Hello, and thanks so much for joining. I'm Lisa Jasper, and I'm so happy to be with you here.I've had a chance to join some of the other presentations today, and they've been great. I hope you have had a great experience and get some great takeaways from this session as well. So I'll get into my intro in a moment. But before I do, I want to start by telling you about a friend of mine. She was a shareholder in a well respected professional services firm, and their clients love them and their people love them. But after years of success, they had one really tough financial year. Their three biggest clients, which made up 70% of their revenue, wound down within six months.

And the seven partners who had built this thing together and considered themselves friends now could not agree on where they were headed. Meetings were polite, but beneath the surface, tensions brewed. It wasn't clear who owned what. Everyone assumed the problems were someone else's responsibility, and they spun on issues, never getting to the root. They could not agree on what the priorities were. And after after several months of spinning, my friend brought in an organizational consultant to try to get to the real issues. And this consultant interviewed everybody individually and then brought the group back together to process the themes. And at the surface level, it was typical stuff. It was like, should they double down on their core or expand into new areas? But there were some harder questions too.

Like, could they afford to keep all their staff in their current financial state, and was their ownership agreement fair for all the shareholders? But what became clear in the meeting was that the problem wasn't just tactical or even strategic. It was existential. They weren't aligned on purpose and vision. And during the session that they jokingly called partner marriage counseling, the CEO admitted that he wanted to be done and sell the firm. So my friend spent the next few months trying to patch things up after that meeting, trying to work behind the scenes to get the partners aligned, and that was part of the problem. They weren't fighting. They were just drifting further and further apart. And then one of the partners became so frustrated that he quit, and that started a domino effect of another and another, and the firm started to crumble.

Like, they, actually tried to sell the company then. They had a couple of interested buyers, but after the previous financial year, they couldn't get a deal done. So my friend came to the conclusion that she had no choice but to shut the company down entirely and spent the next couple of months working with their financial and legal counsel to do just that. But amidst that awful time, there were some glimmers of hope. Some new clients popped up, and some of the remaining partners tried to lean in and convince my friend that the company was worth saving. And, ultimately, they agreed that she would step in as CEO, and she wrote a high level vision and strategic plan and asked the remaining partners to opt in or out because she was clear she didn't wanna move forward unless they were completely aligned. And then they did. And they bought out four of the other seven shareholders over the next six months, and they started a new journey together.

And that story, as you may have guessed from the description of this session, is mine. I was the one who stepped in. And looking back, I now know that I was part of the problem. I was caught in the middle. I was trying to keep things together while not fully naming what was broken. In that moment, when we chose to realign and to get clear on purpose and vision and what success looked like, it changed everything. Because when leadership alignment fails, it's not just strategy at risk. It's the future. And when it works, it changes everything. So looking back on my career, that was the moment that put me on this passion about this topic, but, that I'm gonna talk to you about today.

But I wanna share a little bit more about my background just so you know where I'm coming from. Like many of you here at this, Women in Technology Conference, my background is technical. I started as a software programmer at Accenture, and I continued down that path at a smaller company called Tactica. And it was there that I found myself doing IT strategy where I got to work with executives on aligning their leadership teams. I loved it so much. I went back to business school to pursue it pursue it further and worked for the Boston Consulting Group. But I was then invited to join the team in the first few years of a new company called ParaVeda. That's where I work today.

And I worked there for a bit. And after a few years, I decided to go off and build my own firm doing IT strategy. I started that with my best friend, and that's where I lived through the story that I just shared with you. And then sorry. I'm getting my my, my slides moving here. I, stepped in as CEO of Thought Ensemble, which is where that story happened. And it took a few years as a leadership team to get to the alignment, that we had by the time we sold the company. But by the time we sold, we were really strong. We were able to navigate through a tough decision to sell the company when the opportunity arose and we weren't quite ready.

And when we were ready, to tell our people, the leadership team was fully aligned about the why and the how, and that helped us support our employees through a pretty tough change. And we then surpassed the expectations in our earn out year, and our leadership team all stayed multiple years at the new company, not just because of an employment contract, but by choice. These days, I lead a national group supporting our regions, and I also support our CEO and our own strategy. I brought many of these practices I'm gonna talk to you about today into my group at ParaVita and into our company as a whole. And throughout all this time, I probably worked about 50 clients and their leadership teams at big and small companies. I'm just showing you a few names you might recognize here, and I will share some stories today from those clients' names removed, of course, throughout some of this presentation.

