The leadership offer
High performing teams start at the top.
Transformations stall in the leadership team far more often than in the delivery teams. So we start there: why you’re here, how competent and accountable the team really is, and what you actually value.
The engagement
Four legs, one flight.
Leg 1 · Backdrop
Ikigai + RAD Assessment
Why each leader is here, and where the teams really are. Two honest readings before anyone writes a values poster.
Leg 2 · Series
High Performing Teams
Short, hands-on modules on a live Miro board: competence, accountability, teaming, biases and the biology of trust.
Leg 3 · Core
Core ideology workshop
Discover 3–5 core values with behaviors, off-limits shortcuts and owners, then the purpose behind them.
Leg 4 · Operationalize
Into RAD Outcome 1
Values become team charters, working agreements and hiring criteria. The first waypoint of the flight plan.
The backdrop, part 1
Ikigai: a reason for being.
Ikigai is a Japanese idea of purpose found where four things overlap. Each leader maps theirs privately before the series starts. Leaders who know why they show up make better calls about what the organization should value, and they spot the gaps on their own team.
Hover or tap the circles. Where two overlap you get passion, mission, vocation or profession. Where all four overlap, you get ikigai.
Pick a circle.
The backdrop, part 2
The RAD Assessment, leadership edition.
Leaders see where their teams sit on the competence ladder, from beginner to master, and what kind of trust that level runs on. Values written next to real data stay grounded; values written in a vacuum end up on a mug.
The series
High Performing Teams
Researchers have long agreed on three psychological needs behind people who are healthier, happier and more productive at work. Every module in the series feeds at least one of them.
- Autonomy
- The desire to be the cause of your own actions, in line with who you are.
- Competence
- Seeking to control outcomes and experience mastery.
- Relatedness
- The will to connect with, and care for, other people.
Pick the modules that fit. Most leadership teams start with check-in, competence levels and core ideology.
Check-in & presence
How do you feel today? How present are you, 0 to 100%? Naming what’s taking up the rest of the percentage is always welcome.
Truths & laws
Goodhart, Hofstadter, the curse of knowledge and friends. Name the gremlins early so the room can call them out later.
Essential ecosystems
Autonomy, competence and relatedness: the three psychological needs that make people healthier, happier and more productive.
Tuckman’s phases
Forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning, and what actually helps in each (check-ins early; retros, clean feedback and tolerance in the storm).
Team competence levels
Beginner to master, plus the two below the line. A shared language for honest assessments without turning them into labels.
Team accountability
The accountability ladder (from “I don’t know” to “I’m working on it”) and the Accountability Dial for small, caring, real-time conversations.
Core ideologyCore
Discover the 3–5 values you actually live by, stress-test them, and find the purpose that would outlast every product you sell today.
Teaming biology
Why safe retros keep the prefrontal cortex online, why closing open loops calms the nervous system, and why commitments said aloud stick.
Estimating biases
The planning fallacy and executive optimism. Take the outside view before you promise a date.
Organizational design & goal modeling
Shape the structure around the work, then align word and deed: power shows up only when the two match.
Leadership & holding space
How leaders create room for a team to struggle productively without rescuing it or abandoning it.
Learning backlog
Dot-vote what the team wants to learn and what it can teach. The series keeps going after we leave.
Team competence levels
From beginner to master.
Competence is an assessment other practitioners make about how you act in a domain. Naming the levels lets a team talk about it without anyone getting defensive.
- 1Beginner. Aware of the domain and honest that they can’t yet act effectively in it. Willing to be taught by someone they accept as an authority.
- 2Minimally competent. Acting in the domain under coaching, following procedures. Can sometimes see a breakdown coming, and knows not to go it alone yet.
- 3Competent. Performs independently and handles breakdowns without a rulebook. Peers in the domain say they perform well.
- 4Virtuoso. Acts without deliberation or instructions, prevents breakdowns before they happen, and raises the standard others measure against.
- 5Master. Helps reinvent the domain itself: new practices that others adopt. (Think of whoever first made TDD a thing.)
Below the line: bull in a china shop and the jerk. Breakdowns others can see that the actor can’t, or won’t.
Team accountability
The Accountability Dial.
Accountability works best in small acts, close to real time, from someone who obviously cares. Turn the dial only as far as you need to.
- 1The mention. A quick, real-time, curious observation. “You missed this morning’s meeting. Everything okay?”
- 2The invitation. Two or three examples that show a pattern, in private. “What’s going on here?”
- 3The conversation. A dedicated meeting about impact on the team, with real urgency.
- 4The boundary. A sober conversation: this has to change for the role to continue.
- 5The limit. Short and final. Everything that should have been done has been done.
The core module
Core ideology workshop
Values are the rules of the game. Purpose is why you play at all. We surface what’s already true about your organization and put words to it, on a live Miro board.
- Who
- Your leadership team, 5–8 people works best
- Minimum viable
- About 2.5 hours → 3–5 core values
- With purpose
- Add 30–45 minutes, or a second session
- You leave with
- Value cards, owners, a purpose draft
Core purpose questions
- ?For the sake of what does our organization exist?
- ?Why does what we do matter, beyond profit?
- ?How are the lives of our employees and customers better because we do this work?
- ?What would we still be proud to do even if it never made us any money?
- 1
Context & distinctions15 min
Values are the rules of the game: how we behave. Purpose is why we exist at all, beyond making money. Different things, both worth getting right.
- 2
Values discovery25 min
Silent brainstorm, one value per sticky. Silent affinity clustering. Five dot-votes each. Out comes a ranked shortlist, not final wording.
- 3
Stress test & distill60–75 minCore deliverable
Every candidate faces the filter. Survivors (3 to 5) get a card: definition, why it’s ours, looks like, doesn’t look like, and a real moment.
- 4
Commit & operationalize20–30 min
Where values are written down, how we hire for them, how we reinforce them day to day, and how we escalate when one is violated.
- 5
Core purpose discovery30–45 min
For the sake of what do we exist? A purpose should still hold in 100 years, even if every product and tactic we use today is gone.
The filter
Four questions most “values” don’t survive.
- ?Would we keep it even if it became a competitive disadvantage?
- ?Does it reflect what we actually do, or what we wish we did?
- ?Would it survive if the market stopped rewarding it?
- ?Is it distinctly ours, or could it be any company’s value?
A “no” or “it depends” on the first two usually means it’s an operating practice or an aspiration. Useful. Just not core. It goes in the parking lot, not the bin.
“Good” is the enemy of great. Do you have the courage to live these values every day?
VALUE CARD
[Value name]
- One-line definition
- Plain language a new hire understands on day one.
- Why it’s core to us
- Not justified by the market. Why do we hold it?
- Looks like
- 3–5 observable behaviors.
- Doesn’t look like
- The tempting shortcuts this value rules out. A value without a named opposite is decoration.
- A real moment
- When holding it cost something, or paid off.
Warm-up: truths & laws
Every session starts by naming the gremlins.
Cognitive biases don’t care about your org chart. We put them on the wall early so the room can call them out later, politely.
Goodhart’s Law
When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. (We still measure. We just don’t worship the number.)
Hofstadter’s Law
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you account for Hofstadter’s Law.
The Curse of Knowledge
Experts forget what it was like not to know. Simplicity is a skill.
Hitchens’s Razor
What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Show us the metrics.
Loss Aversion
Losing hurts about twice as much as winning feels good, which explains most status meetings.
Occam’s Razor
The simpler explanation is usually right. Start there.