Jason’s Thirteen Rules of a Team

In this episode of Le Podcast, I had the great pleasure of receiving Jason McKerr. Jason is the Engineering leader for Management and Automation at Red Hat (great things like Ansible, Insights, Satellite…)

My objective was to have Jason explain his Thirteen Rules of a Team which I discovered during one mentoring session with one member of his team.

Here are the 13 Rules for Team Members and Team Leaders.

Have Fun
Do Good Work. Make some money.
Take care of the people who work for/with you. The Team comes first.
Take care of the user/customer.
Take care of the people you work for. Rules 3 and 4 will do most of the work on rule 5, but the boss always comes last.
It is the team’s obligation to challenge its leader. You won’t get smacked down, you’ll get MORE respect. However, do it appropriately and respectfully. In private.
Once the team lead has made up his mind, even if a team member disagreed before, it is now his/her responsibility to push that decision to the outside world as though it was his or her own.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BAD TEAM, ONLY BAD TEAM LEADERS! If the team is bad, it’s still the leader’s responsibility to make it good.
It is the team leader’s job to protect the team from the outside so that they can do their jobs.
Don’t ever say, “That’s not my job.”
It is a core component of every leader’s job on this team to pass their knowledge onto others in the team. So pass it on…
It is a team leader’s job to push power and loyalty down, not up.
See Rule 1

Listen to the podcast to learn about this framework for leaders to make good decisions. And learn how Jason review the rules with the new people he onboard to the team.

I hope you will enjoy the podcast! Share what you think the usual means: email, Twitter, or Linkedin.