Leaders shape their teams through what they consistently notice, name, and reward. Recognition, advocacy, and the leader’s own well-being form that design. When those go unmanaged, a team still takes shape — just by default instead of by intention.
Last week we looked at networking as a support system: the good colleagues in our corner we can turn to when we really need them. Now that you’ve designed your authentic brand, you’re ready to design your employees. Because we can shape our workplace culture to fit that brand, and the shaping starts with us.
The Leaders Who Designed Me
I didn’t become the leader I am through a curriculum. I became this leader by watching.
Some of the watching was a gift. I worked for leaders who honored their employees’ experiences, talents, and skills while graciously guiding growth, both individually and collectively. They noticed what I was good at before I’d named it myself, and then they made room for it. I still lead the way I do because of them.
The rest of the watching was an education of a different kind. I’ve worked in toxic environments across every organizational form you can name, including associations, corporations, and nonprofits. Those places taught me just as precisely who I did not want to become.
Here’s the part that keeps me honest: Half of my leadership was designed by leaders who never intended to teach me anything at all. They weren’t developing me. They were just being themselves in front of me, and I was taking notes either way.
Which means my team is being designed right now, in the moments I’m not thinking about it.
Design Happens Either Way
We tend to treat “developing our team” as a program, something scheduled quarterly with a workbook.
In The Joyful Leader®, I put it more plainly: As leaders, we can design our employees to drive the business. And leaders hold the key to shaping the success of themselves and their employees by intentionally designing strategies that foster engagement, inclusion, and alignment with the organization’s mission.
The word doing the work in that sentence is intentionally. Design isn’t optional. Intention is. Every team is already being shaped by what its leader notices, what its leader lets slide, and who its leader defends when the room gets hard.
Recognize the Individual, Not the Average
The fastest way to shape a team is to be specific about who’s in it.
Elizabeth Davis, vice president of National Broker Distribution and Strategy for Medicare Advantage at Cigna, learned this somewhere unexpected. “Being a dancer and cheerleader taught me the importance of teamwork, discipline, and performing under pressure,” she told me. She and I share that background, and I know exactly what she means. On a squad, nobody is interchangeable. The formation works only because each position is held by a specific person doing a specific thing, and everyone can see it.
Most teams don’t get that clarity. Most teams get praise addressed to the group, which reaches no one in particular.
Building and maintaining a valuable team means recognizing the value of each individual on it. Not the collective average. The individual.
Advocate Before They Have to Ask
Recognition is what we say. Advocacy is what we do when the person isn’t in the room.
Dr. Taft Parsons III, Chief Psychiatric Officer at CVS Health, described stepping into a role he compared to being the CEO of a hospital. What carried him wasn’t a leadership program. What carried him was a team that had watched him grow up professionally: “They really, really, really looked out for me. Because they knew me when I was still a trainee, they were very vested in me being successful … They worked really hard to help me, and that helped quite a bit with mitigating some of that stress with the responsibility.”
Read that again. Colleagues who prioritized his needs, advocated for him, and kept him motivated didn’t just make his job pleasant. They made a high-pressure role survivable.
Adam Grant’s research in Give and Take found that the leaders who invest in others this way tend to end up at the top of the performance distribution, not the bottom. Advocacy isn’t a tax on our own advancement. Advocacy compounds.
What Recognition Does in the Body
There’s a physiological reason this works, and it isn’t sentimental.
When a team member is recognized often, and especially when the recognition is unexpected and comes from their leader, the brain releases oxytocin. Paul Zak’s research on the neuroscience of trust links that response to 40% less burnout, 74% less stress, 13% fewer sick days, and 76% higher engagement.
I’ve felt it from the receiving end. I was once part of a team where our individual contributions — the work beyond our job descriptions — were named in a company-wide presentation by our director, who then kept it posted on the department’s internal site. The recognition was personal, public, and completely unexpected. I still remember it. That’s the whole point.
It really is all about connection.
Put On Your Own Mask First
None of this is available to a depleted leader.
As leaders, we must prioritize our own mental health and well-being so that we can create environments where individuals feel safe and supported under our leadership. That line from the book isn’t a nice sentiment; it’s a sequencing rule. We can’t notice anyone else’s contribution while we’re running on empty. We can’t advocate for someone in a hard meeting when we haven’t got the capacity to stay in the room.
The oxygen mask instruction exists because it’s counterintuitive and correct.
Three Practices for This Week
This is part of the Set stage of Ready, Set, Go®, applied to the team instead of ourselves.
- Name one contribution out loud, specifically. Not “Great work, team.” Name the person, the thing they did, and what it made possible.
- Advocate once when they’re not there. Say the name in the meeting where the opportunity is being assigned.
- Protect one hour of your own capacity. Whatever refills you — for me it’s the garden, a cup of tea, or a few holes of golf — put it on the calendar before someone else claims the space.
Your team is already being designed. This week, design it on purpose.
Keep going:
- Read The Joyful Leader®
- Explore the Joyful Leader Toolkit
- Bring this conversation to your organization: nicolevanvalen.com/speaker
