For leadership teams
Find out exactly where your team is stuck and clear it effectively.
Four constraints account for most of what holds leadership teams back. We measure which one is yours, work on it, together with your team, for five to six months, measure again and celebrate the results.
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The data
So.. about those four constraints. At least one of them is holding your team back.
Our strategic partner Meta Team has profiled leadership teams across more than twenty countries, and in the large majority of them the dominant constraint is one of these four.
41%
of leadership teams
Low Candor
Everyone agrees at the table. The real conversation then happens ten metres past the door, in twos. You have probably had one of those yourself this month. Disagreement gets postponed rather than settled, and people leave having agreed to something they do not believe. Candor is the constraint most protected by seniority: the more senior the team, the higher the cost of being wrong out loud, and the more sophisticated everyone gets at avoiding it.
Cleared, it looks like
The disagreement arrives inside the meeting instead of after it. Somebody can name a bad decision in front of the person who made it and tension gets resolved constructively.
23%
of leadership teams
Signal Distortion
What you agreed leaves the meeting as slightly different versions. Interpretations and assumptions have a freeway due to expertise. Yet every layer below softens it a little. By the time it reaches the floor, people are interpreting it in ways you've never said.
Cleared, it looks like
One message leaves the team. People two layers down can state the direction in the same words you used.
19%
of leadership teams
Decision Drift
Decisions get reopened repeatedly, while priorities within the team(s) continue to shift. This brings the team to similar discussions they had months before. And with that, the organisational pace slows.
Cleared, it looks like
Decisions stay decided. Reopening one becomes a deliberate act with a name attached to it rather than something that happens by erosion.
17%
of leadership teams
Execution Fragmentation
Effort is high and alignment is not. Every function is optimising its own part beautifully and the sum does not add up to the strategy. The organisation feels pulled in multiple directions by people who all think they are pulling in one.
Cleared, it looks like
Functional plans visibly come from one direction, and the team can point at what it has chosen not to do.
Slower decisions
Execution drag
Duplicated work
Escalation
Stakeholder friction
Delayed strategy
These are the costs of unresolved constraints within your team
The method
We measure first. Then we work where behaviour is made.
It starts with a validated team diagnostic, so the work we do together is aimed at the constraint the data shows. There is usually one dominant constraint with others behind it. We work them one at a time, in the order the diagnostic sets. Throughout it we combine your work's necessity for practicality with the foundation of sustainable change in human behaviour; the nervous system inside and the team as a collective around it.
The last thing teams need is more off-sites that fail to bridge the gap between experience and implementation. So we bring the work into your normal weeks, and we stay until the change is real.
No vague hand-offs and no inspirational quotes to send you on your way.
The engagement
01 · Measure IT
Backed by some serious weight
Together with our partner Meta Team, who have built their diagnostic on 150,000 profiler responses across more than 1,600 teams (and remember, those are people just like you and us), we'll run our validated diagnostic within your team(s).
02 · Work it
It happens inside your work week
Two to three hours at a time and fully connecting to the actual work. We're saying goodbye to offsites and long in betweens in these team interventions.
03 · Prove it
Then we measure again
It's one thing to say so, it's another to prove it happened. After each serie of interventions we run the same measurement as at the start. You'll see the improvements directly in the areas that we targeted together.
What we measure, and what sits under it
Why it holds after we leave
Every team runs on four layers. The diagnostic names the top two. The behaviour you want changed is produced in the bottom two, which is where most team work never goes, and it's also the reason why when that happens it does not survive the first hard quarter.
Hover any habit in layer two to see what it means in practice.
At the top of an organisation, your regulation is the organisation's regulation. When the people setting direction are out of sync with each other, everyone below feels it long before anyone can name the cause.
The engagement
What actually happens, and when
Month 1
Month 6
01
Intake
We work out which team we are actually talking about, who is in it, and what you have already tried.
90 minutes
02
Diagnose
The 360 profiler across the team, you, your manager and key stakeholders. Plus a half day of APE-X Rootdigging with the team.
10 min each, plus a half day
03
Name it and own it
Your debrief first, then the team's. You leave with a written constraint map the team has signed up to, in their words rather than ours.
Two debriefs
04
The work
Four to six two-hour sessions we'll call 'workouts', in an order the diagnostic decides rather than one we prefer, plus your own sessions. Built into your teams working week. Clear and effective.
Months 2 to 5
05
Prove it
The same instrument, the same 32 behaviours, measured against your own baseline and debriefed with the team.
End of engagement
Your time: around 21 hours. Your team's: around 19.
Across five to six months and booked in the calendar before we start. Every leadership team we meet already agrees this work matters. Agreement is the easy part, and it is usually where things stop. What moves a team is when implementation is protected in advance and defended when weeks gets busy. Makes sense right?
The details
How you will know
You'll see the results in the physical space first. Then we'll back it up in the diagnostic
The diagnostic is 360 degrees: every team member, you, your manager and key stakeholders. Around eight to ten minutes each. At the end we run it again on the same instrument, against your own baseline.
The engagement
One team. One constraint at a time. Measured twice.
5 to 6
Months
12
People, at most
21
Hours for the lead
19
Hours, for the team
The guarantee
If a workout does not move something real, you do not pay for the next one.
We stay part of your team until the change is real, and we put it right before we invoice again.
Who this is for
This is for you if
The problem survived at least one earlier attempt to fix it.
You can commit the budget and protect the team’s time, including your own.
You want the team diagnosed rather than a solution sold to you.
You are willing to be confronted about your own part in it.
This is not for you if
You want a motivational day that ends at five.
You want skills training. If the real issue lives at the behavioural or emotional level, a skills workshop will not touch it.
You want the report without the work that follows it.
Next steps
Book a discovery call
You will be speaking to one of us.
Hylke Reidsma
Founder
Wim Geutjes
Leadership and strategy facilitator
Thirty minutes with Hylke or Wim. We ask which team, what you have already tried, and what happened when you tried it.
You leave with our honest read on whether this is right for your team and what the first month would look like.
If it is not a fit we will say so on the call. Nobody chases you with a proposal afterwards.
Not ready to talk yet? The experience booklet shows what the five months look like from inside the team. Ask us for it on the call, or email getstarted@cindermonkey.agency.
Questions worth asking before you book
Isn’t this just another team-building day?
Can you really measure culture?
We tried something before and it did not stick.
Do you do skills training?
What is the Team Performance Profiler?
How much of my time does this take as the leader?
Does the rest of the organisation find out what our profile said?
What happens if the team is bigger than twelve?
Do you work in Dutch or English?
The guarantee