I mentioned to Steve the other day that I wasn’t really feeling April as a “start” as much as an “end” of a phase — and that it’s been this week, on the cusp of May, that I’ve really felt the shift.

So I’ve been thinking the last several days that I’m going to experiment with shifting from quarters to “semesters,” because May-August feels more in line with my seasonal energy than the April-June/July-September structure does.

For some of us, three semesters per year might feel more right and rooted than four quarters or even the four seasons. Especially because those calendar quarters and natural seasons don’t always align with each other.

That feeling of rightness might also align with patterns from childhood where our school years were structured much the same way. Two “in-school” semesters, Fall and Winter, and then the Summer semester off for holidays, vacations, and so on.

If you’re like me, you might be feeling a stronger pull towards something now than you were a month ago. That might be a pull towards rest, relaxation, and a summer slow, or the warmer temps might be providing a spike in energy, creating momentum rather than slowing it.

Depending where you live, May might also be a time when you really feel the seasonal change and a corresponding energetic shift, just like I am right now. It was a long, cold, and gray winter here in Vienna — the worst in 30 years I’ve been told. April has been the transition into spring, but as it tends to do here, there has been a fair amount of sunny false starts and cold and rainy fall backs.

This last week of the month, though, has been stunning. I finally believe nature is ready for a resurgence, and so am I. I’m feeling a creative energy I haven’t had since, well, this time last year, and if history repeats itself that should last into August.

So if you’re feeling less attuned with the quarterly cadence, here’s your permission to experiment with something else that better aligns with your own energy and rhythms.

Regardless of what cadence you prefer, May is a great time to plan for what you will and won’t do during the summer “semester,” as well as a great time to wrap up any projects you can before changes in energy, focus, schedules, and capacity affect what you and your team are able to accomplish in the next four months.

~Maghan

Resources

Seasons and Cadence

Tempo and Energy

Tools and Tips

Join Us for Our May Events

Mark your calendars for our May events, open to our paid subscribers:

• Leadership Strategy Session (LSS): Wednesday, May 13, 2026, at 11:00 am PDT
  May’s Focus: Getting Your Team Ahead of the Seasonal Shift

  April gave your team some clarity about what to carry forward. Now comes the harder part: holding that clarity before everyone’s rhythms start to diverge. The leaders who navigate this well get ahead of it. They read where their team’s energy actually is, clarify who owns what while everyone is still present, and set clear expectations before the wobble sets in.

• Monthly Momentum Call (MMC): Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at 11:00 am PDT
  May’s Focus: Make the Seasonal Shift Work for You

  May is where you start to feel it: the rhythm that carried you through spring begins to change. Your energy shifts, your schedule starts filling differently, and the months ahead start to look and feel unlike the ones behind you. Knowing your own seasonal patterns and planning around them before the season fully arrives can make all the difference in how well you navigate the shift.

May Momentum Planners

The Momentum Planners were built to keep your most important work front and center. Download the free version of our May planners to help you determine what projects you want to accomplish in the new year.

Paid subscribers can access the full suite of dated planners below. 👇 If you don’t see them, please make sure you’re logged in to your paid account.

If you don’t have a paid subscription yet, now’s a great time to upgrade.

Read more

May has a way of catching people off guard. Not because anything dramatic happens, but because the calendar says one thing and your energy, your schedule, and your team say something else entirely.

On paper, you’re two months into Q2. In practice, you’re arriving at a genuine seasonal turning point. School years end. Schedules shift. The long, uninterrupted stretches of spring start giving way to something looser and less predictable. For some people that shift brings more energy. For others, it signals a natural slowdown. For most teams, it brings both at once.

This month, our Leadership Strategy Session explores how to get ahead of summer’s uneven rhythms before they get ahead of your team. And our Monthly Momentum Call looks at how to use this transition point to make intentional choices about the season you’re entering.

We hope to see you in May! (Details below 👇🏽)

Leadership Strategy Session

For leaders navigating team dynamics, organizational priorities, and the challenge of maintaining sustainable momentum while delivering results.

Wednesday, May 13, 2026 at 11am PDT

Note: We’re on a slightly different schedule this month. Our LSS is on the second Wednesday rather than our usual first Wednesday.

May's Focus: Getting Your Team Ahead of the Seasonal Shift

April gave your team some clarity about what to carry forward. Now comes the harder part: holding that clarity before everyone’s rhythms start to diverge. Some team members will head into the coming months with more creative bandwidth than usual. Others will be navigating school schedules, family commitments, or a genuine seasonal dip in energy. The result is a team that’s technically present but quietly out of sync, and collaborative work that gets slippery in ways that are hard to name until something drops.

The leaders who navigate this well get ahead of it. They read where their team’s energy actually is, clarify who owns what while everyone is still present, and set clear expectations before the wobble sets in.

