You already know which team you’re worried about
You just can’t say exactly what’s wrong with it.
You know the symptoms. Decisions take three meetings. Or the deadlines get hit and the good people keep leaving. Or everyone gets on beautifully and nothing has actually shipped since March.
You’ve probably assumed it’s a people problem. One person who needs coaching, or two who don’t get on.
It’s usually not the people. It’s the shape.
Four ways a leadership team fails
Every leader moves at a certain speed and protects a certain thing. Put a whole team’s worth of that on one map and a pattern shows up that no individual report can see.
There are four ways it goes wrong, and each one fails in its own specific, predictable way.
If one of those landed, the next question is usually whether it’s the people. It generally isn’t. Teams acquire their shape through a decade of individually sensible hiring decisions, each one made to fill an immediate gap, and nobody ever steps back and looks at the accumulated result.
Which is fixable, but only once somebody has it on paper.
Ten reports isn’t a diagnosis
You’ve probably run something like this before. Everyone completes it, everyone gets a profile, there’s a good day with decent conversation, and six weeks later nothing has changed about how the team actually operates.
The reason is structural rather than anything to do with the quality of the instrument. A stack of individual profiles describes ten people accurately and says nothing at all about the eleventh thing in the room, which is the group they add up to.
That’s the object you’re actually managing. Not ten leaders. One leadership team with a shape, a set of blind spots it shares, and a way of failing it repeats.
Your Team Imprint
Your whole leadership team on one map. Where you’re heavy. What’s thin. What’s missing entirely.
It isn’t a summary of the individual results. It’s a view of the group that none of those results contains, however carefully you read them.
What it names
- The gap.
- Which of the four you don’t have, and what specifically goes unsaid or undone because of it.
- The friction to expect.
- Not personality clashes. Structural ones. Where a measured leader and a fast one are going to grind, and what that argument is actually about.
- What it’s costing you.
- In the specific currency of that imbalance. A Rocket-heavy team pays in people. A Tractor-heavy team pays in months.
- What to protect.
- Every shape has a strength as well as a cost. The point isn’t to make everyone the same.
A team needs all four. Nobody argues that a tractor should be a rocket.
Two things your people have never been told
Where they go when it’s hard, and how far
Everyone has an everyday position and a pressure position. The gap between them is their range, and it’s the thing most instruments never look for, because they only ever measure the good day.
Individually that’s useful. Across a team it’s something else.
When a whole leadership group has narrow range, the organization is highly predictable and struggles to change gear when it genuinely needs to. When the whole group has wide range, a bad quarter turns every one of them into a slightly different person at the same time, which is where teams describe themselves as falling apart under pressure without being able to say why.
The mixed version is the most common and the most interesting. Some of your leaders hold steady while others move a long way, and the ones who move usually have no idea they do. Their teams know. The Team Imprint puts it where it can be talked about instead of worked around.
What each of them thinks the team says about them
Twelve questions, answered as their own team would answer them. Not how they see themselves, but how they believe the people who work for them would describe them with the door shut.
Nobody on their team is contacted and nobody else is assessed. It measures an assumption, not a fact, and we’re clear about that in the report.
The assumption is the point. Every one of your leaders is running on a belief about how they land, and making decisions off it daily. In a room where several of them discover the same gap at the same time, the conversation that follows is usually the reason people remember the day.
What actually happens on the day
Everyone takes it beforehand. Twelve to fifteen minutes, on their phone if they want.
Nobody sees their result.
That’s deliberate, and it’s the part most people don’t expect. A result read alone at a desk gets skimmed, argued with, and forgotten by Thursday. The same result opened in a room with the people it’s about lands completely differently.
The workbooks go out during a break. One per person, printed, sealed, name showing. People come back from coffee and find their own name sitting on the table in front of them.
Nobody’s allowed to open it yet.
Four things get said first.
There’s no good result and no bad one. You’ll recognize yourself in more than one of them. Something in there is going to sting. And nobody else is going to see it.
Then they open it.
Ten minutes of silence. Actual protected silence, with a pen in hand. No discussion, no tables comparing, no facilitator talking over it. Ten minutes is longer than it sounds and it’s the most valuable stretch of the day.
Then one question:
“What’s the one line you’d rather it hadn’t said?”
That question is where the room changes. People answer it honestly, in front of each other, because everyone in there is holding something they’d rather it hadn’t said.
Nobody says their style out loud until they’re standing next to the people who share it. Four corners of the room, four groups. That’s when it stops being a document about you and starts being a conversation about how you work together.