So during all those years as a consultant, but also, excuse me, as a leader in my own firms, I have developed a framework around what works to align a leadership team. And that's what I wanna share with you here today just to give you a glimpse. Every one of these topics could have its own presentation, so I'll share some of my favorite resources if you want to dive in further. And we'll go through each of these practices together. But just to give you a quick overview, the first pillar is setting the North Star, so enabling strategic clarity. And the question here is where are we going and why? It involves setting a common purpose and shared vision and success measures. The second pillar is aligning your engine with operational cohesion. And the core question here is how do we work together?

And this includes defining roles and strategic priorities and issues management and meeting rhythm. And the final pillar is strengthening the bonds with team effectiveness. The core question here is, who are we together? And we'll talk about strength and diversity and constructive tension and team growth. Now you may know some of these concepts really well. Others might be new to you. But regardless of familiarity, I'd encourage you to think about them from an alignment perspective, from a team alignment perspective, and pick a team to think about, like a team you lead or a team you're part of. And then at the end of each section, we'll give you a chance to rate yourself. So get a piece of paper out, and you can take some notes. So before I dive in here, I do wanna give a shout out to a number of frameworks and methods I have used at clients and with my companies.

Some of the thoughts I'm gonna share today are heavily inspired by this toolkit, and I will make references throughout and share some of my favorites at the end, some links. There are two though that I wanted to introduce upfront. The first is EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. At my company, Thought Ensemble, we implemented it shortly after I stepped in as CEO. It's a system designed to help leadership teams clarify vision and instill operational discipline and create accountability through the organization. For us, it was totally transformational. It helped us work more cohesively. It laid the foundation for many of my views on clarity and collaboration. And that said, we also encountered limitations in our own implementation and when we took its practices to our clients. The second one I wanna point out is holacracy.

So Parivate, my current company, adopted holacracy ten years ago, and it distributes authority across self organizing teams. And it really enables individuals to make decisions through defined roles and structured governments processes versus traditional top down management hierarchies. And these two systems are designed to do the same thing, but, they actually have different perspectives on some things like org design. But they can be very complimentary, and so some of my perspectives come from blending the two, which is what we've done at ParaData. So before I dive into the first section of the framework, which is setting the north star, I wanna share something a little bit more purposeful. Oops. And maybe even a little bit woo woo.

So many years ago, I was really inspired by work I did with Landmark Education Education and Neuro Linguistic Programming, and I became fascinated by the power of intention. Like, what becomes possible when you clearly define not just what you want, but who you are as a human being. And before I started thought on some, well, I actually wrote out my intentions, and I recorded them, and I listened to them every night. I'm kind of that wacky person. I believe in it, and I've seen it work. Whether it's reaching financial freedom or building a company or finding a life partner, if you get really clear about your future and hold that vision close, you can start moving towards it. What's interesting is that individual level practice, vision boards and affirmations and vivid goals, has a direct parallel in organizational leadership.

And over the years of doing strategy work, I noticed something again and again. I'd see these bookshelves full of past strategies that never took hold. And what I realized is that many strategies were missing any kind of real vision. I saw decks that were, like, long lists of problems and strategies that were just reorganized, solutions to those problems grouped into work streams. There was no north star, no clarity about where the organization was headed, who they wanted to become, or what success would look like if they actually got there. So that's what this is. This is the first section of the framework, strategic clarity, and it's about setting the North Star. And we'll look at how purpose and vision and success measures come together to answer the essential question, where are we going and why? Okay. Let's start with common purpose.

So this usually comes from the top. It's often one of the first things that's created in a company's life, and in the best cases, it sticks. But as organizations grow or shift, purpose often gets fuzzy or it was never clearly defined in the first place. I think of purpose as a clear motivating reason why why a group of leaders get out of bed every day and come together. It works hand in hand with values, which guide how we show up and work together. So purpose and values are related, but a little bit different. If you have not seen it, Simon Sinek's TED Talk introducing his book start with why, great book, is a really great intro to purpose. And he talks about how people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

And when you hear a really great purpose like Disney's make people happy, you just get it. Right? It's clear and energizing. So for us, at Thought Ensemble, soon after we went through a restart when I stepped in as CEO, about nine years into the company, we re revisited our purpose as a first step to aligning our leadership team. We kinda knew what it was. We've never really written it down. It was something about solving complex problems that should transform our clients and their industries and and the world. But what we realized through our exploration was that the real reason we showed up every day was how we did it together. We really believed in bringing diverse perspectives and experiences from our own team and with our clients. So we updated the purpose to really represent that.

