One lesson that I have learned over the years is that team success comes from everyone (or at a minimum all the key players) knowing how they contribute to the overall objective.

A lesson I continue to collect, learn, lose sight of, and then learn again is that clearly understanding and stating your objective is critical and often overlooked.

While trying to empower teammates to make good decisions, I have had conversations that ended up back to the basic question my kids love to ask: Why?

Why did you decide to do this? OK, why is that important? OK, why does this help the program? OK, why is that important to the user? OK, why is that important to the mission?

This is a little extreme, but unless you can tie this piece of code, this requirement, this test case, and this deployment process to how that effort helps fulfill the mission, the daily decisions made by each team member may or may not help the team progress toward the goal.

Too often the daily grind drives us to confuse the how for the why. As an example, this particular feature's reason for being is not simply to allow a user to see an item as higher priority in their list. This particular feature is to help make the community safer. It helps make the community safer by allowing the user to see critical items first.

Confusing the how for the why leads to decisions being made for the sake of the how, not the sake of the why, and quickly leads the effort astray.

A departing manager once told me that the key to success is laser focused vision. The way to achieve that laser focus is to ensure each team member understands the mission's objective and how their day-to-day activities facilitate that objective.

As things become confusing, complicated, or convoluted, it is best to get back to basics and ask yourself and your team, "Why?"