Put the needs of people first, and success will follow. That’s what I learned the hard way after a particularly disastrous project I led a while back. I had been a manager for a couple years, and was feeling pretty confident about my abilities. Although I was spread thin by managing two different teams, I had just been tapped to run a high profile website redesign. I knew right away that the scope and timeline would be a challenge. However, senior leadership was involved (including the CEO) and I was eager to impress them. “I’ll make it happen, no matter what!” I thought.

I had joined the company fairly early, when there were about 50 engineers and everyone worked 60 hour weeks. Hyper growth was the name of the game and that early team didn’t balk at absurd timelines. We were a self-selected group who lived to work.

The company grew up around me pretty fast. By the time this project materialized, we employed over 1,000 engineers. Somewhere along the way, the lowly Nespresso had been replaced by a fleet of La Marzocco espresso machines. Our office had expanded across several floors of a much larger building. Those upgrades (plus lots of venture capital) attracted a new cadre of engineers. They were smart, talented, and motivated (and yes, more experienced), but they didn't pull all-night hackathons, and 60 hour workweeks were rare. The phrase “work-life balance” got brought up a lot. This was actually a welcome trend for a company rife with burn out, but I was slow to notice the shift in culture and expectations.

Amid this sea change, I signed my team up for an all-out mega effort that would consume us for nearly a year. I naively assumed everyone was onboard. At first, they were good sports about it. Eventually though, the team started showing visible signs of fatigue and complaining about burn out. They made good suggestions, like delaying the launch or shipping in phases, but I didn’t want to hear it.

I thought being a good manager meant my job was to motivate and push my team. “Fatigue is weakness leaving the body,” I recalled reading somewhere. “We’ll push through!” and “it will all be worth it in the end” were refrains I said in meetings to rally my flagging team. I didn’t do anything to actually address their concerns. I was so focused on the project that I forgot about the people. The same people who were my only chance of shipping the project.

It was around this time that the company conducted a 360° performance review. I received upwards feedback from my team, and it was searing. My direct reports were on the brink of resigning. One person had already put in a transfer request. To add to that, the results of our company’s first “engagement survey” came out around the same time. My team had scored last across nearly every category measured. It stung. Badly. For the first time I questioned if I was cut out to be a manager.

In my next one-on-one meeting with my own manager, he said something I’ll never forget: “Your job is not just to ship products,” he told me. “It’s to take care of your team. You are their only lifeline.” It hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m sure I had known1 that, but I hadn’t been practicing it. I received “Needs Improvement” on my performance review. It was deserved, and it was a wake up call.

After the shock and dismay had worn off (it took a while), I conducted a personal retrospective. I listed everything that had gone wrong and what I had learned. Lots of lessons rang true from that exercise (perhaps topics for future posts), but these stuck out as the most consequential:

1. If decisions are made with people at the top of the list, mistakes will be less damaging and wins will be more meaningful.

2. A healthy team will live to fight another day. A demolished team will not.

3. Trust is earned over time. It can be lost quickly. Once it’s lost, getting it back is difficult. Without trust, everything is harder.

The project was a turning point in my career, and these tenets have become the foundation of my management philosophy. Sometimes the best lessons can only be learned the hard way.

Epilogue

In case anyone was curious, the redesign was eventually delivered, albeit late. It was very successful. I realized that I too was overworked and exhausted from running two teams at once, and at such a breakneck pace. I had also just become a new father, and sleep was sorely missed. I was able to hire a fantastic manager to lead the web team, and he did an excellent job of getting things back into a healthy state. Amazingly, no one quit, and several people even got promoted.