And at the same time, we took a fresh look at our values, which were more established at the time. We had one around thought leadership that have had evolved over time and frankly had gotten, a little off the rails. It had a little bit more of a know it all flavor than we thought felt right. So we renamed it to always growing, and we defined it around curious questions versus knowing the answers. And that really reshaped how we talked and listened and led. And we then took our purpose and values and woven into all our processes, you know, how we hired and recognized and rewarded people and talked to our clients about what mattered to us. So for those of you who are not a CEO or executive yet, know that purpose is not just for the top of the company.

At Parvada, I lead a group, called the solutions and industries team. It's part of a larger firm that has a very defined purpose. But as a new team about a year and a half ago, we defined our own purpose. Holacracy actually requires it for new teams, but I took it really seriously because I knew how much it mattered to get it right as we're aligning a new group of leaders. And our purpose is to supercharge adviser teams. So the adviser teams are the leaders leading sales and delivery within our consulting firm. And that purpose guides our priorities and how we collaborate and how we measure impact. And we share the company values, but we also shared shaped our own ways of working that activate our purpose as well.

So if you're leading a team, whether as a founder or inside a bigger organization, clarifying your shared purpose and values can be a game changer. It gives people something to rally around and a reason to care and a compass to guide them. Let's move to shared vision. This is where alignment starts to get real momentum. So if purpose is why we exist, then vision is what it looks like when we're living that purpose in the future. And we can't align on strategy if we're not headed to the same destination. So So most of you have probably heard of Jim Collins' concept of a b hag or a big, hairy, audacious goal, and that's one great way to cast vision.

But what I found even more useful is creating something called a painted picture. It's like basically imagining yourself a few years into the future and describing in detail what success looks like. It feels like, like, not just the milestones, but the everyday. What does it feel like to walk into your office, and how do your people work, and what kind of culture are you living and breathing? And at that ensemble, our BHAG was to be the most loved and respected consulting firm in our markets. Not the biggest, but the most trusted. And we mapped out what success looked like ten years out, three years out, and and one year out. But the one that really landed was this narrative form that was from the perspective of a junior consultant three years in the future.

And we described what they would see and how they would feel and how they would be growing. And actually, I read it aloud in a company meeting in a dreamy voice. It was a little silly, but it really worked. And people connected with it, and they could see the future with us. And as a leadership team, it helped us a ton to align around writing that. Okay. Different kind of example. Many of you are in IT organizations or tech companies. So I was working on a tech strategy for a big company, and the CEO kept saying that they wanted their technology organization to be more innovative. And as we started digging in, it became clear that no one agreed on what innovation meant or looked like.

And so we paused and we took a step back and then we painted three really different visions of what an innovative tech organization will look like. So one was blue ocean innovation, like having labs and big bets and inventing things. And another was incremental innovation, which was more, you know, getting really close to the customer and driving incremental improvement. And then the third was m and a driven innovation, so kind of buying the future and then integrating it. And each of those future visions implied a different kind of organization, you know, different capabilities and talent models and investment strategies. And when we laid them out side by side, the CEO totally got it. He's like, oh, they were pushing for innovation without knowing which feature they were aiming for.

And so once they aligned on m and a as the vision for innovation, everything else, like the org structure, priorities, success measures got way clearer. That's the power of vision. So if your team's vision is fuzzy or if different leaders are carrying around different visions in their heads, start there, paint the picture, and share it. Okay. Success measures. Many teams do this, but few do it in a way that gets to alignment. And the goal here is not to track everything. It's to build a clear connected picture of what success looks like and how you'll know you're getting there. So in the nineties, I got really into the Kaplan Norton balanced scorecard framework, and it's not as common now.

But there are some principles from there that really still hold up. Like, keep it simple. You should have five to 10 core measures. Use lagging and leading measures as a balance and also balance financial and nonfinancial metrics. And you wanna make sure they all connect. They're not just a list of KPIs. It's like, if you have a great dashboard, it tells the story of performance, and more importantly, your your team sees themselves in it. Okay. Couple examples of measures. At Thought Ensemble, we used one called EBITB. So you've probably heard of EBIT or EBITDA. We made up our own measure called earnings before interest, taxes, and bonuses, because we didn't have depreciation or amortization, but we wanted to track how much profit we could share back with our employees. And it was both a measure and a motivator, but that wasn't enough. Our purpose was about being loved by clients and teammates, so we tracked that as well.

