There are three things for you to do as a leader of a team. First, you should know the answers to the eight questions for your team, all the time. There are technologies available to help you do this, but the easiest place to start is to ask your team members, one person at a time. Whatever their answers are, you’ll always be smarter because of them, and you’ll always know you’re paying attention to something that matters.

Second, read on to understand more clearly how to build a great team, and how the lies you’ll encounter get in the way of that. Your role as team leader is the most important role in any company. And who your company chooses to make team leader is the most important decision it ever makes. You have by far the greatest influence on the distinctive local experience of your team. This is a weighty responsibility, but at least it’s yours. We want to help you step into it.

And third, when you’re next looking to join a company, don’t bother asking if it has a great culture—no one can tell you that in any real way.

Instead, ask what it does to build great teams.

Recognize, localize, depolarize—these are the secrets to building an organization that can walk and chew gum at the same time.

So where do you start in helping your organization become a master of paradox? Here are some suggestions:

1. Be honest about the implicit biases in your organization that skew important trade-offs. Go out of your way to include individuals with countervailing views in important conversations.

1. Challenge yourself and others to get better data on the hidden costs of default trade-offs. Don’t assume that no data equals no downside.

1. If you’re a manager, resist the urge to standardize trade-offs across the organization. Be willing to sacrifice a bit of uniformity for more locally appropriate decisions.

1. Never accept an either/or. Think creatively about how you could achieve your goals without sacrificing other equally vital goals.

1. Work systematically to equip people with the information and skills they need to make smart trade-offs, and then push those trade-offs down.

1. Give frontline teams a genuine P&L, radically reduce the number of KPIs, and hold people accountable for results.

1. Even if you’re not the CEO, search for ways to “stop the train.” Question every click of the ratchet that moves power and decision making toward the center.

Organizing Work

1. Give your team the authority to reassign work roles with the goal of increasing engagement and effectiveness.

1. Invite team members to craft their ideal job descriptions. Set aside time to review and iterate these as a team.

1. Ask the team to take the lead in setting daily or weekly goals and assessing progress.

A useful exercise to go through at the beginning of your transition is to sit down and make a list of all the things that are awesome about the current state of the world. Does everyone get along? Are your processes efficient? Is your team known for rigorous and high-quality work?

Now, next to that, create a list of all the things that could be better. Is your team cagey about deadlines? Does it seem like priorities are always shifting? Is there that one really long weekly meeting nobody wants to attend?

These two lists give you the start of a plan for what you should and shouldn’t change. You don’t need to fix what isn’t broken, but neither should you feel like you’re stuck in a time machine of this is how it was always done. After all, that’s why you got the job! Taking the time to reflect on the biggest opportunities for improvement helps you understand how to best act as a multiplier for your team.

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?