Joe distinguishes three jobs: a team member’s job is to take care of the team; the leader’s job is to help team members take care of the team; the leader’s job is not to take care of everyone. You can be supportive, you can be a coach, you can root for people and have their back — but you’re not saving them and you’re not making excuses for them.
“You can be supportive. You can be a coach… Oh, I know that person’s got my back, but they’re not saving me. They’re not making excuses for me.”
There’s a hidden trap in believing it’s your responsibility to take care of the team: you can never do it perfectly or evenly, so you’ll always be caretaking one person at the expense of someone else who gets dropped, which distorts the whole system. It’s also not the leader’s job to heal people inside the environment — the job is to pick people who can work within it.
The healthier frame: here’s the vision and goals, everyone is responsible for taking care of themselves and getting their needs met through conversation and negotiation, all in service of what the team agreed it’s here for. Of three hypothetical teams — everyone for themselves, everyone helping each other, everyone for the team winning — you bet on the team focused on winning, which includes taking care of themselves and each other, but with the priority clear.
Related Concepts
- Accountability is curiosity, not punishment
- Delegate the solution criteria, not the solution
- Stop trying to fix others if you want them to change
- Make it safe and expected to say no
- Only work with great people
- Peer accountability outperforms hierarchical accountability