Years ago at Google, I came across Project Aristotle, their deep dive into what makes teams high performing. The finding surprised almost no one and helped almost everyone: the highest performing teams have strong psychological safety. Translation: they trusted each other. I thought about that recently in a session with a founder client. He's building a company and, for the first time, a culture from zero. Trust came up while he was negotiating terms with his cofounder, and t

Org charts can be negotiated. I keep seeing the same pattern with my highest achieving clients: the ones who come out of a reorg or a leadership change stronger than before are never the ones who wait to see what happens to them. They're the ones who get in front of it, prepared, clear eyed, and willing to have the conversation before the decision is made. Last week was a perfect example of it in action. One of my clients, a well respected leader in the AI space who'd recentl

Companies are telling people to "just use AI" but without psychological safety, time, structure or honest conversation, most people can't even figure out what that means for them.