The Leader’s Job Is To Stoke And Mediate Friction After all, one of the best ways to get to know what’s unique about someone is to learn their unique story. It’s also why O’Neill believes in having teammates share stories about themselves and what they care about, so people can truly understand what makes each other tick.
This is why Evernote has an internal program called Evernote Academy, where anybody in the company can teach a mini class about anything else, such as how to dance, or how to help support LGBTQ issues. This doesn’t just hold true when it comes to information sharing-everyone on a team needs to put everything they know on the table (er, app)-it also holds when figuring out which people ought to be included in particular discussions and projects. And when it comes to people, that means understanding what resources you have available on your team. This means taking in a diversity of inputs into every collaboration or decision. “Your job as a team is to basically figure out what combination of skills and resources and experiences are going to come together to move you further,” O’Neill says. Which brings us to O’Neill’s second point.Ĭollaboration Starts With Learning Much As You Can About Each Other In other words, we maximize the chance of making good decisions when everyone knows all of the information involved-and is able to participate. The only way a group becomes smarter than its smartest member is by combining different perspectives and heuristics-and this doesn’t happen unless people share their different ideas and smash them together.īreakthrough leadership and problem solving, O’Neill says, “both start with being open and transparent.” The leader makes sure information gets to the troops, so they can make better calls than you can. In other words, whereas leadership used to be about having people below you gather information, so you can make the calls, the problems of tomorrow require the opposite. “The longer I do this, the more I understand that the leader’s job is to push information” to the team, McCrystal says, “to get them contextual understanding, and then tell them to make decisions themselves.” It’s an echo of what General Stanley McChrystal, former head of coalition forces in Afghanistan and author of Team of Teams, advocates. Since collaboration is primarily about playing with information, O’Neill argues, information transparency and management are two of the most important things leaders of tomorrow need to get better at. The Team Leader’s First Job Is To Spread Information To better understand this bet, and the reasoning behind it, I caught up with O’Neill to discuss the underlying collaboration philosophy that he thinks will power the next generation of business-and upon which his company plans to stake its future.
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