The best product leadership skill you need to run a peak team
How a top VP trained his leadership team about leading others
A guest post by Jorge Samayoa Founder of KVERGE, a company focused on helping all tech professionals to overdeliver. Want to know more? Go to www.kverge.com
The VP’s name was Gerardo Rios. I met him at Procter and Gamble early on in my career, first as a legend in leadership, and then as a VP in my organization. Everybody loved him; I never heard a bad phrase next to his name, which is odd for a shark swimming in a big pond among other sharks.
His demeanor, tone, line of questioning, and clarity were quite impressive. He was the type of leader that, somehow, you would fall in love with the mission he proposed. I honestly couldn’t explain this unique effect of expansive waves across the organization, until one day I was invited to one of his leadership team training sessions.
Honestly, at this point, I don’t even know if he knew I was there, or if he remembers me at all (he ran a 2k+ or maybe more organization at that point). But what he taught me in that training has shaped my leadership style forever. I’ve since delivered 10+ years of leading teams as small as 1, and up to 90 people with great relations with my direct and indirect reports across the organization, and with zero known HR reports.
During that training, he started without a deck; he just stood up in front of 12+ people and said the following:
“Leadership can be summarized in one single word - CARE. Caring about your customers, your employees, your peers, your leadership team, your community, truly just caring about the humans around you and the business you are in charge of.”
From that point on, he started sharing examples of how CARING for others pays off. How about asking an employee about his/her day and family, a customer about their health, or your boss about his/her worries? He talked for about an hour, without a deck, just connecting with his audience, caring about them, asking them why they struggle with being leaders, and showing that caring for others was the most important skill you need to lead.
From that day on, in every darkest hour when I’m leading a team, I ask myself “Am I caring about others?” That question has constantly given me the confidence to follow through one more step, course correct, or just stop the current path of action.
The pursuit of building high-performing teams
While caring for others as a principle can always be a guardrail for decision-making as a leader, the moments where you face the biggest challenges are when trying to produce a high-performing team. A “Peak team” is one that produces exceptional results constantly, such as the “Chicago Bulls” from the 90s or the “Argentina World Champion Soccer team” from 2022. This is by far the toughest task you have as a leader and not having a systemic approach will keep you from reaching the dreamland of a peak team.
A few years back I embarked on trying to build a framework detailing what caring means for your employees. I devised a simple tool that now pops up in my head during critical situations, and I have an action plan to keep building my peak team. Let me show you something I’ve built for myself, and this is the first time I’m making it public.
Introducing the “Caring Leadership Framework”
When you think about your employees, you are constantly facing two main topics:
Are they at peak (at the best they can be overdelivering) or underperforming (delivering poor results)?
What is their level of engagement (with their work, peers, leadership, and customers)?
When you start a new role as a leader and start with your first 1:1; you usually sense where your employee’s engagement is and have a little window to see their performance. But, as time passes and you get overwhelmed with your own work and keep asking your team to deliver X or Y in Z time, you start getting the hard truth about who is who. You start to see who is at peak, and who’s under-delivering with high/low engagement.
Now it’s your turn to first ask, “Do I care about my employees?” and, “Do I care about THIS EXACT employee?” I honestly hope your answer is always “Yes.” Remember that no matter what situation you are in, you are leading the team and you have to care for the health, security, stability, realization, sense of belonging, and performance of your team.
Once you have done your self-assessment and understand where you stand about your actual behavior and sentiment towards the employee, you can move on to the next steps. You need to understand that caring for your employees means you can help them be at their peak and help them “be the best they can be,” and be highly engaged with meaningful work and relations (as Ray Dalio would say).
Quadrant PHE (Peak-High Engagement)
Employees in this quadrant are the ones that are producing great results and are constantly engaging with their assigned work and building relations across the organization. They come prepared to your 1:1 with a clear agenda, bring thought leadership to the conversations you have with them or with others, and build connections across the organization to get things done. These employees are the example you are trying to set as the standard for the rest.
These types of employees are what chess calls your Queen. Read carefully, “DO NOT LOSE YOUR QUEEN.” You can see what losing your queen feels like on the series Billions when Chuck Rhoades loses Kate Sacker for not caring about her, just himself.

Personally, I have lost very few PHE direct employees in my career (two to be exact), but when you do, trust me, you regret it every day for a long time.
As of today, I still regret losing a particular PHE. He was at a PHE quadrant and I pushed him to a PLE (Peak-Low Engagement) quadrant due to my lack of care for him. I missed the shift in his behavior, and ultimately he went to another team despite losing his promotion (because the new role was a lateral move under a new manager.)
I didn’t listen enough and didn’t spend time observing his body language, words, and actions. I lost him by overstretching him, pushing him to become a manager and taking on more responsibility, while at the same time, he was becoming a dad for the first time and had family members going through severe health problems. I completely misread him. I thought stretching him was the right course of action, but what he wanted was not to be stretched, but to have at least 1 thing under control. He didn’t want to lead others and wanted to stay as an individual contributor. (Sadly Steve Jobs was right on this occasion; he would be the best manager the day he decides to embark on that kind of role.)