We’ll explore themes like:

• Reading where your team’s energy actually is and planning around it honestly

• Clarifying ownership and priorities while everyone is still present and aligned

• Setting realistic expectations for what’s achievable between now and September

• Creating enough structure to hold progress through the uneven months ahead, without overcorrecting into rigidity

May is your last good window before summer makes everything more complicated. Use it to set your team up to work with the season rather than against it.

Bring questions about: Managing mismatched energy levels across your team, what to protect and what to let flex through summer, how to keep collaborative work from getting slippery when availability is uneven, and how to have honest conversations about capacity before the season shifts.

Monthly Momentum Call

For anyone looking to focus on what matters most, clarify goals, and make meaningful progress on what’s important to you.

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 at 11am PDT

May's Focus: Make the Seasonal Shift Work for You

There’s a moment in May where you start to feel it. The rhythm that carried you through spring begins to change. Your energy shifts, your schedule starts filling differently, and the months ahead start to look and feel unlike the ones behind you.

Knowing your own seasonal patterns and planning around them before the season fully arrives makes all the difference. Which projects deserve your energy now? What’s worth setting aside until after the summer? Where do you want to protect your focus, and where can you afford to let things breathe?

We’ll explore:

• How to read your own seasonal energy patterns as summer approaches

• Which of your current projects are well matched to where your energy is heading

• What to prioritize for the stretch ahead, and what to set down until after the summer

• How to build momentum that travels through summer’s disruptions rather than depending on conditions that won’t be there

Bring questions about: What your seasonal energy typically looks like and how to plan around it, deciding what to move forward versus set aside until September, building practices that hold through summer’s unpredictability, and how to make the most of the season you’re actually entering.

These monthly calls are part of a paid/premium subscription to Productive Flourishing.

If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, we encourage you to upgrade your subscription and join us in April for one or both of these calls.

Our Monthly Momentum Calls are designed to help you focus on what matters most, offering a supportive space to clarify goals, overcome challenges, and make meaningful progress — whether you’re pursuing a creative project, growing your business, or balancing life responsibilities.

Each 60-minute session blends teaching, hot- support-seat coaching, and interactive Q&A, providing real-time support and actionable insights to help you move forward with clarity and purpose.

May's Focus: Make the Seasonal Shift Work for You

There’s a moment in May where you start to feel it. The rhythm that carried you through spring begins to change. Your energy shifts, your schedule starts filling differently, and the months ahead start to look and feel unlike the ones behind you.

Knowing your own seasonal patterns and planning around them before the season fully arrives makes all the difference. Which projects deserve your energy now? What’s worth setting aside until after the summer? Where do you want to protect your focus, and where can you afford to let things breathe?

We’ll explore:

• How to read your own seasonal energy patterns as summer approaches

• Which of your current projects are well matched to where your energy is heading

• What to prioritize for the stretch ahead, and what to set down until after the summer

• How to build momentum that travels through summer’s disruptions rather than depending on conditions that won’t be there

Bring questions about: What your seasonal energy typically looks like and how to plan around it, deciding what to move forward versus set aside until September, building practices that hold through summer’s unpredictability, and how to make the most of the season you’re actually entering.

These monthly calls are part of a paid/premium subscription to Productive Flourishing. 

If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, I encourage you to upgrade your subscription and join us Wednesday, March 18, 2026 at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Paid subscribers, here’s what you need to know to join the call:

Read more

To be a leader means managing constant complexity. Shifting priorities, team dynamics, capacity challenges, and the pressure to execute while everything keeps changing.

Our Leadership Strategy Sessions are supportive, no-fluff monthly virtual meetings for leaders navigating the real challenges of modern team life.

Each session blends practical guidance, coaching, and peer Q&A. We tackle what’s most timely and relevant, from clarifying team roles and managing capacity to leading through change and building trust.

You don’t need to prep. You just need to show up as you are, with whatever’s on your plate. These sessions are designed to meet you where you are.

May's Focus: Getting Your Team Ahead of the Seasonal Shift

April gave your team some clarity about what to carry forward. Now comes the harder part: holding that clarity before everyone’s rhythms start to diverge. Some team members will head into the coming months with more creative bandwidth than usual. Others will be navigating school schedules, family commitments, or a genuine seasonal dip in energy. The result is a team that’s technically present but quietly out of sync, and collaborative work that gets slippery in ways that are hard to name until something drops.

The leaders who navigate this well get ahead of it. They read where their team’s energy actually is, clarify who owns what while everyone is still present, and set clear expectations before the wobble sets in.

We’ll explore themes like:

• Reading where your team’s energy actually is and planning around it honestly

• Clarifying ownership and priorities while everyone is still present and aligned

• Setting realistic expectations for what’s achievable between now and September

• Creating enough structure to hold progress through the uneven months ahead, without overcorrecting into rigidity

May is your last good window before summer makes everything more complicated. Use it to set your team up to work with the season rather than against it.

