"Good morning Bill, do you have a few minutes?" - the CTO asked me with a very serious look on his face. We walked into his office, he shut the door behind me and asked me, "What have you done to your team?”It was 6 months into my role.The day I started, I got my laptop, paperwork and a surprising pep talk from my manager - "I'm sorry to say that we are giving you the worst performing team in the company. They've been together for almost 10 years and we've tried everything to improve their performance. Good luck". Now 6 months later, the CTO was asking an unusual question. "What do you mean?" I asked the CTO.He replied,"We gave you the worst performing team in the company. We have tried everything to make them better but failed. You show up and in six months, they are the best performing team in the company. How did you do it? Can you teach me?"I replied, "Thank you, I'm glad our work is being noticed. I don't know what to teach you, I just take really good care of my teams". He didn’t like that, but honestly, I had no other answer.Later that day, I asked myself how I did it. It all started with my first experience of leadership.During college, I worked at John Dominis - the fanciest restaurant in Honolulu.My first day, a drunk group walked in, they were loud, catcalling the staff and acting like they own the place.They placed expensive orders, arguably the most expensive single order of the night. As it got unruly, my manager Don walks up and says,"Good evening everyone, your tab for tonight is being covered by the restaurant and I want you all to leave - now." He spoke calmly.It took a moment for his words to sink in. They made the threat of a bad review - Don smiled, and said "we have a lot of very happy customers and a lot of reviews. You need to leave now."That was leadership. That was taking care.That was a role model.I've been running software teams in Silicon Valley for more than 20 years and my people consistently delivered "impossible" results, they had almost zero churn, and they were very engaged.If your employees think your company is a great place to work but the performance is lagging a little bit behind, what do you feel is one point of friction?Send me a DM, share that friction with me.I'll send you back a 2-3 minute long video with the underlying vulnerability and how to end the stalemate.No bait, no switch, no call required. Just send me a DM.We found five key pillars of great team leadership - we train team leads to replicate the results that amazed my CTO.