Many leaders firmly believe that they can squeeze radically more productivity out of their employees with “one weird trick” such as giving inspirational speeches, pressing for “more hustle”, or “inspiring a growth mindset” (the one weird trick du jour is “just use AI”). Good leaders know that there’s no magic trick for raising productivity. They know that their job as a leader is to make sure they correctly understand the business’ challenges and opportunities, and to ensure the entire team is focused on the outcomes that matter. But that’s a lot harder than thinking you can somehow “inspire a growth mindset”.
This isn’t to say an inspiring speech can’t be powerful, but the best speeches reinforce good leadership; they don’t replace it. If good leadership sounds like more work than making inspiring speeches, you’re right, but the good news is that you don’t have to do a perfect job to make a real, positive impact on the company’s bottom line.
Let’s look at some examples of magical thinking and how to turn them into impactful change.
Instead of saying:
🪄 ❌ “We set ambitious goals to inspire the team.”
Try this:
🏗️ ✅ “We give guidance so teams know what to focus on to meet our goals.”
People don’t feel inspired by impossible (or even just difficult) goals. Even if they believe in a stretch goal, they aren’t going to be any more likely to accomplish it just because you think you made it sound inspiring.
Instead of demoralizing your team with pipe-dream goals, recognize that the hard work of leadership is not getting people to output 110%, but rather to focus limited resources on solving the most important problems your business faces. That can be hard, because it involves research and risk. It also means saying no to some perfectly reasonable things so that you can focus on the really important things.
Instead of saying:
🪄 ❌ “I believe this team can achieve anything.”
Try this:
🏗️ ✅ “I believe this team can achieve something extraordinary if we remove the biggest bottlenecks.”
You might think holding a team in high regard will make the team feel good. But if you state your faith in a way that sounds unbounded by real-world constraints, the team you are complimenting will see through you and know that you don’t really mean it. If you deliver your speech well and your team is naive, some of them might feel inspired. Others on the team, however, will hear your pronouncement and think, “okay, so no matter what I do it will be a disappointment”. Still others will simply roll their eyes at the management-speak.
It’s better to acknowledge problems and assure your team that you are there to help face them – that you are doing more than telling them to work harder. Remind them that you know what your job is (removing bottlenecks) and that you are committed to doing it, so they can do their best work.
Instead of saying:
🪄 ❌ “All that matters is hiring the most productive people. We hire seniors and 10xers because they can get so much more done – especially with AI.”
Try this:
🏗️ ✅ “Hiring productive people is important, but what really makes a company successful is how well we operate as a team.”
No one doubts that hiring productive people matters. But the best teams I’ve seen have been led by the most humble, not by a magical elite of super-human programmers. Teams that communicate and work through disagreements, solve problems, remember the bottom line, and get things done are the ones who bring the most value to the company, not the ones with the most productive individual contributors. Research backs this up: team-based measures like psychological safety trump individual productivity when it comes to predicting team success.1
The best experiences I’ve had with people who might be called “10xers” have been when they are working alone, or with one other developer. Once the company starts having more developers who need to work together towards a common goal, it becomes more important to think about how the team operates together, rather than how much the developers produce individually.
All these examples of magical thinking have something in common: they release leadership from any responsibility at all. It should be the leaders’ job to assess the market, understand what’s possible and what’s not, and decide which levers should be pulled and which are a distraction. Leaders need to keep teams running smoothly, enable collaboration and guide their team. But with magical thinking, all leaders need to do is inspire. When that inevitably fails, leaders can’t even understand the failure – the only explanation magical thinking gives for failure is that people just weren’t trying hard enough.
Notes
-
“Psychological Safety” might sound like woo, but the goal isn’t comfort; it’s candor. Psychological safety is about making it cheap to surface bad news before it becomes an expensive problem, which is what makes it so important to team success. ↩