Bring questions about: Managing mismatched energy levels across your team, what to protect and what to let flex through summer, how to keep collaborative work from getting slippery when availability is uneven, and how to have honest conversations about capacity before the season shifts.

These monthly calls are part of a paid/premium subscription to Productive Flourishing. 

If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, I encourage you to upgrade your subscription and join us Wednesday, May 13, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Paid subscribers, here’s what you need to know to join the call:

Read more

🌟 Enjoy a special preview of our April workshop! The clip we're sharing introduces the core idea that drives everything else: working from what's already in you changes everything about how you reach your goals. If you're not already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to access the full 90-minute recording and join us for upcoming sessions.

Thank you to everyone who joined our April workshop last week!

We spend a lot of time chasing the hard thing and undervaluing what comes naturally to us. But the work that flows most naturally is often exactly where our best work lives. This isn’t about avoiding hard things. It’s about recognizing where effort feels aligned rather than forced, where you’re working with your grain instead of against it.

This workshop was an invitation to flip that script and start building a more honest picture of how you actually work best. We explored your GATES (the Genius, Affinities, Talents, Expertise, and Strengths that are already in you) and how to put them to work toward the goals that matter most.

During this workshop, we explored:

• The Effort Paradox: Why we both try to avoid effort and assign it outsized value, and how that pattern can lead us to make things harder than they need to be.

• Unlocking Your GATES: Discovering the attributes that help you do your best work, how to recognize them in yourself, and why the most powerful ones are often the hardest to see.

• GATEwayS to Goals: A reframe for how to approach your goals. Consulting your GATES before choosing the how, rather than jumping straight to a method that may or may not fit how you’re wired.

• Live Coaching: Real-time application of the framework to participants’ actual goals and challenges.

This 90-minute workshop provided extended space to identify how you work best and start putting those strengths toward the goals that matter most. Upgrade to a paid subscription to access the full recording and join us for upcoming sessions.

Our next Monthly Momentum Call (back to our regular 60-minute format) will be on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PT.

Premium subscribers can watch the full recording and find the session highlights, workshop workbook, and additional resources below. 👇🏽

Read more

Q1 gave your team real data. Now, at the start of Q2, you’re sitting with what actually happened: the wins that built momentum, the projects that quietly lost steam, and the patterns your team defaulted to when no one was actively steering.

Inertia runs in both directions. Teams get stuck. But teams also drift, moving in a direction you didn’t intend because the path of least resistance took over. And the momentum building in the right places deserves just as much attention as the things that have stalled.

April is one of the best windows in the year to address all three. Energy is high, summer disruption hasn’t arrived, and Q1’s patterns are fresh enough to act on.

This month’s Q&A also covered:

• Helping a team shift from settled operational work to a new higher-priority project without losing the people in the process

• Relaunching a stalled creative project after a partnership breakdown, and why the apology tour usually isn’t necessary

• Distinguishing real deadlines from habitual urgency when rebuilding your work identity after leaving a high-pressure environment

• Keeping volunteers or part-time collaborators genuinely aligned when you’re running far ahead of them between meetings

• Navigating the challenge of holding a teaching, training, and facilitation role simultaneously without formal authority

• Framing data-gathering work as strategic opportunity rather than defensive obligation during a leadership transition

One pattern that surfaced across conversations: the gap between what has been working and what the moment actually requires. April is the right time to name that gap and decide what to do with it.

Consider joining us live as a paid subscriber.

Our next Leadership Strategy Session will be on Wednesday, May 13, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Premium subscribers can watch the full opening teaching and access all related resources shared during the call. 👇🏽

Join us on April 15 for Work from What's Already Working, a 90-minute workshop where we'll help you identify your GATES (genius, affinities, talents, expertise, and strengths) and put them to work on the goals and challenges in front of you right now.

Read more

dormant energy
coils all winter, then bursts forth—
that’s why it’s called “spring”

With bluebonnets blooming everywhere, Spring has officially arrived here in South Texas. As we enter April (hands down the best month of the year here), I’m feeling this build-up of restless energy.

That seasonal change — along with some personal changes, including a milestone birthday this year — has me in the midst of a “crisis.” Not as in “something bad that’s happened” but as in “turning point” or “point of decision.”

That energy has had me, over the past couple of weeks, really considering… well… everything.

Small stuff, like: do I switch my morning coffee for green tea?

Obvious stuff, like: do I switch my walks from evening to morning now? (Yes! I always make this change as the weather warms, and switch back the other half of the year.)

And bigger stuff, like: is my daily haiku practice still serving me as a creative outlet, or is it getting in the way of me working on another creative project I’d rather be doing?

