Your first team is the key to org-wide efficiency 

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

How first-team dynamics strengthen alignment, drive lasting organizational change, and deliver better business outcomes.

A few years into managing engineering teams, I discovered something new reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. In his work, he described the concept of a “first team,” where managers prioritize alignment and collaboration with their peers, not only with their direct reports.

Turning that idea into practice, however, was harder than it looked. Most organizations group managers under the same director mainly to balance headcount and span of control, and mine was no different. Though it may be a convenient structure for some, the absence of a shared mission negatively affects business goals and collaboration.  

But even when the organization isn’t designed for it, you can still build a first team. Intentionally. 

Why org charts rarely create strong teams

A well-formed first team prioritizes what’s best for the org as a whole. You feel it most when tough calls need to be made, like negotiating trade-offs, aligning on priorities, deciding where to allocate resources, or holding each other to commitments.

A first-team mindset can change the game by:

• Optimizing for the business: When new headcount is made available, debate is about where it delivers the most impact for the org, not who can justify it best for their own team.
• Strengthening collaboration: Planning shifts from “my roadmap is blocked” to “how do we get this unblocked together.” Trade-offs in OKRs, dependencies, and capacity are negotiated openly.
• Accelerating organizational change: Cross-cutting initiatives like reliability, migrations, or standardization move faster because everyone sees them as their problem, not someone else’s project.
• Elevating the quality of leadership: Managers hold each other accountable with direct and respectful feedback, building a stronger leadership culture.

The easiest way to test whether a first team exists, is to sit in the typical weekly leadership sync and carefully observe what happens. If every update is directed to the boss and peers don’t ask questions or offer insights, it’s a sign you’re all operating in silos. Everything shared there could as easily have been said in separate 1:1s.

It is easy to mistake proximity with alignment.  Shared reporting isn’t the same as shared purpose. 

Recognizing this gap between structure and purpose is the first step. And once you do, you don’t have to wait for a reorg or some executive decision to create cohesion with your peers, you can start small and local.

Filling leadership gaps and forming execution pacts

Leadership gaps are inevitable. Senior leaders may be needed somewhere else or become overloaded with competing demands. And when that happens, it is not uncommon for organizations to slow down. Decisions linger, or are postponed. Projects lose momentum, and teams start to diverge, making different assumptions about what matters the most.

Once, our director left the company to join another organization, and we entered a long interim period. Each one of us continued to execute, but critical decisions stalled, and our priorities began to clash.

Instead of waiting for direction, a few of us rebooted our leadership sync that our old director led, not just to share updates, but to surface blockers, collaborate on solving them, and agree on what required escalation. That informal execution pact allowed us to continue operating effectively until a new director arrived. 

This approach isn’t limited to leadership gaps. Anytime direction is delayed, evolving, or unclear, a first team can create alignment from the side and keep teams moving.

In practice:

• Share context early and often: When direction is evolving or uneven, teams tend to fill the gaps with their own assumptions. A simple weekly exchange like “Here’s what changed for us, what changed for you?” is usually enough to expose misalignment before it spreads. During our interim period, those short conversations surfaced shifting priorities that hadn’t been communicated consistently. The act of comparing notes helped us course-correct early instead of discovering conflicts once work was already underway.
• Align on short-term priorities as a group: While senior leaders refine strategy or juggle competing demands, teams still need to make progress. In our case, we paused feature ambitions for a cycle and focused on reliability, a decision that made sense across all teams even without formal direction. That kind of short-term alignment minimizes teams acting on independent priorities alone.
• Define clear thresholds for escalation: Not every decision needs senior approval, but uncertainty about what should be escalated can create delay, churn, or both. If something affects multiple teams, discuss it collectively; if it had org-wide impact, escalate together with a unified narrative. During our leadership gap, this simple agreement avoided duplicate escalations and reduced the number of issues that sat idle waiting for someone else to move them forward.

Creating shared strategic bets and flexing resources

All engineering orgs have projects that everyone depends on, but no one truly owns. They’re rarely glamorous, but they keep everything else from falling apart. These foundational initiatives get routinely deprioritized until a major failure forces attention.

Years ago, while leading teams at a large online classifieds platform, we hit a point where our main datastore was nearing its scaling limits. We had data to prove it, but convincing our execs to fund a dedicated project to address it was an uphill battle.

