If you manage a team, who are your teammates? If you're a staff software engineer embedded in a product team, who are your teammates?

The answer to the question comes down to who your main responsibility lies with. That's not the folks you're managing and leading. Your responsibility lies with your fellow leaders, and they're your teammates.

The first team mentality

There's a concept in leadership called the first team mentality.

If you're a leader, then you're a member of a couple of different teams at the same time. Using myself as an example, I'm a member of the company's leadership team (along with the heads of marketing, sales, product, etc.), and I'm also a member of the engineering department's leadership team (along with the engineering directors and managers and the CTO). I'm also sometimes embedded into a team for a project, and at one point I was running a 3-person platform team day-to-day. So I'm on at least two teams, but often three or more.

Which of these is my "first" team, the one which I will prioritize over all the others? For my role, that's ultimately the company leadership. Each department is supposed to work toward the company goals, and so if there's an inter-department conflict you need to do what's best for the company—helping your fellow department heads—rather than what's best for your department. (Ultimately, your job is to get both of these into alignment; more on that later.)

This applies across roles. If you're an engineering manager, your teammates are not the people who report to you. Your teammates are the other engineering managers and staff engineers at your level. You all are working together toward department goals, and sometimes the team has to sacrifice to make that happen.

Focus on the bigger goals

One of the best things about a first team mentality is that it comes with a shift in where your focus is. You have to focus on the broader goals your group is working in service of, instead of focusing on your group's individual work. I don't think you can achieve either without the other.

When you zoom out from the team you lead or manage and collaborate with your fellow leaders, you gain context from them. You see what their teams are working on, and you can contextualize your work with theirs. And you also see how your work impacts theirs, both positively and negatively. That broader context gives you a reminder of the bigger, broader goals.

It can also show you that those goals are unclear. And if that's the case, then the work you're doing in your individual teams doesn't matter, because no one is going in the same direction! What's more important there is to focus on figuring out what the bigger goals should be. And once those are done, then you can realign each of your groups around them.

Conflicts are a lens

Sometimes the first team mentality will result in a conflict. There's something your group wants or needs, which will result in a problem for another group.

Ultimately, this is your work to resolve, and the conflict is a lens you can use to see misalignment and to improve the greater organization. You have to find a way to make sure that your group is healthy and able to thrive. And you also have to make sure that your group works toward collective success, which means helping all the groups achieve success.

Any time you run into a conflict like this, it means that something went wrong in alignment. Either your group was doing something which worked against its own goal, or it was doing something which worked against another group's goal. If the latter, then that means that the goals themselves fundamentally conflicted!

So you go and you take that conflict, and you work through it. You work with your first team—and you figure out what the mismatch is, where it came from, and most importantly, what we do to resolve it.

Then you take those new goals back to your group. And you do it with humility, since you're going to have to tell them that you made a mistake. Because that alignment is ultimately your job, and you have to own your failures if you expect your team to be able to trust you and trust each other.