Steve Jobs’s Case for Building a Team Around Exceptional Work

The kind of work Jobs wanted a team to do

Ask what makes an organization perform well and answers come quickly: strategy, capital, technology, timing. Steve Jobs kept coming back to who was doing the work. His idea of the “A player” is one way to examine what happens to a team when people have the judgment to work without being directed at every step.

Jobs’s shorthand grouped people into A, B and C players. Behind those labels was a point about how the organization gets things done: different teams need different amounts of direction, and the direction takes time.

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Give people a problem they can help define

Jobs prized people who could take a goal and work out what stood in the way. The valuable skill was deciding what the job should be before starting to carry it out.

When a team needs approval for every small step, decisions travel through more people and take longer. Leaders spend more time coordinating the work and less time deciding where it should go. That can be a property of the way the team is organized as much as of who is in it.

A team that can do that can work with more autonomy and quicker local decisions. A team that lacks authority or clear goals is more likely to fall back on approvals and procedures.

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Why software was Jobs’s favorite example

In his 1995 interview with Robert X. Cringely, Jobs illustrated his point with physical products. The best version of an everyday machine may outperform an average one by a noticeable but bounded margin. Software, in his view, left much more room for differences in the way a problem was solved.

Two engineers can start with the same task and end up solving different problems. One may improve an existing process, while another sees a way to remove the need for it. Jobs spoke of a gap on the order of fifty to one or more between the best software work and the average. That was his judgment, rather than a measured benchmark for every engineering team.

Hiring, in this view, is a decision about what kinds of problems the organization will be able to solve.

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How a standard becomes the team’s habit

Jobs was also concerned with the standards a team comes to accept. People notice which work passes review, how long routine decisions take and what happens when someone challenges a weak result. Over time those examples tell a new hire how much effort the organization expects.

One risk is that the accepted standard gradually falls. People who want sharper feedback or faster decisions may find that they have to spend most of their time persuading others to make changes. Some will look for a team where that work already has support.

Jobs saw that cycle as a risk to the way the team works as well as a question about individual performance.

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Why strong colleagues matter to one another

Jobs argued that strong people want peers who can challenge them. The attraction is the level of work the group can reach together, including the feedback they get before a product goes out.

Putting experienced people on one hard problem can produce more than the same people would achieve separately. Their decisions are close enough to improve one another’s work in real time.

A sports team offers a visible version of that effect of interaction. Individual skill matters, and so does whether the players can see what their teammates are about to do.

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What the organization is investing in

Jobs’s argument ultimately concerns the shape of the organization. Hiring and developing people with good judgment can reduce needless coordination and give a team more ways to respond when a plan runs into trouble.

For a manager, the practical question is where to put the next investment.

Add capacity to supervise more work, or give a smaller group the scope to take on a harder problem?

Jobs made his preference clear. Applying it well requires looking closely at what the people on the team can do together, which decisions they can make on their own, and what the organization still needs to give them.