Or: as more and more of Mom’s caregiving is taken over by the professionals, what is my role? And what does that mean in terms of how I spend that found time?

What No Longer Serves?

The core questions I’m asking myself as I consider all of these changes to habits / practices / identities / beliefs / goals / projects / possessions / relationships:

• What no longer serves me? What alternative might serve me better?

• If I had only a year to live, which would I keep? Which would I let go of? Which new ones would I cultivate?

• Which of these am I keeping because of inertia, more than a conscious decision that they support me?

• Which am I keeping up because I am worried about what others might think?

• Which do I associate with an identity that no longer serves me, but I’m afraid to let go of?

• Which best support my core values?

• What goals do I want to pursue that these stand in the way of?

If you’re feeling that questing energy, that spring itch to change, perhaps these prompts will help you, too. And if you have your own questions you ask yourself to help you navigate this kind of change (in any season), I’d love to hear them! Please share in the comments.

~Steve

PS: If you need some support as you “strip away and rebuild,” particularly working with your GATES instead of against them, consider joining us April 15 for our workshop, Work from What’s Already Working. Details below!

Resources

For Reviewing

For Visioning and Planning

For Executing

Free subscribers: now might also be a great time for you to give our paid subscription a try. $10 a month will get you all these resources, our two monthly calls, the full digital suite of Momentum Planners, and more. Cancel anytime.

Join Us for Our April Events

Mark your calendars for our April events, open to our paid subscribers:

• Leadership Strategy Session (LSS): Wednesday, April 1, 2026, at 11:00 am PDT
  April’s Focus: Leading Against Inertia

  The risk in April is defaulting to the path of least resistance: keeping what’s familiar, avoiding the conversations that need to happen, letting the weight of Q1 just carry over into Q2. Breaking that pattern takes deliberate choice, and April, while energy is high and summer hasn’t yet disrupted everything, is the right moment to make it.

• NEW WORKSHOP! Work from What’s Already Working: Wednesday, April 15, 2026, at 11:00 am PDT
  We’ve decided to change plans and replace our usual Monthly Momentum Call this month with a 90-minute workshop.

  We spend a lot of time chasing the hard thing and undervaluing what comes naturally to us. But what comes easily is often exactly where our best work lives. In this workshop we'll help you identify what you naturally do best and start building from there, so you can step into Q2 working with yourself rather than against yourself.

  New Zoom details and additional information coming soon!

April Momentum Planners

The Momentum Planners were built to keep your most important work front and center. Download the free version of our April planners to help you determine what projects you want to accomplish in the new year.

Paid subscribers can access the full suite of dated planners below. 👇 If you don’t see them, please make sure you’re logged in to your paid account.

If you don’t have a paid subscription yet, now’s a great time to upgrade.

Read more

Enjoy a special preview of this month's call replay! We're sharing a short clip from the middle of our conversation — a spontaneous riff on why goal persistence matters and what it actually costs you when ideas and commitments don't have a home. If you're not already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to access the full recording and be part of upcoming sessions.

Thank you to everyone who joined our March Monthly Momentum Call!

This month’s conversation kept returning to the same underlying question: what is actually getting in your way? Sometimes it’s a practical system problem. Sometimes it’s the emotional residue of a hard decision. Sometimes the obstacle is the story you’re telling yourself about the harder path being the more worthwhile one. And sometimes it’s simply that your body isn’t giving you the capacity your plans assumed.

Whatever the shape of it, naming what’s actually in your way changes everything about how you respond to it.

Here are some of the key themes we explored this month:

• Following What’s Working: When one path has traction and another has stalled, how to trust what’s actually working instead of chasing what’s theoretically better.

• When Decisions Leave Residue: Why every important choice carries some emotional remainder, and what to do with those feelings instead of letting them keep you stuck.

• Pausing Projects Without Losing Them: How to put a project down well when something more important takes its place, and how to build the systems that let you actually return to it.

• Navigating What Comes After the Book: How to honor the work you just finished before committing to the next big thing, and why promotion deserves as much energy as creation.

• Making the Most of a Q1/Q2 Check-In: What gets missed in quarterly reviews when we focus only on planned outcomes and skip the unexpected.

• When Your Capacity Gets Cut Down: How to work within a much smaller window of energy without beating yourself up for what isn’t getting done.

Our next Monthly Momentum Call will be on Wednesday, April 15, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Premium subscribers can watch the full recording and find the session highlights below, along with all the resources mentioned throughout the call. 👇🏽

Read more

April is a month of adjustment. After three months of plans meeting real life, you know now which projects are actually moving, which habits are serving you, and where the friction you noticed in March has been quietly costing you. That’s useful information, but only if you do something with it.

