Uniting & Engaging Your Team for Optimal Impact

After exploring communication channel development, speaking with clarity and empathy, and the power of listening as a force multiplier, this fourth article continues my five-part series on leading through uncertainty. It brings those threads together. Communication, clarity with empathy, and listening are prerequisites. This principle focuses on uniting and engaging your team for optimal impact.

Unity is not groupthink or cheerleading. It is a shared story, a living set of core values, and visible accountability that keeps everyone pulling in the same direction, especially when pressure rises. The practices below reflect what I have seen work across early-stage startups and large, complex enterprises, drawn from my own operating experience and from work with some ICONIQ portfolio companies.

1) Learn from the Past, Focus on the Future, Act in the Present

As teams grow, it’s natural for long tenured colleagues to focus on how things once were. New colleagues may try to add value by promoting approaches they saw work elsewhere. Fragmentation can follow if leaders do not name what is happening and bring everyone back to a shared current reality.

Start by calling things as you see them and putting the situation on the table for collective awareness. It is likely the good old days were not actually that good. Early employees faced significant hurdles to get the company to today. They learned, grew, and evolved. There is no going back, and most would not want to. Today’s challenges are different. Strong teams draw confidence from past learning and current context, not nostalgia.

Likewise, each new colleague joined for a reason. They bring experience, but they should also bring a beginner’s mind. What worked elsewhere may not be optimal here. Their previous success was shaped by a specific place and time that no longer exists. Give new hires the mandate to use their experience while applying it to the present moment.

When leaders acknowledge what has been hard and what the team has already overcome, people see reality and believe in the path ahead. Treat the past as learning, not legend. When everyone applies prior experience constructively, individual histories become collective advantage.

Tactically, you might open your annual meeting with a brief company history so everyone understands the evolving narrative. Be specific about challenges overcome and lessons gained. Welcome new talent and create openness for their contributions. Celebrate the past, look toward the future, and bring current capabilities into the fold. Unite deeply now so you can succeed together tomorrow.

2) Core Values Are Your Company’s DNA

Core values can serve as the unifying fabric of your company. They come to life when they move from walls, websites, and slide decks into the hearts and minds of colleagues. When embedded in the fabric of the organization, values show up in planning, hiring, one on ones, performance reviews, customer decisions, and board updates. Customers, partners, and investors feel them in every interaction. Your collective unification becomes visible.

How do you make this real? Assuming there is genuine buy in, the keys are repetition, usage, and reinforcement. Leadership must consistently live the company’s values and remind teams what they are and how they are used. Show decision making through the lens of values. Use values as explicit filters when weighing tradeoffs, and explain which value guided the call in emails, meetings, and conversations. Reinforce values in every area of the business. Celebrate individuals who live a value with specific, behavior-based recognition that describes what they did and the impact it created.

At Coupa we invited peers to nominate one another for quarterly awards based on exceptional examples of living our values. Winners were recognized at company meetings and on quarterly earnings calls. Based on third party assessments, roughly ninety seven percent of colleagues believed in and were committed to our values year after year. Over time our core values became our company’s DNA.

When values are orchestrated well, the organization unifies around them. People can predict how choices will be made even when they are not in the room. Those who do not align with the shared values tend to opt out, and the organization grows stronger and more unified. Instead of a group of individuals working at the same company, you build a determined, collective, and cohesive force based on shared beliefs.

3) Align on State, Standards, and Safeguards

Unity collapses without shared reality and clear accountability. Bring everyone into the same present tense. Establish where you are, who owns what, and what could derail progress if left unattended.

Start with state. Share what is true right now across customers, pipeline, dependencies, and runway. People can handle hard news when leadership speaks plainly and stays engaged. Define standards. Clarify owners, timelines, and definitions of what success means. Standards are a common language for quality and completeness, not bureaucracy. Set safeguards. Name a few leading indicators that might surface drift early and tie them to action.

In our multiyear Coupa journey from struggling startup to global scale, one of the biggest hurdles was maintaining agility in a tough market while also realizing the benefits of scale. The key was to keep everyone mindful of our current state, committed to our standards, and accountable for safeguards. We held ourselves and each other responsible for avoiding the slide toward confusion from too much agility or toward bureaucracy from too much of a focus on scaling. This showed up daily. Appropriate approvals were in place, but common sense ruled. Initiatives were not over engineered, yet they included the people required to move quickly. Communication favored speed and effectiveness while keeping the right teams engaged so alignment and consistency of message held across the organization.

Team members across the company were empowered to call out any situation where they felt the group was beginning the slippery slide in either direction on this visual above.  Often, they would propose constructive approaches for restoring balance.  This shared accountability was key in our growth from a handful of early folks to many thousands of colleagues around the world.

In Conclusion

Articles one, two and three in this series set the foundation. Build communication channels that carry signal. Speak with clarity and empathy. Listen like a partner. This article puts that foundation to work.

Cultivating unity is paramount to effective leadership. It is the through line from moment to moment and decision to decision. Start today. Give your colleagues a clear view of where you have been, where you are, and where you’re going. Bring your values to life. Spotlight them, live them, and reinforce them. Help your team understand the challenges of the present moment, take joint accountability for collective outcomes, and step forward as contributors and stewards of the company.

Learn from the past, act in the present, and lock arms for the road ahead. Bind your collective energy through the lens of your values. Align and engage around your current state, standards, and safeguards. Set your sights on winning together and do just that!