We took NPS and EMPS really seriously and made space for those scores in leadership conversations alongside revenue and margin. And those, along with a few other measures, told the story of what success looked like. Now shifting gears to one of my clients, another IT organization, it was for an online retailer, and and their CEO brought us in to do their IT strategy. And the CEO was obsessed with measuring IT spend as a percent of revenue, which used to be, something CEOs love to do. It's not around as much anymore. It did it's it was tough to benchmark, within their industry. And more importantly, it didn't mean anything to the team. No emotional connection. No motivation. So we reframed it around user satisfaction and business value delivered, and suddenly the energy changed.

People wanted to talk about the numbers because they understood what winning looked like and why it mattered. So that's the power of strong success measures. They're not just reportable. They're shared, meaningful, and motivating. When your team's aligned on what success looks like and how it's measured, they pull in the same direction. Okay. Now it's time to get your paper. Time for the little quiz. So just three questions. Number one, how clearly defined and activated is your team's purpose and values? One is no shared purpose and values, and five is clear shared purpose and values. How aligned is your team on the long term vision for your organization? One is conflicting visions, and five is shared future focus. How clearly defined and shared are your team's success measures? One, undefined success, and five, clear success metrics. Alright. Give you just a second. Take a drink of water. And on to the second part of the framework, operational cohesion.

So I have loved org design since I was three years old. I used to play with my little plastic people in the basement inventing teams to solve problems. And that fascination turned into a lifelong question for me, which is how do groups accomplish more together? And I'll tell you, when a team is running on all cylinders with clear roles and strong rhythms and real accountability, it is so energizing. It's it's really fun. And we experienced that at Thought Ensemble after implementing EOS. It gave us a lot of structure and momentum. This section, by the way, is definitely inspired by EOS. It also reflects what I've seen in plenty of organizations that don't follow a specific playbook. Okay. Let's start with role clarity. So at its core, this is about leaders understanding what they're accountable for, where their boundaries are, and how decisions get made.

When this works well, it unlocks faster execution, reduces friction, strengthens accountability. When it breaks down, you see decisions stalling, people duplicating work, dropping balls, and escalation becomes the norm. So a lot of my consulting work has ended up being around role clarity. We work with a lot of tech organizations. So these days, it's like the chief product officer and the chief technology officer and all their organizations and the role clarity between those two. It's it's a lot. You know? Who owns the road map? Who makes the call in architecture or release priorities? And it's not just at the top. It's like it ripples down to the team level. And without clear accountability, people end up working in parallel or across purposes. In the best cases with role clarity, there's not only clarity of ownership, but also real healthy tension between roles.

So thinking about, you know, AI projects, you need someone pushing fast for speed and learning and iterating, but also you need roles focused on governance and risk mitigation. And they might seem to be at odds, but with the right role design, it actually helps you move faster. A lot of teams use RACI to define roles. You may have heard of RACI before. It's a classic for a reason. It works really well with process work and helps clarify who's involved in what. And I've used that a lot. But at Thought Ensemble, we had defined new clear roles through EOS, but we were still moving too slow because it was in our DNA to be super collaborative and decisions were stalling. So we turned to rapid, which is Bain's decision rights framework, and that was totally transformational for us.

It gave us a language to talk about who recommends, who agrees, who decides, who performs, and who's informed. We were able to move much faster after that. But here's the thing I've learned, racy, rapid, whatever the framework is. The value isn't in the framework. It's in the conversation. So you can do those exercises all day, but the the clarity comes from really working through it, working through the overlaps, the assumptions, the friction points, not looking at the spreadsheet at the end. And you do have to revisit it because roles shift and context changes. You can't just hand it out and expect it to hold. So alignment needs to be maintained. Alright. Next area is strategic priorities because even the best teams can find themselves moving fast but going nowhere. What we often see when we go into new clients is that each group will define their own strategic priorities, and then the company strategy becomes just a roll up of all of those.

