For leaders who have become their own team's bottleneck.
You're in the middle
of everything. So nothing
moves without you.
We make visible what your team keeps and what it drops. You confront what that costs.
Book an intake →
Three things that already happened this week.
Not if this week was the exception. If this is the normal run of things, in your team.
Your diary is packed with requests your team could handle perfectly well itself. Every decision, however small, waits for you, and you wait for no one.
Something was agreed on Monday. On Friday something else is on the table, or nothing is, and nobody flagged it beforehand.
A team member is late for the fourth week running, the deadline slips with no consequence, and everyone watches as if that is normal.
This is the difference on a Monday morning.
Not a promise. The feel of a week where your team handles it, and you are not in the middle of everything.
- At eleven at night you check whether tomorrow's deadline will be met.
- The same meeting is on the agenda for the third week, and ends again without a decision.
- You hear afterwards that the call was made in the corridor, after the meeting.
- You work around the team member who never delivers on time, and it costs you time every week.
- A commitment holds, and you don't have to chase it to know it will land.
- A colleague calls out a missed deadline themselves, within a day, without you in the room.
- The meeting ends in a decision with an owner, not in 'let's discuss it again'.
- Your diary has room again, because decisions no longer all have to pass through you.
Everything runs through you.
As long as commitments are only made to you, you are the single link keeping the team running. Drop out for a month and the team stops.
You are the link
Every commitment in the room runs through you, not through each other.
- Implicit commitments.Commitments are made to you, not to each other. Colleagues holding each other to account simply doesn't happen.
- You remind, you chase.Without your message or phone call the deadline quietly slips.
- You drop out, it stops.Drop out for a month and the number of commitments kept falls straight away.
The team holds itself
You hold the field. Not the weight of the commitments.
- Every commitment is explicit.Owner, deadline and verification are fixed, between colleagues themselves.
- Confrontation between colleagues is normal.A missed commitment is named by a colleague within a day, without you in the room.
- We measure who really carries it.The leader-dependency index shows which share of kept commitments depends on your chasing, and which share the team guards itself.
What was agreed is not what lands.
Before this is a number it is a feeling: you know something is off between what gets said in the meeting and what is on the table on Friday. We turn that feeling into a number.
Agreements inventory
Every commitment your management team made in the last sixty days is pulled from the minutes, action lists and board papers, usually sixty to a hundred and twenty of them. For each one we establish whether it was explicit, who owned it, whether there was a deadline and verification, and what the result was.
Your team's say-do ratio
Commitments kept divided by commitments made. Teams that describe themselves as good at execution usually measure between fifty and sixty-five per cent. The number lands like a diagnosis, because that is what it is.
What a team tolerates is that team's de facto standard. Whatever the values poster says.
Principle · Problem 3
Behaviour that breaks the standard gets a pass.
You see it happen. You say nothing, or you say it not quite loud enough. And so that behaviour quietly becomes your team's new standard.
The tolerance list
In confidential sixty-minute conversations with each team member we ask three questions: what does this team tolerate that it should not, which conversation does this team avoid, and what do you not say in the room that you do say elsewhere. The anonymised list is read out to the full team.
The meeting audit
One regular meeting of your management team is observed live and counted in facts: decisions versus topics, fact minutes versus story minutes, explicit versus implicit commitments, and who speaks, who commits and who stays silent.
Four signals. Three problems.
The same four principles show up in each of the three problems. The audit speaks this language, and soon your team will too.
Responsibility
Does the team claim the cause of its own results, or does it point at the market, the timing or each other?
Commitment
Is there a defined part of the work the team has bound itself to unconditionally, separate from the wish list?
Integrity
Does the team's actual work match what the team agreed? The standards are the team's definition of done.
Ownership
Does the team's review produce owner language, or stories? Own everything and you can change everything.
You have changed. Your team hasn't. What do you choose?
Yes or no.
The intake is a qualification, not a sales call. You qualify yourself first, before your team does.
- You let yourself be confronted in front of your own team.
- Your team has three to eight members. Bigger is not a team, that is a department.
- Your team is willing to face its own say-do ratio.
- The organisation is not mid-restructure, with members competing for a remaining seat.
- You see yourself as part of the pattern, not as the one who came to fix the pattern in others.
- You want the team fixed while you stay out of range.
- The purchase runs through HR or L&D. Delegating the purchase of confrontation undermines it.
- Your team is mid-restructure, with members fighting for their own seat.
- Your team wants team building, personality tests or a session on psychological safety.
- There is no willingness to put your own score, in facts, in front of the full team.
Three formats. One method.
The audit can be booked on its own and counts towards a follow-on track within thirty days. The full track builds on the audit.
Team integrity audit
Agreements inventory, the say-do ratio, the tolerance list, the meeting audit and the leader-dependency index. Ends in a findings session with the full team.
Team OS, full track
Audit plus a two-day install, five monthly sessions, a shared agreements log and individual coaching for the leader. The track is designed to end.
Standard holds, for alumni
For teams that have completed the track: a quarterly team audit and a scoreboard review, to keep the say-do ratio where it belongs.
Team OS is a program: you invest in the result of the program, never per session and never per person. The audit is the diagnosis that decides whether Robin, Django or both staff the track.
Your diary can be
yours again.
Measure the difference.
Sixty minutes. No sales pitch, only the qualification test: are you willing to be confronted in front of your own team? That decides whether an audit makes sense for you.
Looking for an individual track instead of a team track? See Mentor of Leaders.