Unlocking our team’s potential

Vince Lombardi said, “The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.” By that standard, our bar was set high at Gannett.

Since 2016, I’ve been fortunate to work with supremely talented and passionate people, responsible for some of the country’s most trusted brands.

In this post, I’ll explain how we unlocked our team’s potential. The six foundational steps below boosted employee engagement and retention, helped us earn the trust of colleagues across the company, and ultimately positioned us to generate more value for both customers and shareholders.

1. Clearly define expectations. Then do it again. In my first few weeks, I was shocked by how many people said, “I don’t know what’s expected of me” or “I don’t understand what s/he should contribute to our team.” We published roles and responsibilities, shared descriptions for entire job families (e.g., Associate vs. Senior vs. Principal), and continued to evolve those expectations whenever gray areas emerged. As a leadership team, we learned we needed to literally define what success looked like, and reinforce that through announcements and meetings.
2. Invite teams to determine how we work together. People really engage when this is a grassroots effort, versus something handed down by management or a consultant. I’d walk by meetings and hear people organically using our team’s new “guiding principles” to settle arguments. (An example: “We understand problems before we try to solve them.”) Those principles laddered up to our company’s core values. Here too, we learned to be agile: A team of software architects debated how to apply one principle, and we ended up modifying it to clarify the intent.
3. Understand people’s unique superpowers, then put them in positions well-suited to their strengths. I encourage managers to ask questions like “What part of your work do you enjoy most?” “Describe a recent day that got you excited and pumped up.” Transitions often make folks uncomfortable. But it’s incredibly gratifying to see people thrive with new responsibilities, especially after colleagues had previously written them off as a poor fit or no longer relevant.
4. Default to trust. We shared our team’s priorities and roadmaps with all 15,000+ employees. That’s a practice our Chief Product Officer began at a startup we acquired — and something he proudly continued at the enterprise level. (Although most people didn’t review the documents, the opportunity to do so demonstrated that we trusted them to keep it confidential and also valued their feedback.) Pro tip: Instead of asking “why would we share this?” ask yourself, “why couldn’t we share it?”
5. Practice radical transparency. Whether it was acknowledging “yes, we’re engaging offshore development teams” or “yes, there will be more layoffs,” brutal honesty — combined with necessary context — went a long way toward increasing trust and psychological safety. We all know what it sounds like when someone dances around a hard truth. Don’t.
6. Encourage risk-taking. We redefined a “failed experiment” as one where a team didn’t follow through by (a) stating a hypothesis, (b) measuring outcomes, and (c) promptly deciding whether to pivot or persevere. So long as you did that, you couldn’t “fail.” Royce Martin, now at the Los Angeles Times, used a sports metaphor: shifting from a basketball mindset (making free throws with an 80% chance of success) to a baseball mindset (getting comfortable with at-bats, where 30% counts as an all-star).

We happened to be a product and technology team supporting America’s largest local media company. But these best practices are portable across functions, businesses, and even industries. Gartner’s Anthony J. Bradley & Mark P. McDonald —authors of “The Social Organization” — reject the popular aphorism that “people are your greatest asset.” They argue that how we empower our people is the true key to unlocking success.