​Don't Start with the Metrics

Teams outperform when work feels safe, clear, and doable.

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We work on clarity and a weekly rhythm first, then a few objectives, and only then the numbers, which your people choose and own. 

 

Further Reading:

Scientific American, What Humans Could Be - On Maslow’s later work and what people reach for once the basics are met: truth, goodness, meaning, simplicity.

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Amy Edmondson (1999), Psychological Safety & Learning Behavior - Gold-standard empirical evidence that teams with psychological safety learn more and perform better.

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Rhythm of business

Simple planning cadences create stability.

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Organizations often juggle grants, board meetings, and business cycles. A predictable weekly, monthly, and quarterly rhythm helps leaders respond to change without losing focus.

 

Further reading:

Steven Rogelberg, Glad We Met (2024). The research on 1:1s, and why weekly wins.

Microsoft: Rhythm of Business Empowering Teams to Succeed – Microsoft Australia redesigned its Rhythm-of-Business to cut low-value meetings, reducing follow-ups and improving team connection.

Atlassian: Rolling 4 — Quarterly Company Planning – A quarterly ritual that balances reflection and forward planning.

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How you may view your people

Theory Z supports your organization's superpower.

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Every leader runs on an assumption about whether people want to contribute, and your people can tell what your assumption is.

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We believe that almost every leader believes people want to do good work. Almost every leader was also trained, somewhere along the way, in how they add oversight the moment something goes wrong.

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The gap between the two shows up under pressure, and it is a design problem before it is a character problem. When a leader stays steady long enough that the team knows they are the same through thick and thin, then trust becomes something the whole organization reinforces.

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It is built by what the organization does day after day, held in place by the habits its leaders keep, and it wears down fast when a key person stops being consistent.

 

Further reading

Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (1960). The two assumptions, named Theory X and Theory Y.

William Ouchi, Theory Z (1981). What an organization becomes when it established shared decisions, long-term investment in people, and trust as the working currency.

 

Trust

Trust is like a three-legged stool.

When you struggle to trust someone, or someone struggles to trust you, it usually comes down to one of three things: whether you believe they can do what they say they will do, whether they are the same person under pressure as on an easy day, and whether their decisions are good for both of you or only for them.

 

Each one is repaired differently, so telling a leader to "build more trust" without naming which leg is wobbling is like telling a carpenter to fix the chair without knowing the problem.

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Further reading:

Dr. Michael Gervais, Finding Mastery, interview with Caroline Marks (November 2025). The three legs, in his words: ability, benevolence, integrity.

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Culture

Culture is how your team does its work when no one is watching.

 

Whatever your culture, agreeing on what can be handled in writing or not can reduce meetings and make expectations clearer. These guides matter most for teams with remote members, volunteers, or boards.

 

Further reading:

Netflix's Culture Deck - The best look at building culture through alignment with Netflix's original HR leader, Patty McCord

GitLab, the Handbook. The most complete public example of an organization that writes everything down

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Coaching & manager effectiveness

Great execution flows from great people leaders.

 

The research behind the mentor mindset, which holds high standards and real support at the same time, and how a manager could slide under pressure: enforcing the standard without support, or protecting people from the standard altogether.

 

Further reading:

David Yeager, 10 to 25 (2024). Why high standards and high support together outperform either by themselves, and the three mindsets managers fall into under pressure.

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Strategy (diagnosis → guiding policy → actions)

If you don’t have a diagnosis, you can’t have a strategy.

 

We use Richard Rumelt’s “kernel” and "crux" to clarify what’s blocking progress and align the right actions. It’s the spine of our approach.

 

Further reading:

McKinsey interview with Rumelt – The three-part test of strategy.

 

Decision-Making (speed, clarity, roles)

Clarity speeds up business.

 

Slow decisions are usually unclear ones. We help teams decide with 70% of the information and no doubt about who decides.

 

Further reading:

Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the US Marine Corps. Principle #1: Aim for the 70-percent solution. It’s better to decide quickly on an imperfect plan than to roll out a perfect plan when it’s too late. 

RACI & Decision Rights. Organizations that get decision-making right move faster under pressure and make fewer costly missteps.

The Eisenhower Matrix. Sorting a crowded week into do, decide, delegate, delete.

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Change management (a few cautionary tales)

Pace matters, and so does trust.

 

Fast change isn’t always good change, and the LEGO turnaround read next to the J.C. Penny collapse shows why. The harder problem is seeing the change coming at all.

 

Further reading:

LEGO Turnaround Case (CEO Mag) – Simplicity + focus = recovery. A lesson for orgs tempted to “do it all.”

JC Penney Mistakes (HBR) – A good example of how not knowing your most important stakeholders can damage your strategy.

Rita McGrath, Seeing Around Corners (2019). Why a shift shows up at the edges of an organization long before it reaches the center, and what leaders do to stay close enough to notice.

 

Meetings (make them work or get rid of them)

Meetings are for decisions, so we help organizations hold fewer of them and get decisions out of the ones that remain.

 

Debate belongs in the meeting room as well, though only where trust is strong enough that people will say what may be unpopular.

 

Further reading:

Amazon 2017 Shareholder Letter – How replacing slides with 6-page memos resulted in better meetings.

NPR on Shopify’s Meeting Purge – 322,000 hours deleted. "Meetings are not in and of themselves the problem. Bad meetings are."

Rebecca Hinds, on whether a meeting should exist at all, and on asking people afterward to rate whether it was worth their time.

 

 

Revenue (fundraising & revenue operations trends)

Fundraising should have the same discipline as everything else.

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When the economy contracts, giving follows it. American charitable giving has held close to 2 percent of GDP for as long as there is good data, so a bad year for the economy is a bad year for the sector.

 

What separates the organizations that come through it is rarely a cleverer campaign. It is whether they knew their own numbers before the trouble started.

Most do not.

 

American Philanthropic reports that 90 percent of nonprofits collect data, 49 percent cannot say how it is collected, and 5 percent use it in every decision they make.

 

Meanwhile the average organization loses about 40 percent of its donors every year, and few leaders can say what it costs to replace one.

 

That is an operations problem before it is a fundraising problem, and it is the part we work on. We are HubSpot certified, for organizations that run fundraising through it.

 

Further reading:

Jeremy Beer and the consultants at American Philanthropic, Fundraising When Times Are Bad (2020, revised 2022). The source we return to most. Its argument: what makes fundraising work in good times matters more in bad times.

Giving USA. The big picture: $592B in 2024, driven by stock gains.

AFP Fundraising Effectiveness Q4 2024. Strategic opportunities with the reported change in giving.

Daniel House Club: HubSpot RevOps implementation. Data centralization, pipeline alignment, dashboards, and measurable lifts in conversion, membership, and relationship creation.

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How we use these

We draw on these to build solutions that stick. When one organization needed to find their fundraising gap, we leaned on Jeremy Beer's work and helped them build out a gift table and to understand their donor acquisition costs.

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When another needed faster decisions, we brought in the Eisenhower Matrix and a RACI, so everyone knew who was responsible, who was accountable, who would be consulted, and who would simply be told.

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When coaching managers, we start from what Ouchi found people need from their organization, and from Edmondson’s finding that people learn when it is safe to speak, and Yeager's findings on the type of leader you are.

 

Every one of these has been used in our engagements.

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