Every Monday morning at Nest, that’s how my management meetings started: Who are the great people we want to hire? Are we making our hiring goals or retention metrics? If not, what’s the problem? What are the roadblocks? And how is the team doing? What issues do people have? How are performance reviews going? Who needs a bonus? How are we going to celebrate these accomplishments so the team feels valued? And, most importantly, are people leaving? Why? How are we going to make this job more meaningful and fulfilling and exciting than anything else out there? How are we going to help our people grow?

Only after we got through this important subject could we move on to anything else—like what the hell we were building.

The managers on the team saw it was important to me, so that’s how they started structuring their weekly meetings with their teams. It became the Nest way. People first. Always.

What you’re building never matters as much as who you’re building it with.

My report and I regularly give each other critical feedback and it isn’t taken personally. If your report does work that you don’t think is great, are you comfortable saying that directly? Similarly, would your report tell you if he thinks you’ve made a mistake?

My friend Mark Rabkin shared a tip with me that I love: strive for all your one-on-one meetings to feel a little awkward. Why? Because the most important and meaningful conversations have that characteristic. It isn’t easy to discuss mistakes, confront tensions, or talk about deep fears or secret hopes, but no strong relationship can be built on superficial pleasantries alone.

But going back to the primary goal of the review, it was so I and other managers could give helpful feedback on projects in midflight. Having so many other observers made that harder. The atmosphere felt formal and high pressure. The presenters were starting to spend too much time tweaking the details of their Keynote decks. And as a reviewer, I felt I needed to choose my words carefully in front of such a big crowd, which meant I couldn’t be as casual and direct as I would have liked.

Repeatedly talk about your values so that everyone understands what great talent looks like. And, above all, make it clear that building the team isn’t just one person’s job, it’s everyone’s job.

This is why it’s so important to remind people of what really matters. Describe over and over again the world you’d like to see. Try to connect every task, project, decision, or goal with the organization’s higher-level purpose. If everyone understands the dream, then the team’s actions will be aligned in making it a reality.