It's not really strategy. Right? It's just a laundry list of stuff. There's no cohesive plan, and it always feels like too much. Right? And in today's world where every organization is trying to do more with less, that leads to burnout and confusion and stalled project. Progress. Sorry. This section, strategic priorities, is about fixing all of that. It's about deciding together what really matters right now and aligning executives around that. And so for thought ensemble, one of the biggest game changers was a practice called quarterly rocks, which is from EOS. Although the idea goes back to Jim Collins, and you can picture a big glass jar, And he talks about how you have to put the big rocks in first because if you put the pebbles and sand in, you can't get the rocks in to fit. So you gotta start with your big rocks. So we did that, and every quarter, we picked three to five priorities. That was it.

We got clear on scope and resources and ownership, and that came first before everything else we were doing. And over a couple of years, we looked back and couldn't believe what we had accomplished. We are doing something similar now at ParaVeda. This is one of the practices we pulled from EOS, and the results are real already. We are collaborating across teams instead of stepping on each other, and we're not trying to chase everything. We're picking a few things and getting momentum on those. This is the key, though. Strategic priorities are not just about a planning exercises. They're like an alignment mechanism in the moment. It's where leadership alignment gets really real. It's not just agreeing on vision in the abstract. It's like making hard choices about what you're gonna do and and what you're not. Alignment's not just a value.

It's a discipline, and strategic priorities are where the discipline shows up. Okay. Next one. Let's talk about issues resolution. So something to think about. If you're not hitting roadblocks, you're probably not playing a big enough game. So you're gonna have issues. Every leadership team runs into challenges, and what matters most is having a consistent approach to solving them together. And there is an approach for this in EOS. It's called IDS, which stands for identify, discuss, and solve. You go through a process to identify the root issue, not the noise, but what's underneath, discuss it openly and productively, then solve it and get clear on the next step and who owns it. And at Thought Ensemble, IDS was one of those transformational tools we had. We tracked all our issues in a backlog. We prioritize them weekly, and we carved out time.

EOS recommends seventy five minutes of a ninety minute meeting every week to work on IDS. And when we stuck with that, we worked through so many complex challenges so quickly. We've loved it so much that we even brought it into some of our client work, including one major merger integration where leaders embedded IDS into their program governance. But EOS did not invent this. The military uses a similar mindset. If you've heard of COAs or course of action, that's, it's more of an analysis upfront where somebody defines the problem clearly and looks at multiple paths and then recommends a course of action and shares that document in advance, and then it's discussed in the meeting. But at the end of the day, teams don't just need a solution.

They need to trust that their problems won't fester, and they wanna know there's a way to name them and work them and resolve them. That's what builds momentum. It what's it's what keeps the group in alignment. Okay. Last one in this area is meeting cadence because teams without rhythm fall out of sync fast. So I believe there's real value in repeatability. When your team has a predictable rhythm, people know what to expect, and they know when topics will get addressed. They'll show up better prepared. And over time, it just gets faster and smoother and more aligned. But the cadence alone isn't enough. You have to get your meeting purposes clear, like separating strategic meetings from tactical meetings. One of the most common mistakes I see is just trying to cram everything into one meeting. Oh, and status updates, they need to go somewhere else.

Use dashboards or shared reports or anything that doesn't waste your most valuable time together. Great book. I'd love to recommend here is Death by Meaning by Patrick Lencioni, and he writes that bad meetings are the birthplace of unhealthy organizations. And I totally believe that. But the problem isn't too many meetings. It's blurring the purpose because strategy needs space and tactical needs clarity, and everyone deserves its own land. One of the most transformational practices we took on at Thought Ensemble through EOS was the weekly level 10 meeting because you rate it at the end of the meeting, whether it's one or 10. It's a ninety minute meeting with just two valid excuses for missing it, which are vacation and death. And once we got everyone there on time every week, and it's a small group, a small leadership team. There are about seven of us.

It was amazing what we could accomplish in that meeting. And in my group at Para Veda, we do have meet those weekly meetings as well where we sync on tactical things and also have the quarterly cadence where we have a two day off-site and, midpoint strategic meetings as well. And we use those to get aligned. And after a year and a half in of doing that, it's it's just like we're getting better and better at knowing when to bring things and where to bring things and, just continuing to use the time really wisely. So if your meetings are feeling chaotic or dull or scattered, don't blame them. Just redesign them, protect them, and use them to drive real cohesion. Alright. Time to grab your paper again. Give yourself a quick score. Four questions here. How clear are the roles and decision rights on your team? One would be total confusion.

