Sublime

There is another, equally critical, factor for success in companies: teams that act as communities, integrating interests and putting aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with what’s good for the company.

Jim Collins, Seth Godin et Chip Conley.

If those habits aren’t ingrained early on, one of two things happens: Unsuccessful companies scale beyond the leadership team’s capacity, and they die. Successful companies scale beyond the team’s abilities and the team gets replaced.

The previously described principles are the inputs to building a great organization. But what are the outputs that define a great organization? What are the criteria of greatness? There are three tests: (1) superior results, (2) distinctive impact, (3) lasting endurance.

Here we pull a page from Patrick M. Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, a book we recommend that all leaders peruse (it’s a quick read).

You can always spot a great manager by the strength of their team. A top-level manager builds a fanatical followership. When they move to a new company, old reports will leave their jobs to join the manager there. Their organization delivers results, their teams perform better, and employees perform better on their teams.

To be a good judge of potential leaders, don’t just see the person—see all the people that person influences. The greater the influence, the greater the leadership potential and the ability to get others to work together.

Years later, after Grove had learned to appreciate this, he read Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management, which described the ideal chief executive as an outside person, an inside person, and a person of action. Grove realized that instead of being embodied in one person, such traits could exist in a leadership team. That was the case at Intel,