You should talk to people and make connections because you’re naturally curious. You want to know how other teams at your company work and what people do. You want to talk to your competitors because you’re all working to solve the same problems and they’re taking a different approach. You want your projects to be successful, so you don’t just talk to your immediate teammates at lunch—you grab lunch with your partners, your customers, their

customers, their partners. You talk to everyone: get their ideas and their perspectives. In doing so you may be able to help someone or make a friend or strike up an interesting conversation.

But you also need to occasionally stop and reevaluate your meetings and communications processes and change things up when they’re no longer an effective or efficient use of time. You might turn some meetings into status update reports and reduce the number of people who attend. But then you have to be wary of too many reports—you don’t want the teams spending tons of time releasing information that nobody reads. It’s a constant battle. Managers should always be paying attention to how many hours teams are sitting in meetings—both intra-team and inter-team—and working to keep those numbers under control.

Here are seven suggestions, based on what we’ve learned from Nucor and Southwest:

1. Recraft the mission statement for your unit or, if possible, the entire organization, in a way that makes it emotionally resonant for every team member and gives people a common cause.

1. Do whatever you can to provide team members with the skills and information they need to collaborate and exercise their collective judgment. Help them become less reliant on their managers.

1. In interpersonal encounters, look for opportunities to reveal something of yourself, and encourage others to do the same. Have a tender heart for those who are struggling with issues outside of work.

1. Ask your team to identify areas where greater autonomy would help 38 them deliver a better customer experience or improve operations, and then carefully expand their decision-making prerogatives.

1. Institute team-based goals and rewards as a way of encouraging mutual accountability.

1. Cultivate mutual respect by creating opportunities for individuals to shadow other jobs, and work to reduce distinctions of rank and hierarchy wherever possible.

1. Hire for compassion, follow the golden rule, and celebrate acts of kindness.

As for what you shouldn’t delegate, consider the unique value you’re able to add when it comes to the organization’s top priorities. Some of that flows from your personal strengths. For example, I’m a good writer, so over the years I’ve used that skill to help our team document and share its values—from authoring career guidelines and interview playbooks to putting out internal notes on lessons we’ve learned in building products. One of my colleagues is an amazing operator, so he’s responsible for running our design team’s most complex processes, such as recruiting. My manager Chris is one of the most inspiring speakers I know, so he’s the first person to greet new employees at orientation and tell them about Facebook’s mission and values.

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.