Then Find Your Opposite. Sixty minutes, paired with the person furthest from you on the map. Eight behavioral questions each, answered in writing before either of you speaks, because if you talk first you’ll both soften it into something polite and useless.
Then you find out how wrong you both were.
It’s the hour people quote back to you a year later.
And at the end, a sealed slip with their name on it. Three questions, answered at the start, deliberately left out of the report.
Where you go when a conversation gets uncomfortable. Push, accommodate, delay, or avoid.
The header says do not open until asked.
Everybody does all four. This is where you go when you haven’t thought about it.
It’s going to be uncomfortable
We should be straight about this, because it’s the thing that makes it work and it’s also the thing that will make somebody in your team unhappy on the day.
The report tells people what their style costs the people around them. Not what they’re good at. What it’s like to work for them when they’re under pressure.
A Rocket reads that things get done and people leave, and that they usually don’t connect those two facts.
A Bus reads that their instinct to protect people looks like kindness and works like avoidance.
A Tractor reads that their team often can’t tell the difference between them thinking and them being stuck.
Nobody comes out of this document flattered, which turns out to be why people take it seriously. An assessment that tells everyone they’re a natural leader gets read once and reasonably ignored. This one gets argued with, and the arguing is where the useful part happens.
How it runs
- Everyone takes it.
- 40 questions plus a 12-item section. Twelve to fifteen minutes. A link, no logins, no app.
- You get the roster.
- Who’s finished, who hasn’t, and the styles, so the room can be set up properly.
- We build the Team Imprint.
- Your whole group on one map, plus a printed workbook for every person.
- A conversation with you first.
- Ninety minutes, before anybody else is in the room. You’ll see the team picture before your people do, because if something in it is going to be difficult you should not find out at the same time as everyone else.
- Then the session.
- Half day or full day, in person or virtual.
- Then thirty, sixty and ninety days.
- Because the day is not the point. What happens in February is the point.
- Minimum eight leaders.
- Below eight the team picture isn’t reliable enough to hand you, so we won’t. That’s a limit of the method, not a sales floor.
Three ways to run it
Team Read
Everyone takes it. You get the workbooks, the Team Imprint, and ninety minutes with us to walk through what it found. No group session. For when you want the diagnosis before you decide what to do about it.
Team Day
Everything above, plus a half day with your people. The reveal, the four corners, and the conflict slips.
Team Program
A full day, Find Your Opposite at its full length, and follow-up at thirty, sixty and ninety days. For a team that’s going to be working together for years and knows it.
Most people take Team Program. Some start with Team Read and move up next quarter.
Facilitation is always quoted as a separate line from the per-person fee, so you can see exactly what you’re paying for.
One session, aimed at one thing
A Team Imprint usually points at one thing louder than the rest. The session is built around that one, rather than a general tour of the model, and most teams recognize themselves in a single line below before they’ve finished reading the others.
Your Team Imprint tells you which of these you’re walking into first. Most teams book a second within the year, because the shape you can finally see tends to reveal the one sitting behind it. New sessions get added as the work turns up patterns worth their own day.
Before you ask, because you should ask
You’re about to send your leadership team a set of questions about how they behave under pressure. It’s fair to want to know where those answers go.
Every person sees their own full result. Always, including when you’re paying.
You see who finished, which style each person is so the room can be set up, and the picture of the whole team, which is what running the program actually requires.
You don’t see their answers. You don’t get a spreadsheet of how each person handles conflict. You don’t see what any individual thinks their team says about them behind their back.
And it can’t be used against them. Every company that buys this agrees in writing not to use it for hiring, promotion, pay or discipline. It wasn’t built for those things and we don’t allow them.
What we’re not going to tell you
We’re not going to tell you it’s validated, because it isn’t yet.
This is a new instrument. Every question is mapped to something specific it measures, and that mapping was written down while it was being built. The pressure section uses a format chosen because it’s harder to game. The two-axis structure underneath it has a long research history.
What we don’t have is reliability figures, test-retest data, or a correlation against anything. Anybody selling you a new instrument with those numbers is either using somebody else’s or hoping you won’t ask.
We’ll publish the numbers when we have them, including the ones we don’t like.
Talk to us about your team
Not a pitch and not a slide deck. A conversation about the team you’re worried about.
Three things worth thinking about before we speak:
- How many leaders,
- and do they already work together or are they about to.
- What’s going wrong,
- in your words. “Decisions take too long” is a useful answer. So is “I don’t know, it just feels heavy.”
- When.
- Some of this is better before a reorg than after one.
Curious what the document actually looks like? See a real report →