This is the moment to sort through what you’re bringing into Q2 and what you’re better off leaving behind. Not as a way of writing off the first quarter, but as a way of stepping into the next one from a clearer foundation. Spring’s energy is real. The question is what you point it toward.

The challenge is that it’s easy to keep moving with the current of what’s already in motion. Old habits, projects that have outlived their purpose, team patterns that no one has stopped to question. Momentum has a pull, and not all of it is pulling in the right direction. Making the most of April means consciously deciding what you’re carrying forward and what you’re better off putting down.

This month, both our Leadership Strategy Session and Monthly Momentum Call explore how to use April’s energy to make those adjustments intentionally, before the summer window closes.

We hope to see you in April! (Details below 👇🏽)

Leadership Strategy Session

For leaders navigating team dynamics, organizational priorities, and the challenge of maintaining sustainable momentum while delivering results.

Wednesday, April 1, 2026 at 11am PDT

April’s Focus: Leading Against Inertia

Q1 gave your team real data. Some things worked. Some things created more drag than they were worth. Some projects that felt essential in January are harder to justify now, and some processes that seemed fine are showing their costs.

The risk in April is defaulting to the path of least resistance: keeping what’s familiar, avoiding the conversations that need to happen, letting the weight of Q1 just carry over into Q2. Breaking that pattern takes deliberate choice, and April, while energy is high and summer hasn’t yet disrupted everything, is the right moment to make it.

We’ll explore themes like:

• What Q1 revealed about your team’s real priorities and where to focus energy in Q2

• How to retire projects and processes that are no longer earning their place without losing momentum in the transition

• Resetting team habits and agreements before the summer window closes

• How to build toward the second half with intention rather than just absorbing whatever Q1 left behind

April is your window. Use it to set your team up for a stronger second half rather than repeating the patterns Q1 made visible.

Bring questions about: Projects or processes your team has been holding onto longer than makes sense, how to have honest conversations about what’s not working, creating shared clarity about Q2 priorities, and how to build toward summer without overloading the months between now and then.

NEW WORKSHOP! Work from What’s Already Working

We’ve decided to change plans and replace our usual Monthly Momentum Call this month with a 90-minute workshop.

Wednesday, April 15, 2026 at 11am PDT

We spend a lot of time chasing the hard thing and undervaluing what comes naturally to us. But what comes easily is often exactly where our best work lives. In this workshop we’ll help you identify what you naturally do best and start building from there, so you can step into Q2 working with yourself rather than against yourself.

Updated Zoom details coming soon!

These monthly calls are part of a paid/premium subscription to Productive Flourishing.

If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, we encourage you to upgrade your subscription and join us in April for one or both of these calls.

This month we’re doing something different. Instead of our typical Monthly Momentum Call, we’re offering a 90-minute workshop to help you give yourself permission to lean into your GATES instead of overvaluing “hard” things.

We spend a lot of time chasing the hard thing and undervaluing what comes naturally to us. But the work that flows most naturally is often exactly where our best work lives. This isn't about avoiding hard things. It's about recognizing where effort feels aligned rather than forced, where you're working with your grain instead of against it.

In this 90-minute workshop we’ll work through:

• Identifying your genius, affinities, talents, expertise, and strengths — your GATES

• Seeing where you’ve been undervaluing what’s already working for you

• Applying what you naturally do best to the goals and challenges in front of you right now

This isn’t about learning a new system. It’s about working from what’s already yours.

Know Your Strengths?

If you have results from CliftonStrengths, Sparketypes, or any other assessment, bring them along — there will be opportunity to put them to use. As a Gallup Certified Strengths Coach and Certified Sparketype Advisor, I love helping people put their results to work.

And if you haven’t taken an assessment of this type, don’t worry; there’s still plenty in the workshop to support you in identifying and applying your GATES.

This workshop is part of a paid/premium subscription to Productive Flourishing. 

If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, I encourage you to upgrade your subscription and join us Wednesday, April 15, 2026 at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Paid subscribers, here’s what you need to know to join the call:

Read more

To be a leader means managing constant complexity. Shifting priorities, team dynamics, capacity challenges, and the pressure to execute while everything keeps changing.

Our Leadership Strategy Sessions are supportive, no-fluff monthly virtual meetings for leaders navigating the real challenges of modern team life.

Each session blends practical guidance, coaching, and peer Q&A. We tackle what’s most timely and relevant, from clarifying team roles and managing capacity to leading through change and building trust.

You don’t need to prep. You just need to show up as you are, with whatever’s on your plate. These sessions are designed to meet you where you are.

April’s Focus: Leading Against Inertia

Q1 gave your team real data. Some things worked. Some things created more drag than they were worth. Some projects that felt essential in January are harder to justify now, and some processes that seemed fine are showing their costs.

