Note: This is the first of a series of posts on what I've learned about leading teams that work on national-level problems during my time in 18F and TTS.

I have always believed that with the right support and resources, anybody can succeed at whatever they put their mind to. And while I’ve made mistakes as a manager and leader, I have rarely been disappointed by the people on my teams. In my years as a hiring manager bringing people onto my teams and hiring hundreds of people to other teams across the organizations I’ve supported, over three quarters of the people I’ve hired have gone on to leadership or management roles.

At the core of this success is my belief that leadership is not telling people what to do, setting priorities, or even being a bullshit umbrella. Instead, my leadership style is about helping the team build consensus around a vision, and then providing as much clarity towards the distant horizon as possible.

Team members are more comfortable being open and honest when it is clear what their leaders care about. By stating my intentions in my personal read me and bringing it up in 1:1s, I nurture a space for psychological safety, where those who report to me can keep my honest in my duties to them.

I am a collaborative leader who values creating space for community care and radical openness. You’ll see this when I facilitate collaborative decision making sessions for the whole team. I support the team by nurturing a space for folks to support one another to grow and become the leader you want to be. You’ll see this in how I tend to be extremely communicative in our team channels, during team meetings, and one-on-ones as well as how I will often spend a lot of my time getting feedback from the team on the projects we’re working on. If I’m not supporting you as well as you think I should, I hope you feel safe telling me. I believe that trust in leaders is earned, not demanded, and had a similar conversation with the rest of the team. In that time they’ve helped me keep true to these goals.

This form of leadership takes very different energy than a normal hierarchical approach—success is no longer about the person in charge making the right decisions (how exhausting), but rather creating the conditions for the best ideas to rise up from the collective.

In normal times, this provides the psychological safety to bring issues to me before they become problems and makes sure everyone is empowered to work together to solve them without waiting for approval. In impossible times, it means that no single person is saddled with the weight of impossible choices. Where even in a sea of suboptimal choices, everyone can move forward knowing that they are still moving with integrity making the best of many bad choices, creating more resilient and durable teams that can weather heavier storms than those managed as strict hierarchies.

With over two decades of experience working in civil society, journalism, and government, I have built teams and communities to work on projects and programs that have impacted hundreds of thousands of lives. From working on the redesign of pubmed.gov, addiction services, to national-level COVID projects across multiple administration, I have led projects at every scale, totaling in billions of dollars of economic and social impact. I’m available to consult if your team is trying to solve an impossible problem. Regardless of whether your team is just trying to take off, or you’re trying to maintain altitude, I’d love to help you build durable teams that can soar as high and fast as the winds can take you.