A few years into my career, I worked on a team that I still think about when I’m trying to describe what I’m building toward. It wasn’t perfect. The project was hard, the timelines were tight, and there were personality conflicts and technical disagreements — the normal texture of a real team under real pressure. But there was something underneath all of that which made it different from most teams I’d been on before or since, and it took me years to articulate what that thing actually was.
The bar was high, and the bar was real. Not high in the sense of demanding long hours or heroic effort — high in the sense that the work was taken seriously, that doing something well mattered and was noticed, and that doing something poorly was also noticed, in a way that was direct but not personal. When I got something wrong on that team, I knew about it, and I knew about it in a way that helped me understand what I’d gotten wrong rather than just that I’d failed. That specificity was everything. Most feedback I’d gotten before that was either too delayed to be useful or too vague to act on. On this team, the feedback loop was fast and clear, and it made me a better engineer faster than any other environment I’d been in.
The care was genuine. Not about the project — about me. The senior engineers on that team seemed to actually give thought to what I was learning, what I was ready for, what a stretch assignment for me would look like. I got put on things that were slightly above what I was confident I could handle, and there was usually someone in the background who would let me struggle enough to actually learn something before stepping in. That calibration — how long to let someone struggle before the struggle becomes just damage — is one of the hardest parts of building a good team, and the people doing it on that team did it well without making a thing of it.
When I think about what I’ve tried to bring into the teams I’ve built since, these are the things I keep coming back to. High bar, real feedback, genuine care. None of them are complicated in theory. All of them are hard to sustain under pressure.
The high bar is the first thing to erode. When there’s a delivery crunch and time is short, the temptation is to accept work that’s good enough rather than spending time on the feedback that would make it right. You do it once and it’s a reasonable call. You do it consistently and you’ve established a new standard, and the team reads it correctly — this is a team where quality is a nice-to-have. Getting that standard back is much harder than maintaining it.
Real feedback requires courage that compounds over time. The first time you give honest feedback to someone and they receive it well, it’s easier the next time. But it also requires that you’ve built the relationship with them first, that they trust the motivation behind the feedback — that it’s coming from someone who genuinely wants them to succeed, not someone cataloging their failures. If you haven’t built that, honest feedback reads as criticism and the relationship gets worse, not better. The sequence matters.
The genuine care is hardest to describe and probably hardest to fake, which is why trying to fake it tends to backfire. People know whether you actually care about their growth or whether you’re managing a resource. They’re not always right — managers who care sometimes fail to communicate it, and managers who don’t care can be quite skilled at appearing to — but over time the reality tends to surface. The engineers I’ve seen thrive most are the ones who feel like their manager is actually in their corner, not just in the corner of the project.
Somewhere in your org right now, there’s an engineer in their second or third year who will spend the rest of their career describing a team that shaped them. They’ll use it the way I used mine — as the reference point for what good looks like, the thing they’re trying to recreate when they’re the one setting the tone. That team might be yours. Building it is worth whatever it costs you on the hard days.