The risk in April is defaulting to the path of least resistance: keeping what’s familiar, avoiding the conversations that need to happen, letting the weight of Q1 just carry over into Q2. Breaking that pattern takes deliberate choice, and April — while energy is high and summer hasn’t yet disrupted everything — is the right moment to make it.

We’ll explore themes like:

• What Q1 revealed about your team’s real priorities and where to focus energy in Q2

• How to retire projects and processes that are no longer earning their place without losing momentum in the transition

• Resetting team habits and agreements before the summer window closes

• Celebrating progress and wins, especially in areas outside your original intentions and plans

April is your window. Use it to set your team up for a stronger second half rather than repeating the patterns Q1 made visible.

Bring questions about: Projects or processes your team has been holding onto longer than makes sense, how to have honest conversations about what’s not working, creating shared clarity about Q2 priorities, and how to build toward summer without overloading the months between now and then.

These monthly calls are part of a paid/premium subscription to Productive Flourishing. 

If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, I encourage you to upgrade your subscription and join us Wednesday, April 1, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Paid subscribers, here’s what you need to know to join the call:

Read more

Last month, we looked at whether your team had what it needed to execute: the right competency, capacity, and workways to deliver. This month, we turned to a harder question: what’s slowing your team down even when those things are in place?

In almost every team, there are patterns of waste hiding in plain sight. Work stalls because someone is waiting on a response. Projects get touched too many times before they ship. Outputs require rework because something wasn’t clear upstream. These aren’t signs of a bad team. No human system is 100% efficient, and chasing that is a fool’s errand. The goal isn’t to eliminate all waste. It’s to reduce it, and you can only do that once you know where to look.

Using TIMWOOD, a framework from lean manufacturing adapted for knowledge work, we focused on the four patterns most likely to create drag in creative and knowledge-based teams: wait times, overproduction, overprocessing, and defects.

This month’s Q&A also covered:

• How to lead fairly when your team members work at genuinely different speeds

• Making a clean exit from leadership roles without getting pulled back in

• Breaking the delegation dilemma when doing it yourself feels faster

• Redirecting a team member who has taken on work that isn’t theirs to keep

• What to do when administrative structures start overriding the people doing the actual work

These sessions often surface new frameworks and ideas before they make it into writing. This month that was epicycles: why the same mistake that kept astronomers wrong for more than 1,000 years might be showing up in your team right now. A post is coming, but the conversation happened here first. Consider joining us live as a paid subscriber.

Our next Leadership Strategy Session will be on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PDT. (Details coming soon.)

Premium subscribers can watch the full opening teaching, including the complete discussion of epicycles and what they mean for your team, and access all related resources shared during the call. 👇🏽

Read more

In Part 1 of this series, we explored how Reviewing helps you understand where you are. In Part 2, Visioning clarified where you want to go. Then Part 3, Planning, charted the course between the two. Now we turn to the fourth and final phase: Executing, where you actually make the journey.

Why Executing Matters

Some people naturally live in this phase. If you’ve taken our Momentum Quiz, you might recognize yourself as a Creator:

✨ Creator: Action-oriented doer who works best with clear steps or checklists. Creators achieve a lot but sometimes feel they're not progressing on what matters most.

Others struggle to stay here. Visionaries (big-picture thinkers) can find execution tedious once the ideation phase is behind them. Designers (master planners) can struggle to put the map down and start driving.

But all roles are needed in the planning process. And just as skipping the earlier phases creates problems, skipping Executing means none of the other work matters:

• Reviewing: You know where you are, but you never move from it

• Visioning: You know where you want to go, but it stays a dream

• Planning: You have a beautiful roadmap that never takes you anywhere

Create the Conditions for Your Success

In the Planning phase, you named what success looks like. Now it's time to set yourself up for it.

Creating the conditions for success requires two things:

1. Understanding your unique working profile.

This is the combination of your strengths, affinities, and natural tendencies along with the environments and rhythms that bring out your best. When you work with these rather than against them, projects get easier, not harder.

2. Learning to work with your unique blend of TEA

Your time, energy, and attention are finite resources and they are not interchangeable. Having a free hour does not mean you have the energy or focus to do your most demanding work in it. Matching the right type of work to the right kind of capacity is one of the most practical moves you can make toward finishing what matters most.

What You Might Hit Along the Way

Even with the right conditions and a solid plan, execution rarely goes smoothly. Here are three common challenges and how to navigate them:

• The Air Sandwich. The gap between your big-picture vision and your day-to-day reality is rarely just one thing. It can be competing demands pulling you in different directions, the stories you tell yourself about what’s possible, misaligned support, or simply not having enough of the right resources. Everyone’s gap looks different. Knowing what’s widening yours is the first step to closing it.

