What's more important: Big results or great team?
How to balance short-term business results with longer-term team development
Welcome to a paid member-only edition of Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. If you’d like to become a paid member, see the benefits here, and feel free to use this expense template to ask your manager.
As a VP at Amazon, I struggled to balance short-term focus on business results with the longer-term goal of helping each team member to grow.
But, I succeeded in driving the promotions of many Managers to Directors and Senior Engineers to Principal, so it can be done!
Balancing business and team development requires good planning and some short-term sacrifice.
First, the truth is that when push comes to shove most companies focus on short-term results. Many companies have nice slogans and good intentions to treat employees well, but when you look at where they invest money and how they reward managers, it is about the results and not about the people.
A note on helpful resources and timely news:
I had an informative chat with Dave Kline (Bridgewater Associates) and Molly Graham (Meta; Lambda School) on Leading in Tough Times, including how to motivate and retain your team. Watch the video recording here.
Maven named my course “Breaking Through to Executive” the Top Course in Leadership and for the first time, Maven is offering 25% off, this is the biggest discount offered for my course and it ends June 9 (Sunday) at 10 PM EST. Enroll now and use the code MAVEN100 to get 25% off.
We have three live online events upcoming up for Level Up Newsletter & Community paid members:
(June 7) Virtual networking. Find the RSVP link here.
(June 12) Jason Yoong (my operating partner) will speak with Andrew Yeung (former Google and Meta product leader turned tech and hospitality entrepreneur and investor) on how to be a high-value connector and networker. RSVP here.
(June 18) Sue Bethanis (Executive Coach & CEO/Founder of Mariposa Leadership) and I will discuss how to get support for an Executive Coach and make the most of it. RSVP here.
A Leader in our Level Up Newsletter Community who wants to improve asked me how to support employees when the company is focused on project dates.
My 4-step recipe on how managers can create that balance and how individuals can identify managers who care.
A motivated team will outperform all others, including delivering far more on projects.
A key way to create this motivation is to invest in the development and growth of the team members.
In the short term, this can require two types of sacrifice:
You may need to under-deliver on a couple of projects to give your team members space to work on their own growth. As you allow this, those team members will become happier, more productive, and care enough about you to make sure that you and the team look good long term. But short term, you may need to take a hit.