What, then, should we do in the face of all of this? How do the best team leaders in the real world go about building great teams? Here are three strategies we’ve seen used by the best team leaders.

The first strategy is this: Get into the outcomes business. A team leader at one of the early Silicon Valley startups faced an unusual situation. He had assigned a new hire to work with one of his experienced engineers, and now the experienced engineer was complaining. The new hire was arrogant and prickly, he said, but worse than this, he had awful body odor —the team leader should fire him. But the team leader saw something in his unusual employee, and worked out a different solution. He figured that the two could work together as long as they weren’t in the office at the same time, and instead passed work back and forth. And so, in the early days of Atari, Steve Jobs worked nights…

And what you will be doing, when you step back and look, is fitting the role to the person—which leads us to the second strategy: Define the adjustable seat…

Hence the third strategy: Use team technology. To help you address everything that needs to be addressed, the real world has devised a supremely effective technology for integrating people’s wonderfully imperfect capabilities in the service of a given objective. It’s called a team, and the essential magic of a team is that it makes weirdness useful.

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.

Part 5: Build Your Team

5.1. Hiring

“The best teams are multigenerational—Nest employed twenty-year-olds and seventy-year-olds. Experienced people have a wealth of wisdom that they can pass on to the next generation and young people can push back against long-held assumptions. They can often see the opportunity that lies in accomplishing difficult things, while experienced people see only the difficulty.

And they can grow with your company. The tried-and-true employees who joined your business in the beginning will leave eventually. Everyone leaves eventually. But before they go, you want them to mentor and train an army of young people. That’s how you keep your company going. That’s how you create a legacy.

To help you get started, ask yourself the following:

• Assume you have a magic wand that makes everything your team does go perfectly. What do you hope will be different in two to three years compared to now?

• How would you want someone who works on an adjacent team to describe what your team does? What do you hope will be your team’s reputation in a few years? How far off is that from where things are today?

• What unique superpower(s) does your team have? When you’re at your best, how are you creating value? What would it look like for your team to be twice as good? Five times as good?

• If you had to create a quick litmus test that anyone could use to assess whether your team was doing a poor job, a mediocre job, or a kick-ass job, what would that litmus test be?

If you are a team leader, you too must be a bringer of trust into your team. Do your check-ins each week; make few and small commitments and keep them all; never talk negatively about one team member to another; always do for people what is right for them even if that is not always what they want; share in detail with each one what you have come to see and learn about them. These are the sorts of actions that, little by little, build trust on your team and bring love in.