• Drag points. Every project has them, and yours will be particular to you. They might show up as no-win scenarios you have built in your own mind, other people’s priorities crowding out your own, or bright shiny objects pulling your focus. When you know what these tend to be, you can build strategies to address them when they show up.

• The red zone. That painful stretch near the end of a project where progress seems to stall just when you’re closest to the finish line. Fatigue, perfectionism, and second-guessing are all features of this phase. Knowing you’re in it is half the battle.

Knowing When You’re Done

Finishing is rarely a single dramatic moment; it’s a series of small completions that each require clarity, commitment, and the discipline to stay concentrated rather than drifting to the next new thing. And closing out a project well, capturing what you learned, and celebrating what you did, is not a bonus round. It’s what sets you up to start the next thing strong.

If Reviewing was a conversation with your past self, Visioning was connecting with your future self, and Planning was charting the course, then Executing is about being fully present in the here and now. It’s about responding to the conditions in front of you and showing up for your work until what you envisioned becomes real.

Executing Resources

Below you’ll find resources to support you in the doing:

When you need to set yourself up for your best work

• How to Use Your GATES to Make Your Project Easier - Use your Genius, Affinities, Talents, Expertise, and Strengths to make your projects easier and more energizing

• The Power of Environment - Design the spaces where you work to support focus, flow, and follow-through

• Work with Your Chronotype Instead of Against It - Understand your natural energy rhythms and stop fighting your own biology

When you need to use your TEA (Time, Energy, and Attention) well

• How Heat Mapping Your Day Can Reveal Your Most Productive Hours - Track your own energy patterns to discover when your TEA is at its highest

• How to Be a Productive Powerhouse Using Time Blocking - Use four block types to protect your best work hours and build in the recovery that keeps you going

• Block Scheduling: Create a Weekly Schedule That Works for You - Structure your week around your real capacity, not just available time

• Getting the Most from Your Time Blocks - Navigate the most common misunderstandings about block scheduling so your blocks actually work

When you need to build habits and routines that support consistent execution

• Are Your Habits Working for You? - Evaluate whether your current defaults are propelling you forward or holding you back

• Is It Time to Rethink Your Routines? - Know when your routines are serving you and when they are getting in the way

• Cold Start Routines - Use pre-defined sequences to get into flow faster, even on your hardest days

When you hit challenges mid-execution

• The Air Sandwich: Why Your Big Picture and Day-to-Day Reality Don’t Link Up - Understand the five forces that create the gap between your vision and your daily work

• Keep Flying by Accounting for Drag Points - Navigate no-win scenarios, other people’s priorities, and naysayers without losing your momentum

• 5 Ways to Get Through the Creative Red Zone - Push through that painful final stretch and finish what you started

When you need to stay focused on what matters most

• 5 Ways to Resist Bright Shiny Object Syndrome and Finish What You Start - Stay the course when new ideas and distractions pull at your attention

• The Five Projects Rule: Defining Your Best Work - Keep your active project list short enough to actually make progress on what matters

• If You’re Planning Effectively, You’ll Always Be Changing Your Plans - Learn why adapting your plan mid-execution is not failure; it is good planning

When you need to finish and close out well

• The 5 Cs of Completion - Move from clarity to concreteness to commitment to concentration to celebration

• CAT Work: How Clean-Up, Archive, and Trash Sets Up Your Next Project - Close out well so your next project starts on solid ground

When you are leading a team or organization

• 7 Practices to Elevate Your Strategy Execution - Practical approaches for leaders who need to drive execution across a team or organization

When life disrupts your execution

• How to Overcome Major Disruptions in Your Work Life - Navigate the big interruptions without losing all your progress

• What to Do When Life Shatters Your Plans - Find your footing again after the kind of disruptions that change everything

Up Next in This Series

Now that you’ve moved through all four phases, Part 5 will bring them together. Because while we’ve explored Reviewing, Visioning, Planning, and Executing one at a time, in practice, they are not a straight line. They overlap, feed each other, and sometimes happen all at once. More on that soon.

Struggling to execute on what matters most, even when you have a plan? Our Productivity Coaching can help you identify what is getting in the way, build better working conditions, and stay on track through the inevitable challenges of doing the work. Learn more about Productivity Coaching.

Mom and I just finished one of our household rituals: watching the Winter Olympics. Her favorite is figure skating. I’m not sure I have a favorite, but I do have a fascination: curling, where teams slide granite stones across the ice to a target.

What fascinates me about this sport is its precision: how tiny decisions in how the stone is thrown and the tiny adjustments that reduce friction between stone and ice (go sweepers!) affect the stone’s trajectory and eventual resting place in the target circle (the “house”).

As in curling, friction is often the enemy of our personal or team projects, too. Some of this friction we might not even be aware of, until we see the curling stone of our project slow and stall, rather than reaching the house for a score.

