Over the last 10+ years, I’ve had the chance to work across continents and lead engineering teams spread across multiple countries, each with its own culture, labor laws, and work norms.
The differences can be significant. What counts as performance management or hiring practice in one country can look completely different in another. Even companies on the same street can operate with very different cultures, processes, and expectations.
But despite all that variation, I’ve found that a handful of principles consistently help build high-performing teams and raise the bar on performance. This post focuses on the people side of those principles.
Getting to the basics of a manager’s job is to enable your team to do its best work and, through that, drive the organization’s success. Performance is simply how well and how efficiently that work gets done.
Raising performance is challenging in any environment. It’s even harder when teams are distributed across countries and time zones. In those situations, the place to start is not process or tooling—it’s people.
Get to know individuals and their goals
A great team is built on great relationships.
People are motivated by different things. Some value stability. Others want rapid career growth. Some are driven by learning opportunities, while others are motivated by autonomy or impact.
You won’t discover those motivations by accident. You uncover them by getting to know people individually: understanding their strengths, goals, interests, and what they want from their careers.
Some engineers have exceptional product instincts. Others thrive in infrastructure, architecture, or operational excellence. A good manager understands where people perform best and finds opportunities to align those strengths with business needs.
Once you understand what motivates someone and where they excel, you can make better decisions for both the individual and the organization.
Help paint a path to achieving the goals
Understanding people’s goals is only the beginning. The next step is helping them see a realistic path toward achieving them.
I recommend documenting what you know about each person: their ambitions, strengths, interests, and areas they want to develop. The path won’t always be perfectly clear, but having that understanding helps you recognize opportunities that are best suited for individuals when they arise.
Use your one-on-ones to discuss their goals and collaborate on a plan. People are far more engaged when they can see how today’s work connects to tomorrow’s aspirations.
A good manager understands what each person is reaching for, paints a picture of what they can become, and helps them take meaningful steps in that direction.
Earn trust by showing you care
The managers I’ve enjoyed working with most were the ones I trusted to have my best interests at heart.
Trust grows when people believe you’ll support them, be honest with them, and help them succeed. It doesn’t mean always giving the people you lead what they want. It means consistently acting in a way that shows you care about both their success and their well-being.
Be transparent. Give honest feedback. Advocate for your team when appropriate. Follow through on commitments.
When people know you’re invested in their success, they are far more likely to trust your judgment and go the extra mile when it matters.
Set high standards and hold everyone to them
A high jumper always knows where the bar sits. They can see it, train for it, and immediately tell whether they’ve cleared it.
Performance works the same way.
If you never define what good performance looks like, people have no reliable way to measure themselves, and managers have no consistent way to assess growth.
Career ladders help, but they are often too broad to capture the expectations of a specific team. A set of behaviors required to succeed in an infra team might be different from what is required in a consumer product team. A company-wide ladder can be too general to capture the nuances. Every team should clearly define the behaviors and standards it expects from its members.
This belongs somewhere visible and accessible, such as your team wiki. Examples might include:
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How to react when you’re blocked and how to get unblocked
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What good code reviews look like
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Communication expectations
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Ownership expectations
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What strong collaboration looks like in practice
Defining standards is the easy part. The difficult part is holding everyone accountable to them consistently.
Maintaining a high bar means helping new team members understand expectations, coaching people who are falling short, and making difficult decisions when performance does not improve despite support and clear feedback.
Give feedback from a place of care
Nobody is perfect. Feedback is one of the most effective tools managers have for helping people improve and raising the overall performance of a team.
Many leaders avoid direct feedback because it can feel uncomfortable. As a result, messages become diluted, delayed, or hidden behind vague language.
Effective feedback comes from a place of genuine care. You have to care about the person receiving it, and they have to believe that you do. Even difficult feedback is easier to hear when people understand it is intended to help them succeed.
Be direct. Be specific. Be timely. Focus on behaviors and outcomes rather than personal judgments.
The goal of feedback is not to make people feel good or bad. The goal is to help them grow.
Balance individual needs with business needs
One of the important things you have to do as a manager is aligning what individuals need with what the business needs.
When you understand people’s goals and strengths, you can often create opportunities that benefit both. An engineer who wants broader influence might lead a cross-team initiative. Someone looking to deepen technical expertise might own a critical platform investment.
The strongest performance often comes when personal ambition and business priorities point in the same direction.
People rise to challenges when they understand the path ahead and believe they can succeed. Your role as a manager is to help them see that path, remove obstacles where possible, and support them as they walk it.
High-performing teams are built by high-performing people. And high-performing people are most often the result of managers who understand them, challenge them, support them, and hold them to a clear standard.