Help Your Team Become the First Choice

It was the end of a workday, around five or six in the evening, when one of the engineers in my organization came to my office with a question I didn't expect.

"Am I going to be laid off?"

She was a strong performer, so the question surprised me. I asked her why she thought so. Her answer made sense. At the time, Intel was integrating functions that used to live on two separate chips into one. Her team worked on the interconnect between those two chips. If the chips became one, the bus between them would disappear, and so, she feared, would her job.

I refocused on her and said, "As long as you are good at what you do and easy to work with, you will find a place."

At the time, it was normal practice at the company: as projects ended, good people moved to new ones. Also fresh in my mind was something I had seen just a few weeks earlier.

Who Gets Chosen

An organization was shutting down a site. Its managers sent a group email to managers like me: here are the people now available, who is interested? Replies started coming in, and I found myself watching who was choosing whom.

One engineer on that list was a true technical superstar. Nobody picked him. Another was solid but not exceptional, and several managers wanted him. I would have expected the opposite, so I asked myself why.

The answer was simple. The superstar was difficult to work with. The other engineer was good enough technically and easy to work with.

“Skill is the price of entry. Being easy to work with is what gets you chosen.”

Those emails gave me the first two behaviors: be competent, and be easy to work with. The name, Vendor of Choice, came later, from a different kind of problem.

From Charter to Choice

Over the following years, the same pattern kept showing up, this time between teams. Team members would come to me with some version of the same complaint: "Do you know that team is doing work that's in our charter?" Scope and charter fights took real energy, and they rarely made anyone better at the work. In Malaysia, engineers asked me what they needed to do to stay relevant. Underneath both was the same assumption: this work belongs to us by right.

I believe in clear, agreed-upon charters, and when one was genuinely violated, I addressed it. But over time, charters and scopes become ambiguous and boundaries blur, and management does not always fix them quickly. A team that waits for the org chart to protect it is focusing on what others control. So my message became: yes, this may be your charter. Don't take it for granted. Focus on what you control: being the team your customers and partners would choose, even as things change.

That is where the name Vendor of Choice came from. Think of your team as a shop. Customers can walk in, and they can also walk next door.

I chose the word "vendor" deliberately. A vendor's customers can always choose someone else, so a good vendor never stops earning the business. Engineering teams usually see themselves as owners of their work, not vendors, and the word is meant to be a little uncomfortable: it turns internal partners into customers with a choice. It also works the same way inside a company and between companies, whether you are a team serving another team or a supplier serving a client.

"Don't assume people will come to you. Ask why they should come to you, and if they are going to someone else, ask why."

A clear charter matters: it gives a team access to the work. It does not make the team the one people want to work with. That has to be earned, every day.

Five Behaviors, Added One Lesson at a Time

The framework did not arrive complete. I started with two behaviors and added the rest over the years, each one from a real moment with a team. They apply to each person, and just as much to the team as a whole: a team gets chosen the same way a person does, by what it delivers and by what it is like to work with.

1. Competent and 2. Easy to Work With came from those emails: skill gets you considered, and collaboration gets you chosen. The same holds for a team: when a capable team is hard to work with, people find another team to work with.

3. Go the Extra Mile came from a question I asked a team in Malaysia. Imagine it is the end of the day and two people ask for your help at the same time. You have five minutes, enough to help only one. All else being equal, how do you decide? Most of us help the one who has done something for us before. Going the extra mile builds that credit.

When I first said "go the extra mile," the team heard "do more work." So I told them about two shops on the same street, both selling sweets. You walk into the first and ask whether they carry cosmetics. No, the shopkeeper says, we only sell sweets. You walk into the second and ask the same question. "Sorry, we only sell sweets, but turn right outside and take the next left, and you'll find a shop that sells cosmetics."

Next time you want sweets, which shop do you go to? Everyone picked the second one. Did those directions take much time? No. That is the extra mile: a little more that genuinely helps the other person.

4. Proactive came from the cafeteria. I was having lunch with a program manager my team supported and asked how my team was doing. He said, "I'd like them to be a little more proactive." That feedback became the fourth behavior: anticipate what people need before they have to ask.

5. Learn and Evolve Continuously came from who I am. I am a learner, and I have always pushed for continuous improvement. What makes a team worth choosing today will not be enough tomorrow. To stay chosen, you have to stay current; otherwise you fall behind.

I used these five behaviors for years, with individuals and with whole teams across my organizations, and I still use them today.

While these five behaviors were born in traditional matrixed organizations, they are even more critical today. As the nature of work accelerates and shifts, the technology changes—but human dynamics remain the anchor.

Why This Matters More Now

The stable, matrixed structures where I first saw this pattern are becoming less common. Work is more fluid and more cross-functional, and AI is accelerating both. AI makes it easier for partners to do some of the work themselves, or to get it from someone else. A charter protects even less than it used to.

At the same time, AI raises the value of everything it cannot do. As routine technical output gets cheaper, the question shifts from "who can do this?" to "who do we want to do this with?" Each of the five behaviors becomes more important, not less:

• Competent now means judgment: framing the right problem, knowing when the tool is wrong, and using AI to deliver more, not just faster.

• Easy to Work With matters more when the work that remains is the work between people and teams.

• Proactive sets a team apart when tools answer the questions people ask; the value is in raising the ones they haven't asked yet.

• Go the Extra Mile is the context, the introduction, and the pointer to the right person that a tool doesn't think to give.

• Learn and Evolve Continuously is no longer optional. The tools change every few months, and the teams that adapt first are the ones others want to work with.

The Vendor of Choice posture protects a team because its place no longer depends on the org chart. It elevates a team because the more AI takes over routine work, the more people choose partners for what only people can bring.

The same is true between companies. Suppliers, partners and service teams all compete to be chosen, and the ones that win are rarely just the cheapest or the most capable on paper.

The answer I gave that engineer at the end of the workday is the one I still give: be good at what you do, be easy to work with, and keep earning the choice.

Three Questions for Your Team

1. Why do your partners choose your team today, in their words, not yours?

2. Do your customers or partners take work that is in your charter to other teams? Why?

3. Which of the five behaviors is your team's weakest, and what would one step forward look like this month?

Ahmed Omer is the Founding President of Converging Fractal, a strategic advisory firm specializing in collaborative innovation architecture for global technology organizations. His methodology, the Converging Fractal Operating System (CFOS™), helps distributed teams close Perception Gaps, eliminate decision friction, and build the conditions for sustained collaborative performance.