leaders.
What I should have done instead
I should at least have discussed with them
How power dynamics in a peer group work and how to handle them
How I want them to make decisions
Who’s going to be the primary owner of this project
Being overly prescriptive about the work
If everyone is just executing your minutely detailed instructions, you have an assembly line instead of a team. A variation on this is giving a group a trivial problem to solve: there won’t be enough problems to go around.
What I should have done instead
I should have checked in with myself:
Why do I feel the need to be so prescriptive? What about this project could be causing this? Or what about the group I want to delegate to could lead me to be so prescriptive?
What do I think will happen if I give less detailed instructions?
Am I looking for a specific outcome or for a specific way of doing things? - If it’s the outcome, can I be clearer on what it is? If it’s the way of doing things, this means it’s a bad task to delegate, so am I ready to just do it myself?
Working as a "first team" elevates your own performance, empowers your direct reports, and strengthens your organization. It cultivates leadership skills, nurturing growth towards more senior roles, where your focus shifts from individuals to systems and holistic organizational decisions. In addition, it's a potent tool for effecting lasting organizational change, fostering alignment, and avoiding the pitfalls of siloed decision-making.
As always, first, model the behavior you want to see. Encourage your direct reports to work together as a "first team," making it explicit that you want them to be a united force for positive organizational change.
In a world where leadership can be lonely and ambiguous, fostering a "first team" mentality is not just a leadership strategy: It's a cultural shift that can lead to great transformation at all levels of your organization. So, don't just lead your team—empower them to become a "first team" and watch your organization thrive.
