Your Leadership Team Makes Decisions Together.
When Was the Last Time You Examined How?
An offsite can name a pattern. It can't change one. I work with executive teams, founding teams, and investment partnerships over a full year of sustained team coaching.
The engagement
Most team development is an event. This is an engagement.
A leadership team is a small group making consequential decisions under uncertainty. The quality of those decisions depends on how information flows in the room, how disagreement gets handled, and which behaviors the team rewards or penalizes over time.
The patterns that hold a team back took years to form. They do not change in a day, however good the offsite. They change over months of doing real work differently, with someone in the room who can see what the team can't see about itself.
That's why I work with leadership teams for a year. The engagement begins with assessment and a team alignment session, then moves into sustained team coaching: monthly working sessions, coaching inside your actual meetings, and a measured re-assessment at the end.
Over two decades, I've worked with executive teams across technology, finance, and global organizations, from investment partnerships to leadership teams navigating hypergrowth. The industries differ. The patterns don't.
The difference
Most team coaching looks inward. This work looks outward, and ahead.
Most team development begins with an offsite and an assessment. Done well, those create real awareness: the team sees its patterns, sometimes for the first time. But awareness is only the beginning. Naming a pattern is not the same as changing one.
Well-known models like Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions look almost entirely at the team's inner workings: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability. That work matters, and it happens here too. But a team can trust each other completely and still be delivering the wrong things to the people it serves. The inner work is an important part of the picture. It's just not the whole picture.
This engagement looks at the team from the outside in. A leadership team exists to deliver value to its stakeholders, employees, customers, investors, the board, now and in the years ahead. Leadership teams spend almost all of their time solving today's problems. Very few stop to ask what their stakeholders will need from them two or three years from now. That question changes the conversation, and everything in this engagement rests on it.
VC firms that required unanimity for investment decisions had lower IPO rates than those that tolerated disagreement. The teams that argue well outperform the ones that agree quickly.
Study of 700 VC firms
The process
How the Year Works
Twelve months. Data first, conversation second, and sustained change third.
Phase 01 · Months 1 to 2
Assess and Commission
Every engagement starts with data from two directions. Each member of the team completes a validated 360 assessment, debriefed privately before anyone gets in a room together. In parallel, I conduct confidential interviews with the people the team serves: board members, investors, direct reports, key partners.
The interviews look ahead as well as around: what they need from this team today, what they'll need as the business shifts, and what this team must become that it isn't yet. Most teams have never heard, directly and unfiltered, what their stakeholders actually need from them. Almost none have asked about anything beyond the present.
Phase 02
Team Alignment Session
A full-day facilitated session built around your team's actual data, from the 360s and from the stakeholder interviews. Not theory. Not a workshop. A structured conversation about the feedback that isn't happening, the performance that goes unchallenged, and the decisions that nobody quite owns.
Writing before speaking. Junior voices first. Every discussion grounded in your data, not my opinions. The session ends with a team development agenda: three or four specific commitments that become the backbone of the year.
Phase 03 · Months 2 to 12
Sustained Team Coaching
This is where the engagement differs from everything else on the market. Over the rest of the year, the team gets:
The patterns that matter don't show up in workshops. They show up on Tuesday at 9am.
The work
What We Work On Over the Year
The engagement is structured around the five disciplines of high-value-creating teams (Peter Hawkins). In practice, that means the work goes well beyond team dynamics:
01 · The mandate
What do the board, the investors, and the organization actually expect from this team? Most teams are running on a mandate that has never been made explicit, or one that describes the company they were, not the one they're becoming. We surface it, test it, and renegotiate it.
02 · Purpose and decision rights
What can this team do that no other group in the company can? Which decisions does it own together, which belong to individuals, and where has consensus become a way to avoid accountability?
03 · How the team behaves in the room
Candor, conflict, airtime, the softened positions and unchallenged performance surfaced in the 360 data. Most vendors sell this as the whole engagement. Here it's one discipline of five.
04 · How the team leads outward
The gap between what's agreed in the room and what the organization experiences. Speaking with one voice after contested decisions, and engaging the board, the investors, and the leaders below, where alignment usually goes to die.
05 · The team's ability to learn
Structured learning reviews, honest post-mortems on decisions, the habit of standing back. This is what makes the change survive the engagement.
Pattern recognition
What I Typically Find
There is no single profile. But after two decades of this work, the failures cluster into two patterns.
The team that's too warm
Feedback gets softened into reassurance, so people feel comfortable but stay uninformed. Poor performance goes unchallenged because confrontation feels like risking the relationship. Consensus becomes a way to avoid accountability. The team is warm enough. The question is whether it's honest enough.
The team that's too guarded
Candor gets punished, so information becomes ammunition. People manage their exposure instead of the business. Feedback deflects off armor, converging critical views get dismissed as outliers, and the sharpest operator in the room sets the temperature for everyone else.
Different surfaces, same failure: the real conversation isn't happening in the room. In the warm team it's avoided. In the guarded team it's unsafe. Either way, the team is making its most consequential decisions without its best information.
Diagnostic
Questions Your Leadership Team Should Be Able to Answer
These are the questions I bring into the engagement. Most leadership teams have never asked them out loud.
If reading those made you uncomfortable, that's the point.
Fit
Who This Is For
A specialization in investment partnerships
Some of my deepest work is with investment teams, small groups managing large amounts of capital where decision quality is the entire business. For these teams, the year is built around the investment decision process itself: conviction thresholds, debate quality, post-mortem discipline, and the partnership dynamics that Hogan 360 data makes visible.
Learn more about Investment Team AlignmentMichael enabled our executive team to collaborate more openly, communicate more honestly, and make decisions with greater cohesion.
Ken Fine
CEO, Affinity
Let's find out if this is the right fit.
A 30-minute conversation. I'll ask a few questions about where your team is and what it's navigating. You'll get a clear sense of whether this process fits, and whether your team is ready for it. No proposal until we've talked.
Also available
Executive Coaching, for senior leaders in high-stakes, analytically rigorous environments
Investment Team Alignment, the specialization of this work for investment teams
Cross-Cultural Leadership Coaching, for global leaders and multicultural teams