Five would be crystal clear. How aligned is your team on the top priorities? One would be scattered focused. Five is aligned on top priorities. How effective is your team at surfacing and resolving issues together? One is issues fester, and five is a consistent resolution process. And how consistent and purposeful is your team's meeting rhythm? One would be inconsistent meetings. Five would be effective meeting rhythm. Alright. This last section is the force multiplier for the rest of it. I have dabbled in team effectiveness over the years. I've run workshops and facilitated sessions and studied all the frameworks, but I didn't really get the stakes until I stepped into the CEO's seat. And that's when I saw firsthand how team dysfunction can quietly destroy value and how the right investments in team effectiveness can overcome about any obstacle.

This section is heavily inspired by the five dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lencioni. It's one of the top business books of all time, in my opinion. If you haven't read it, you can knock it out in just over an hour. And I probably read it five times, and I recommend reading it anytime you go through an organizational change. When I think about leadership alignment in my own teams, this section is the part I'm most proud of from our journey as thought ensemble. And the work was really hard, but it was worth it. I think the first two dimensions are what created our value. They helped us, you know, triple in size and revenue in three years and build more loyal clients and dedicated employees.

But this part, the team effectiveness part, it's what made the sale decision and the integration process so much more successful because we are ready as a team to go anywhere together. I've also had the privilege of watching, groups who were stuck with my clients, sometimes actively fighting, transform into teams that respect each other, genuinely bring out the best in each other. It's very powerful. And I'm getting to do it again in my current role. So a lot of the practices I'm sharing with you here are things I'm putting to use right now. So let's start this next section section with one of my very favorite practices, which is strength and diversity. I am such a believer in diversity that we founded thought ensemble and the belief that better solutions come from a diversity of thought of personality and experience and strengths.

I've loved personality and strength based development for a long time individually, like and brought it into the group setting, a little bit later, but it's probably because I grew up with it. My dad was a Myers Briggs MBTI facilitator, and so I learned early on that not everyone sees or processes the world the same way. And I carried that into my career, and I facilitated a ton of these sessions with teams. I'll I I've got one story here from, a leadership team I worked with years ago from an IT organization. Two leaders were just not getting along. They were constantly frustrated with each other. And through going through the MBTI, they this thing came out where they realized that one of them would send meeting invites and the other would respond as to them because he wasn't sure what meeting he was gonna go to, if he was gonna go to hers or another one.

And she was super disrespected by it, and there was just building tension about all that. And they realized all this through this session, and literally both of them cried and had this huge breakthrough, and it changed everything. It's it was it was amazing to watch. So that's a bit about personality and understanding personality, but then there's strength based development. I am a huge fan of strengths finder. I read the book Now Discover Your Strengths back in the nineties and, just loved it. But what you do in strengths finder is you learn your top five strengths. And then if you do teamwork with it, your team helps you lean into those. And so we used both strengths finder and MBTI across our whole company for new employees and internal teams and client teams.

And within our leadership team, it really supported our alignment to know how to work with each other and how to leverage each other's strengths. I do have one caution here, which is do not overwhelm your team with too many different personality things. Pick one Like MBTI, pick a strengths finder like core strengths or something else. But I would leave you with on this one, if you treat everybody the same, you you waste what makes them great. Okay. Now it gets a little harder. We'll talk about constructive tension, which is the ability to engage in healthy conflict and process tension in the room together. And I will be honest. I hate conflict. I have always hated it, and for years, I avoided it at all costs. I didn't wanna argue, and I didn't wanna be around people arguing.

So I played Switzerland, very neutral and diplomatic, constantly having conversations outside the room to smooth things over. And it drained me. It burned time. And in retrospect, it was one of the biggest things holding my leadership team back. So when I look at my part in the matter, the story I told you earlier, that was the root of it, our inability to engage in the room. And I was contributing to it more than anyone because I couldn't stand the idea of people not getting along. So several years after I stepped in as CEO, after we'd had a lot of success with many of the other elements in this framework I'm sharing with you today, I realized I still hadn't dealt with my conflict issues. And I hit a moment where I had to choose some significant discomfort over collapse. And it was about six months before he we sold the thought ensemble to ParaVeda.

