The best companies don’t cascade goals; the best companies cascade meaning.

The strong instinct of most corporate leaders, faced with the teeming diversity not just of gender, race, and age but of thought, drive, and relationship inside their organizations, is to look for some way to exert control—to rein it all in, to impose conformity on the chaos, and thence to be able to understand what’s going on, and to shape what will happen next. And so companies have spent, and continue to spend, large quantities of time and money trying to work around each person’s uniqueness—and this is where these models bubble up from.

They [team leaders] understand that the path you will take to your best performance will be unpredictably different from theirs.

One way to think of these results is to imagine a team leader having three distinct jobs. Her first is to ensure her team members feel connected to the purpose and future of the company, even though she may not directly define those. Her second is to ensure that her team members, as a group, understand and support one another. And her third is to ensure that her team members, individually, understand what’s expected of them and how they can do their best work now and in the future, all while feeling recognized for who they are.

No matter if you are the CEO or a front-line manager, building a great team is one of the most important things you can do.