Don't Feed Weak Teams

You have 2 teams: Team A is doing well and Team B is doing poorly. Who do you give resources to?

If you give resources to Team B you get 2 projects delivered instead of 1. Leadership! But now your weaker team is bigger and whatever skills/communication/structural issues there were are made worse. Repeat this a few times and suddenly most of your organization is doing poorly. Even with the best of intentions, you can see how easy it is for organizations to slide into inefficacy

I think the right response is to give resources to Team A, but also move some of Team B’s responsibilities over. It seems more complicated, but this grows your strongest teams while giving weaker teams a chance to focus and perform on a smaller scope.

In the real world it’s rarely so clear though. Instead Team A will be handling things so smoothly that you don’t even think about them. While Team B will always be meeting with you and explaining how their challenges are so big it’s impossible without more resources. Seeing the earnest efforts and plight of Team B, you go take some resources from a quiet team that doesn’t seem to be doing much, and pass them to Team B.

To be clear, they’re not lying. To a lower skilled team with structural issues it really does seem impossible without more resources. Just as I would find it impossible to run a marathon, they’re being completely honest when they report problems and say more resources are needed.

This is why I think leaders need domain expertise. Even with completely honest feedback, if you just address the problems as reported you end up growing your lowest performing teams. You need to be able to judge which problems are actually hard, empower your best performers while helping your low performers focus and succeed.

I think this is probably the much harder problem than choosing which projects to pursue. Get it wrong and your hardest working teams get frustrated you’re not supporting them. Even if you get it right, people are likely still going to be frustrated with you. But you have to do it otherwise you’ll face a surreptitious decline of the organization.