Key partner told me that he was ready to leave, and it was rooted in his frustration with our team dynamics. And it really shook me. I asked him to give me ninety days, and then I brought in an external coach to help us through the tension. And we used a tool called SDI, strength deployment and inventory, and it helped us understand each other's motivations and how we show up in conflict. And one thing I learned about myself that was also very helpful for the team is that I have no visible signs when I'm in conflict. I go into a resource state, which means I seem very calm. But inside, I'm suppressing everything, and that wasn't helping anyone. It was actually hurting the team. And so the coaching didn't just help the partners who were in conflict. It helped me show up differently, and it changed the entire dynamic.

And it's really what gave us the strength as a team to navigate one of the biggest decisions of our lives, which was how to sell the company and how to lead our people through it. And the people I went through the process with, they are still close colleagues and friends today, not only with me, but with each other. So if you're not having disagreement in the room or if the real conversations are happening before or after, take that as a signal. Alignment without tension is a performance, and alignment through tension is the real thing. Okay. Let's wrap this section with team growth because learning and growing together is how teams unlock what's truly possible. I don't know about you, but the best feedback I've ever gotten has has, not come from my bosses. It's come from teammates, even people who reported to me.

So how do you build that into your company culture? One of the simplest ways is to share with each other what you're working on, whether it's something you learned in a performance review or three sixty, just a personal development goal, saying it out loud and asking your team to support you is incredibly valuable. At one point, I had gotten feedback from my team I wasn't making decisions fast enough. So I asked them to hold me accountable, and we worked on that together. Another exercise that people hate to do but always end up loving, and I've done this within my companies and with clients, is a feedback speed round. So you sit one on one with every other member of the team and you each answer a couple questions. What's my greatest contribution to the team? What's one way I could support you more effectively?

And people get great insights from this, but they also learn to be vulnerable, and those couple minutes change how they interact in the future. Both of these practices really shift the dynamic within the team. They open up vulnerability and they build trust. The team is aligned on how they're working on themselves to improve the team, and it's really awesome when you get in the flow of just helping each other grow. Alright. Last survey. How well does your team understand and work with each other's strengths and styles? One is you overlook individual styles, and five is you lean into strengths and differences. How effectively does your team engage with disagreement in the room? One is avoid conflict. Five is productive in room debate. And how intentionally does your team invest in growing and developing together? One is no time investment, and five is active mutual development. Alright.

We have four minutes left. So I'm gonna go through a few takeaways super fast. Few lessons learned. First, it takes time. That's okay. Even even if you had a couple weeks to lock yourselves in a room and do nothing else, alignment is not something that you can rush. You need time to marinate and revisit, which brings me to the second point. Start simple. Don't wait for perfect. Choose a few success measures. Try a quarterly cadence. Get some things on paper. Third, get on a rhythm. You don't have to do everything at once, but get your cadence going so you keep building from your starting point. Speaking of which, people often ask the best place to start. You may have some ideas based on the survey you just filled out. That's often a good indicator.

If you're not clear, I recommend vision and priorities as two great places to start. Always build in time for team development. It doesn't have to be cheesy. Just set aside ninety minutes or so in any every quarter to do that with your team. Stick with it. Don't keep restarting. It may feel awkward, but you gotta keep at it. And don't be afraid to bring in outside help. External facilitators, coaches, we a lot of times as consultants think we can do it ourselves, but as I've shared, there are a couple key times that we have brought in external help. And, you know, as I wrap up, since we're here at women's leadership conference, I thought it would be worth just sharing a little bit about why women are uniquely equipped to lead aligned teams. Study after study shows that women naturally lead in ways that bring people together. I have several statistics here that I need to skip based on time, but it's amazing.

And I've seen it firsthand with clients. Many of my clients are women, and they lead in a way that feels different. And they're able to build leadership and alignment, really powerfully. So I will leave you then with a question, which is, what would be possible for your team if everyone was aligned on strategic direction, how you operate, and effective team practices? And if you're ready to take one step forward, pick one practice to focus on this quarter, work on that area with your team, and watch how it changes your team. Because with an aligned team, you can create the future you envision together. I will look for questions here, but I know we're almost out of time. Feel free to pop in. I don't see any questions, so feel free to reach out to me.

I put my info in in the chat, and I also have some resources here if you wanna screenshot this. These are books and talks, and then I have another one that is frameworks and tools. I'll see if I can paste this into the chat before I lose you in case there's anything you wanna click on. Gonna try to copy this here. Thanks for all the it doesn't let me copy paste. Sorry. Hopefully, you got it through the, the screenshot. Thanks for all the notes, y'all. Thanks for joining. Have a great day.