As a manager, when you see that someone is performing at their peak and is highly engaged, this is the moment where you want to stretch their skills. This is the moment to scout more complex problems (more engineers as a PM, higher budget as a growth marketer, bigger scope area for a PMM, etc.) and produce a brief for them and prioritize this over other less impactful work.
Remember, stretching doesn’t mean “Set it and forget it.” This is the moment where your job is to walk next to them and to teach them a new skill that will return in many multiples for the company and you. If you just ask for a tough project to be resolved, you can easily move the employee to a UHE (Underperforming-High Engaged) quadrant, which is a risk zone for breaking the team and/or the employee.
For this quadrant, remember:
Stretching their skills is the main course of action.
But don’t forget to listen if more skills are what they want, or you can move them to a PLE quadrant.
Walk with them on the new skills; do not throw them into the shaky waters or you can push them to a UHE quadrant
Course correct fast with heavy support if they fall into PLE or UHE, or you might lose your employee or break the team dynamics.
Quadrant PHE (Underperforming-High Engagement)
Sometimes, your highly-engaged employees will fall into this dangerous zone where just being engaged is not enough to deliver peak results. If the employee does not have the skills and competencies to deliver what is required, no matter how engaged they are, the result won’t come. What do you do here?
Let me tell you about my favorite UHE employee, Miss X (yes, I’ll keep her anonymous). My boss said she was a project manager who had a huge potential to become a Growth Product Manager. Honestly, I loved working with her, and I was confident in my ability to inspire and coach her to become a great PHE employee.
She came on board, and my typical strategy with transition employees is to give them something easy they can execute, while I can take on the big part of rallying the stakeholders. This usually yields great results and lets the employee get a sense of the execution and how I engage with others. The first project was to “set an entry point on the app.” This entry point was going to bring millions of users as a result, and the product execution had low complexity.
In 2 months, the entry point was live, the product growth was at +50% in new users and the employee was at the PHE quadrant. So my next task was to stretch Miss X to new challenges that require more skill.
Next project, a promotion across all the sign-up flows across 2 different apps. Yes, I went aggressive on this project. Still, I felt this employee had the experience of a project manager and she was a very fast learner. As expected, she jumped at the problem and started to bring a very organized project into place. Everything was moving smoothly until one month before shipping, she flags that we might slip the launch date.
When I went deep into the details of the execution, it was obvious that we weren’t just going to slip the date, but we were actually going to launch 2 months late. She clearly didn’t have the skills for product requirements collection or the articulation of the needs of the engineering team. I wasn’t auditing requirements at that point, thinking she was used to this work as a project manager. Sadly, her skills were not ready yet and I had made a PHE a UHE employee. 100% on me.
The action you have to take in that kind of scenario is not to just take over, point fingers, and assign another PM to save the day, regardless of whether that's what your instinct is. Because remember, doing this would not be caring for others, and you could lose this great learning opportunity for your employee. So the key action here is COMPRESS.
You need to compress as much knowledge as possible in the shortest possible time into the employee. The knowledge needs to be simple and consumable by the employee to spot the gaps which result in “underperformance” and provide clear direction on how to solve the gap. This is the moment when Yoda teaches Luke.

You have to keep a close distance from the employee. Do not let fear enter their decision-making, let them know you are with them and any decision from that point on will be 100% owned by you. Set daily stand-ups, explain how your caring leadership style will change temporarily and why, and roll your sleeves to make the project a success.
As for my favorite UHE employee, she was on that quadrant for 2 months while we polished her skills, and then she launched the project and grew the user acquisition by 20-30% 🙂. She came back to the PHE quadrant, and I decided to hold off stretching more until she launched the next project (the same promotion but on a different app.)
Quadrant PLE (Peak-Low Engagement)
The Peak-Low Engaged quadrant is where guerrilla warfare starts in your team. This is where one of the best performers starts setting the example that not being engaged is the right way to keep performing well; Where not caring for others works “just fine”, and where the devil of the story is always the boss. Disengaged employees are the bad apple that not only rot themselves but can infect the rest. This is a very, VERY dangerous quadrant for high-performing teams.
Here, your job is to REVITALIZE the relationship with your employee. Usually, these employees fall into this quadrant because they’ve lost or don’t have status, have low intimacy with you as a manager, or didn’t get the promotion they believe they deserved, or any other such reasons. Employees in this quadrant are probably the toughest to deal with because they know that they’re good and that the team, and especially you, depend on them to stay at their peak.
Revitalize the relationship by going for a walk, inviting her/him to key important meetings with leadership, asking about team structure and their thoughts about others, asking them about their main concerns at work, and then truly acting upon them. Do not ignore them and just give up on their behavior. Just like teenagers don’t know better, these employees need your help to rediscover who they are, what they want, why they want it, and how the company or the mission you have for them fits in that framework.
Don’t get me wrong, though. If after trying on your end, the employee stays on that quadrant, your job is no longer to revitalize the relationship between you, her/him, and the company. Your job is to revitalize their aspiration and their career path since you don’t have anything else to offer.
