High Performance Culture
Most early-stage performance problems are communication problems. I help founders set the bar, make hard people calls faster, and build systems that hold it without them in every decision.
Where founders get stuck
“No one cares as much as I do.”
True. It's your company.
Everyone else needs reasons to stay invested: recognition, encouragement, room to grow, and a culture they're excited to be part of. And what motivated your first 10 hires won't motivate the next 20.
The shiftYou stop expecting your level of drive and start building the things that create it.
“I can do it better and faster myself.”
True, today.
But every time you step in, the team learns to wait for you. The company can only grow as fast as the people around you.
The shiftYour job moves from doing the work to building people who can.
The thesis
Everyone wants a high-performance culture, but what it looks like and how you get there is different for every team. The foundations are the same. How you build on them depends on the founder's leadership style, the team they have, and the goals they're chasing. I work with founders and their teams to get there in a way that fits all three.
Foundations of success
What changes
Pick a founder, a team, and a goal to see where the work would start.
Every engagement starts with a diagnostic of the actual team.
More patterns
Loyalty is standing in for a standard, and every newer hire can see it.
Separate the friendship from the role, so they can keep both.
Leveled expectations and a review cycle that apply to everyone, early hires included.
The founder is waiting to feel certain. The team made up its mind months ago.
Decide without waiting for certainty, and plan the reset or exit conversation word for word.
A 30-day performance plan with clear checkpoints, so the outcome is obvious either way.
The decisions are happening anyway, just inconsistently. And people compare notes.
Pick the two or three systems worth building now, and skip the rest until they're needed.
Comp bands they'd be comfortable seeing leaked, and a simple promotion path.
Nobody knows which decisions are theirs, so everything rolls uphill to the founder.
Delegate decisions, not just tasks, and live with the ones they'd have made differently.
Clear decision rights by role, and a weekly rhythm that surfaces problems before they reach the founder.
Roles blurred as the company grew, and the conversation about who owns what keeps getting postponed.
Make their unspoken agreements explicit before a disagreement turns personal.
A written split of roles and decision rights that both founders sign off on.
Working together
For people decisions that can't wait. A clear answer, and the words to deliver it.
A hard exit, a performance reset, a co-founder standoff
For the systems you build once and want to get right. Rolled out so the team buys in, and designed so they own it when I'm done.
Review cycles, leveling, comp, manager training
A standing advisor for the founder and leadership team, and a sounding board for every people call.
Founder and leadership coaching, fractional people ops