I struggled with the title for this essay. It's essentially about high-performance teams at startups. But I hesitate to use the "high performance" moniker, because in my experience there seems to be confusion about what this really means.

We've all heard the dramatic startup stories. Up all night, sleeping under the desk, doing whatever it takes to get shipped. A ton of value gets created this way. Amazing products have been built on the backs of such effort.

But I'd urge readers to keep in mind that correlation is not causation. While every successful startup carries such stories as a badge of honor, so do the unsuccessful ones. Treating round-the-clock efforts as an input to production risks undermining the motivation that is crucial to creating great things.

We had up-all-night and sleep-under-desk moments at Pandora. I'll offer three specific personal experiences: 1) When authoring the first version of our iPhone app, I logged 90 hour work weeks for several weeks in a row to complete it in time for the App Store unveiling. 2) During one 2 week stretch when I was on pager duty, I received over 1,000 pages across all hours of day and night because we had reached a scaling bottleneck with our databases. 3) During one 6 week stretch where I had a newborn at home, I traveled across the country 5 times to build iPhone app backgrounding and our first iPad app on pre-release iOS software and hardware.

My colleagues shared many experiences yet more intense than my own. But here's the thing: no one expected us to do this. It was not asked of us. We volunteered.

Meanwhile, many modern startups expect employees to be overworking themselves. Worse yet, they see failure to overwork as a symptom of apathy and lethargy. If employees aren't working constantly, so the thinking goes, they must be lazy and we need to "shake things up" to get their attention, because we're not behaving like a successful startup. Management at such startups will point at the epic all-nighter lore of successful startups, demanding that this is the path to success.

This is a classic example of the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Setting an expectation and culture of overwork, demanding over the top performance, this is the path to extrinsic motivation. It works, to an extent, by driving production. But in my experience, such environments lack creativity, create high turnover, diminish morale, and breed apathy. This is the path by which the "high performance" moniker is used by some to create grueling and abusive work environments, often times without realizing it.

On the other hand, intrinsic motivation requires leadership to create an environment where employees thrive. The leadership team must accomplish 4 things: convince employees that they are a part of something bigger than themselves (mission), convince them that their contributions make a difference (influence), institute appropriate guardrails in which employees may exercise their own good judgement freely (empowerment), and foster and environment of constructive feedback (nurturing¹).

In this way I've seen team wide intrinsic motivation breed creativity and efficiency beyond the limits of what might otherwise seem possible. And it happens without burnout, keeping morale intact. It's not easy, it's indirect, so it can seem like capturing lightning in a bottle. But when it happens, it's a life changing experience for all involved. Easily the most effective form of leadership.

¹My use of the word "nurturing" may be provacative or triggering for some. That is intentional on my part. To some, nurturing implies a lack of accountability, but nothing could be further from the truth. Proper nurturing builds trust, which builds openness, which yields reception to feedback and accountability. Trust is the foundation upon which high performance teams are built, and feedback is the splitter between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. If you find discomfort with concept of nurturing, that's a signal to self-reflect. This is a big topic and therefore worthy of a future essay, but the short version is that feedback is a complicated topic that defies one-size-fits-all approaches.