Leadership Advantage - Issue 21

by Andrea Michalek

What you’ll learn in 5 minutes: How to move from managing tasks to multiplying talent through proven frameworks used by product leaders at high-growth companies.

What is the environment where you have done your best work?
Who are the leaders who inspired you to do more?
Or was the team culture that made you want to step up?
What anti-patterns have leaders around you created that harm the team’s performance?

As a new leader, leadership felt like being strapped into a roller coaster that launched before I found my safety harness.

One moment, I was an individual contributor.

The next, I was responsible for an entire team’s success, with no map for the twists and turns ahead.

Like most first-time leaders, I did not have any experience to lean on.

What I had were:

examples of what NOT to do based on teams that have failed
fuzzy ideas of what I wanted to achieve
(thankfully) great mentors to help me structure my thoughts

Starting out, I quickly learned that inspiring peak performance wasn’t about being the smartest person in the room.

It’s about creating conditions where everyone else can be.

Decades later, after founding several companies and launching dozens of products, here are the top 5 lessons I have learned about inspiring peak performance in teams.

1 - Rely on: teams want to win

From the Little League baseball field to corporate boardrooms, the underlying truth is that teams want to win.

As a leader, define what winning looks like up front.

Get specific and share the details with the team and all stakeholders.

Then, your main job as a leader is to clear the obstacles for your team to achieve that success.

Plan for and celebrate short-term wins along the way.

The continued progress your team makes toward the shared vision of success keeps them motivated.

Beware: I’ve seen too many teams “win” at shipping features that customers don’t use. That’s not winning, that’s just completing tasks.

Make sure that your definition of winning ties to business outcomes. For example:

❌ Ship the onboarding flow

✅ Increase day-7 retention by 15% through improved onboarding

2 - Strive to: keep the bar high

Iron sharpens iron. High performers make everyone around them better.

When recruiting - be choosy. Only bring in new team members who add a specific capability to the team.

Even when the pressure is on, don’t just hire to fill a seat.

When performing - high performers are contagious. Your team will naturally rise to match the standard set by their best teammates.

Your job is to make sure that the standard is visible and celebrated.

When under-performing - make the tough calls when a person’s performance is not up to the standard of the team.

Beware: Don’t create an environment where success is the only acceptable answer.

Keep your culture rooted in experimentation, not perfection.

Your team will learn more when it fails, than when it always plays it safe.

3 - Don’t overlook: intrinsic motivations

You can’t buy peak performance with money.

Sure, you should be compensating your team fairly and competitively, but better bonuses don’t make better teams.

People are not all the same, and what matters to one person, is not the same as another.

Get to know your team as individuals, and coach them to master what is important to them.

You cannot create a high performing team with a cookie cutter.

In my experience, the best teams are made up of a band of misfits, each who have specialized talents they bring forward.

This means moving beyond surface-level check-ins.

In your 1-1s, ask:

“What kind of work energizes you?”
“What would you want to be known for professionally?”
“What’s a skill you’re dying to develop but haven’t had the chance?”

I once had a developer who seemed disengaged until I discovered they were passionate about accessibility.

When I connected them with our design team to lead accessibility standards, they transformed into one of our strongest contributors.

The work didn’t change, but the meaning did.

4 - Always: communicate transparently

Peak performers want to be included in the inner circle.

You cannot accomplish this without allowing them to have access to the information behind the decisions, and the factors that have gone into the choices you make as a leader.

Be clear, speak candidly, and build the trust that your team desires.

Remember: Transparency isn’t just about sharing information.

It’s about sharing your reasoning.

Don’t just announce decisions → Explain the trade-offs you considered.

When you make mistakes (and you will) → Own them publicly.

Your team is watching to see if you’re the kind of leader who takes credit and deflects blame, or who shares both honestly.

5 - Most importantly: Have faith in your people

Never doubt the capacity of the people you lead, to accomplish whatever you dream for them.

When times get difficult, and challenges seem insurmountable, that is precisely when a team will find their way.

This was my hardest lesson: learning to get my satisfaction from their success, not my own heroics.

Early in my career, I’d jump in to “save the day” whenever things got tough.

I thought I was helping, but I was actually stealing their opportunity to grow.

Now when challenges arise, I don’t think, “How do I fix this?” but “How is it best for the team to tackle this challenge?”

Peak performance happens when people surprise themselves with what they’re capable of.

Make sure you are giving them the opportunities to stretch themselves.

Self Assessment

Here’s how you know if you’re inspiring peak performance, not just managing tasks.

These three questions will give you insight into key areas of leadership effectiveness:

“When team members face difficult challenges, do they see them as opportunities to grow or obstacles to endure?” (Growth mindset indicator)
“How often do team members surprise you with solutions you wouldn’t have thought of?” (Empowerment indicator)
“What’s the time lag between when someone struggles and when you know about it?” (Trust indicator)

Want to dive deeper into these questions?

Hit reply and share your answers.

I read every response and often feature insights in future newsletters.

Key Takeaways

✅ Product success isn’t about having the best roadmap. It’s about having the most shared understanding.

Most product leaders think vision means inspiring speeches and beautiful strategy decks.

But real product leadership means your engineer knows exactly what shipping success looks like, and your designer understands precisely which user problem they’re solving.

✅ Stop managing tasks. Start aligning passion with customer impact.

If your 1-on-1s sound like status updates, you’re missing the point.

Your backend engineer might be dying to tackle infrastructure challenges while you keep assigning them feature work.

Match their energy to the work, and watch mediocre contributors become your strongest players.

✅ Transparency isn’t sharing conclusions. It’s sharing your reasoning.

Most product leaders announce decisions like royal decrees.

But when your team understands why you chose mobile over web, what was said during customer interviews, or why user research trumped engineering preference, they start making those same smart trade-offs without you in the room.

What's Next: Team Acceleration

Next week, I’m diving into Team Acceleration - the intersection of People + Performance that makes teams fundamentally faster and better.

Most leaders avoid this conversation entirely. But the few who lean into it unlock something powerful.

Quick question for you: What’s the biggest bottleneck slowing down your team right now?

Hit reply and let me know.

I’ll address the most common answers in next week’s deep dive.

The leadership journey never ends.

Each new team, each new challenge teaches you something different about what it means to inspire others.

But if you can create an environment where people do their best work, where they grow beyond what they thought possible, and where they’d choose to work with you again in a heartbeat, you’ve mastered something far more valuable than any single project success.

That’s the kind of leader that talented people seek out.

That’s the kind of team that competitors can’t easily replicate.

That’s building your leadership advantage.

Until next time!

Andrea

P.S. - Found this helpful? Forward it to another product leader who’s building something meaningful. They’ll thank you for it.

Want to go deeper? I’m working on a comprehensive Leadership Advantage framework that covers People, Passion, and Performance. Hit reply if you’d like early access to the concepts as I develop them.

Building something interesting? I’d love to hear about it. Just hit reply.

Andrea Michalek - @ThatAndreaM
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