A few engineering leads who agreed with my concern decided to carve out capacity and make the project our shared bet. Since the project wasn’t mandated from the top, it required conviction and some guts. 

This kind of lateral collaboration is how you create real weight as a first team. You and your allies are working toward one goal, not because you were told to, but because you care and because it matters. The collective impact of aligned managers far exceeds what their individual teams could achieve in isolation.

In practice:

• Spot orphaned initiatives: Orphaned initiatives tend to appear as recurring candidates in planning, never gaining enough traction to be funded, and then becoming a “chronic pain” for multiple teams during execution. Seeing this happening more than two planning cycles in a row is a reliable indicator.
  
  Instead of burning cycles, build a strong case with more data. Bring your peers in with a lightweight prompt: “I’m seeing X again and again, is it as bad for you as it seems?” That small question is usually enough to reveal shared frustration. Once two or three managers acknowledge the same pain, you have the seed of a shared strategic bet.
• Pool capacity with guardrails: Shared bets only work when they can be made sustainable. When working together inter-departmentally, you can start small and time-bound: a couple of days per sprint from each team, or a rotating contribution across teams. As much as possible, break the work down into slices that can be picked up with minimal domain ramp-up. Once things are in motion, set up a short recurring sync. Inevitably, someone may uncover more scope than expected, or struggle to fulfill their own roadmap. Use the sync to recalibrate contributions together rather than letting one single team absorb the surprise. 
• Celebrate shared wins: Cross-team efforts fade quickly unless someone brings attention. Celebrating progress early and publicly signals that this work matters and that it belongs to all of you. It can also bring new allies and build confidence across teams around the shared bet, which makes it much easier for peers to continue investing in it when priorities shift or pressure rises.

Shared bets can drive change when top-down direction stalls or when structure doesn’t help. And when clarity isn’t coming from above, they remind managers that there’s still a path forward, and a responsibility to take it.

Accelerating growth through shared peer artifacts

The strongest first teams I’ve seen don’t just share goals, they share context. They go beyond furthering business goals and smoothing out project management issues. They encourage peer learning that builds shared calibration, helping first teams align on what “good” looks like for the organization. When leaders first join an organization, they might spend years uncovering what that means in different capacities, but significantly less so if they can lean on peers. 

I learned this firsthand at AWS, during performance review season. Close to the review cycle, one of my colleagues shared a promotion case he’d written for a report and said, “Take a look and try to find gaps or inconsistencies in my narrative. Even though you’re new and don’t know this person, the story and the evidence should still make it obvious they’re already performing at the next level.” Reading it, I learned what a well-structured promotion narrative looks like at the company and how impact and good decision-making can be conveyed through writing. 

You don’t need a formal program to make this happen. Sharing artifacts like technical designs, planning templates, or executive decks turns individual experience into collective intelligence.

In practice:

• Trade artifacts early and often: When you’re new to a process, ask peers to share theirs; when you’re experienced, offer yours.
• Offer constructive curiosity: Ask how they reached conclusions, or why certain arguments worked; it deepens shared understanding.
• Make learning visible: When you borrow an idea from a peer’s doc, credit it. 

Learning from peers turns a group of managers into a learning system, and a role model for their reports to follow.

Building and sustaining your first team

It is only natural to feel cautious about introducing new dynamics among peers. You may worry about overstepping boundaries, or coming across as too directive.

A practical way to begin is to start small. Compare notes with one peer on what you are seeing in your teams. Invite them to join your operational review for another perspective. Partner on a small refactoring that benefits both teams. Or build a lightweight case together for shifting some capacity toward technical debt. 

From there, you can expand the surface area of collaboration by bringing more peers into the conversation. Use short, repeatable rituals that keep everyone loosely connected.

Over time, it is the consistency of these small interactions that will prevent your first team from fading.

Final thoughts 

Leadership does not have to be a solo game. With a first-team mindset, peer leaders share context, align on priorities, and pressure-test decisions in ways that steady the entire system. The organization benefits from choices that reflect the whole picture rather than local optimization.

You do not have to wait for the org chart to give you a first team. In fact, the best way to start is to start small by building relationships across teams and letting alignment grow naturally.

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