For example, on this quadrant, I had an employee who was, by far, the best at his craft. But out of the blue he just wanted to do something else. When I pressed what that “something else” was, he admitted that he had no idea. So, in turn, my style changed from helping revitalize our relationship, the mission of his job, and why the company needed him, to define his life and career goals. Ultimately, this person ended up leaving the team with a soft landing plan that would help him answer that question for himself.

Quadrant ULE (Underperforming-Low Engagement)
Honestly, this is the hardest quadrant to prove that you truly care about others. This is an employee that already given up on the mission, and is far from capable of producing peak results. As a manager, you might want them to leave organically, simplifying your life and eliminating the need for the awful session with HR to do an offboarding plan. But, as I said, as a leader you care about everyone in your team, and “no one should be left behind.”
Your response here is to “reshape” because, clearly, things aren’t working for the employee and the company; either the mission isn’t clear, the restrictions are too tough, or the skills and competencies aren’t right. It’s your job to reshape the role of the person, or the person themself while dealing with the pressures in your day-to-day life.
Reshaping the role means having a clear assessment of what this person can and cannot do. Think through all the problems you have across your organization where this person could be at the PHE quadrant, and then lobby across the organization on behalf of your employee to make sure this change can happen as soon as possible. You were going to fail either way on the status quo, so change is the only true answer here.
Execute the change with grace; Don’t be a bad human and leader by just stating the obvious (Change the “You are underperforming” to “We are underperforming”). Be assertive with the employee on why you need them to change and what will happen if the employee stays in the ULE quadrant, which is very likely to be a PIP (performance improvement plan) or a layoff (potentially for both of you if the results don’t come.) Obviously, no one wants this outcome.
“How fast do I need to make this change?” you ask. Honestly, 2-3 months. Don’t wait too long, or you will pay the consequences. I had an employee that I held for 8 months while knowing that she was on the ULE quadrant since month 2. I tried COMPRESS, REVITALIZE, and STRETCH, everything except RESHAPE. Why? Because reshaping meant I had to move her, and I didn’t have anyone else who could do the job. Which she wasn’t doing 🙄either way.
This put me in a very bad position, since I didn’t change her fast, didn’t hire someone fast, and we both ended up underperforming for the team. When I hired someone to help her, she left the company, while the new hire and I ended up being left with an absolute disaster. This ultimately yielded 0 results for the company and the whole team was dismantled.
Great, now what?
I’ve dedicated about 3,000 words to explain the Caring Leadership Framework. I’ve shared the good and the bad of my personal experiences and how not using it gets me into trouble and using it makes my team members reach peak performance. The grace of this framework is how easy it is to remember and how you can profile an employee based on observation and take action right away.
Still, how do you start using this today?
Introducing the “Caring Leadership Logic Loop”
This flow is quite self-explanatory, but nonetheless, I’ll explain each concept in one paragraph and hopefully, you can start today with a caring leadership attitude.
To be an effective caring leader, you need to:
Do your work. As the leader, you have to spend time thinking about the mission, vision, and strategy of your team. Read blogs, write documents, make doodles, and spend at least 1-2 days thinking about what’s coming for each of your team members. You have to be sure of what you need from each member, or they will be lost and you won’t be able to place the key players in the right positions to perform at peak ability.
Observe. Once you have a clear ask for your team members, and you have briefed them on what you need/want from them, It’s time to observe as much as possible. You have 2 eyes, 2 ears, and only 1 month for a reason; Listen and observe 2x or 100x more than you talk.
Document what you observe. Have a document with each employee’s name (in my case, I use a note in the ‘notes’ app from Apple) and write every observation you make (e.g. the employee did X and I was expecting Y, or the peer said Z.), add the date (it matters), and add print screens. Document, document, document.
Infer. Once you have at least 1 month of observations, you can now infer what is going on with the employee. I love the term “ladder up” which basically asks you to ask, “what does this observation means” and then, “what does this means” until you get to a point of no other path. A bit of first-principle thinking in this exercise will help you have good insights into what is truly happening with each employee.
Hypothesize. Now is the time to start building your hypothesis on the quadrants your employees are in. Personally, I write this on a spreadsheet and write what the plan of action is for each employee on how to get them to the PHE quadrant.
Test. Design tests to validate your hypothesis. Think on, “I believe the employee is on XZY quadrant, if I do ABC employee will move to YYY quadrant,” “To verify that, I will do CCC for ### time,” “I will look for CYC results,” and “I’m right if RRR happens.”
Validate. Validate the outcome of your tests by writing the conclusions of your tests on your personal excel.
Make changes. Based on your learnings, now is the time to make changes for your employees.
I truly hope you start caring about others today! 💪
Want to connect? Email me at jorge@kverge.com
A guest post by Jorge Samayoa Founder of KVERGE, a company focused on helping all tech professionals to over deliver, and former Director of Growth Product Management, Strategy, and Operations for PayPal. And Designed by Raymundo Valdez VP of Design for KVERGE. Want to read more of his amazing content, subscribe to KVERGE’s newsletter.