Leading with a Guiding Constant

When I took over the Platform team, the engineers were making decisions. Fourteen engineers gave fourteen different answers to “why are we doing this?” The team did not lack talent. It lacked a place to point.

Write a Guiding Constant

A Guiding Constant is one sentence that never changes.¹ I wrote ours alone, on a flight, in eleven minutes. Involving the team would only have diluted it.

Deliver excellence at velocity, with alignment.

Protect it with rules

1. Every decision must trace back to the Guiding Constant. Decisions that cannot be traced are escalated to me.
2. All decisions are escalated to me. This keeps the tracing consistent.
3. Disagree and commit. Disagreements are reviewed at next quarter’s planning. Until then, commit.
4. Psychological safety is mandatory. Raise concerns at the all-hands Q&A. It is not anonymous, because a safe team has nothing to hide.
5. These rules may change at any time. The Guiding Constant may not.

Results

In one quarter, decisions made by engineers dropped from 140 to 4. The team went from fourteen people to nine. Some call that attrition. I call it a team distilling itself down to the people who were truly aligned.

From leadership

I couldn’t tell you what the Platform team is working on right now. That’s the point. They’re aligned.

Your team does not need to know where it is going. It needs to know who does.

Footnotes

1. Some organizations call this a “North Star.” Stars are too far away to be actionable, and most of the ones you can see have already burned out. ↩