In March, the final month of Q1, we often sense the presence of friction even though we can’t identify exactly what’s causing it. We feel that slowdown right when we think we should be speeding up, reaching our groove, and crossing milestones at a clip.

Lots of things can create friction for you in your personal projects, or in the work you and your team do together:

1. Unclear objectives (either yours or your team’s) that have you drifting instead of focusing.

2. Not leaving yourself breadcrumbs, so you need to spend more time relearning the project when you start it again.

3. Broken printers (you know the ones).

4. Procrastination, maybe because you’re fighting the air sandwich, you’re not playing to your GATES, or you haven’t engaged your success pack.

5. Communication difficulties between teammates that lead to misunderstandings, rework, and even hard feelings.

6. A process or procedure that isn’t documented, so it’s done slightly differently each time, or needs to be trained each time a new person picks it up.

These are just a few examples of frictions that saps the time, energy, and attention you and your team would rather put toward work that actually matters.

As you’re reviewing Q1 and planning Q2 this month, now is a great time to identify some friction points you can reduce or eliminate, and get your curling stone project grooving across the ice to hit its target.

~Steve

Resources to Fight Friction and Find Your Groove

For Your Individual Projects

For Your Team’s Work Together

Free subscribers: now might also be a great time for you to give our paid subscription a try. $10 a month will get you all these resources, our two monthly calls, the full digital suite of Momentum Planners, and more. Cancel anytime.

Join Us for Our March Events

Mark your calendars for our March events, open to our paid subscribers:

• Leadership Strategy Session (LSS): Wednesday, March 4, 2026, at 11:00 am PST
  March’s Focus: Finding the Drag in Your Team’s Work

  In almost every team, there are patterns of waste hiding in plain sight. They aren’t signs of a bad team. They’re signs of a system with friction that no one has named yet. In this session, we’ll identify where the drag is coming from and what to address first. We’ll focus on the patterns most common in knowledge work and creative teams. The goal isn’t to turn your team into a machine. It’s to clear the friction that’s making good work harder than it needs to be before the Q2 ramp-up adds more to everyone’s plate.

• Monthly Momentum Call (MMC): Wednesday, March 18, 2026, at 11:00 am PDT*
  March’s Focus: What’s Actually Getting in Your Way?
  There’s a real difference between the space that restores you and the friction that just drains you. This month, we’re looking at the latter: the patterns that keep showing up, the places where you lose momentum, not because the work is hard but because something keeps snagging you on the way to it.

*Please note that North America shifts to daylight saving time on March 8. If you’re joining from outside North America, we recommend checking your local time before joining.

March Momentum Planners

The Momentum Planners were built to keep your most important work front and center. Download the free version of our March planners to help you determine what projects you want to accomplish in the new year.

Paid subscribers can access the full suite of dated planners below. 👇 If you don’t see them, please make sure you’re logged in to your paid account.

If you don’t have a paid subscription yet, now’s a great time to upgrade.

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🌟 Enjoy a special preview of this month's call replay! We're sharing a short snippet to give our free subscribers a taste of the rich discussions and timely insights we explored together. If you're not already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to access the full recording and be part of upcoming sessions.

Thank you to everyone who joined our February Monthly Momentum Call!

January’s vision work felt energizing. Then February arrived, and the gap between where you wanted to go and what you’re actually able to do right now became hard to ignore.

It’s tempting to question your commitment or your capability. But the more useful question is: which gap are you actually facing? There are really only three possibilities: a competency gap (skills and knowledge), a capacity gap (time, energy, and attention), or a workways gap (the habits, routines, and foundational self-care that make everything else possible). Getting clear on which one is limiting you changes everything about how you respond.

Here are some of the key themes we explored this month:

• The Readiness Framework: Identifying what’s actually blocking your execution using Competency, Capacity, and Workways.

• Implicit Learning and Team Habits: How modeling new practices consistently can shift team behavior without heavy-handed instruction.

• Unblocking Creative Freeze: Tools and analogies for helping people move past the freeze response and into generative thinking.

• Finishing and Leaving Breadcrumbs: How to set a long-term project down well and set yourself up to return to it without losing your place.

• Maintaining Team Pace: Setting expectations and structures that keep a high-stakes project moving when the stakes are real and the deadline is fixed.

We hope to see you for one of our March community calls, where we'll explore what's getting in the way of your best work and how to clear it.

Premium subscribers can watch the full recording and find the session highlights and additional resources below. 👇🏽

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March is the last month of Q1, and something interesting happens around this time every year: we start to feel the friction.

Not the big, obvious obstacles. The subtler ones. The project that’s been hovering at almost-done for longer than you’d like to admit. The day when you check off task after task and still arrive at the end of it feeling like nothing actually moved. The team process that technically works but somehow always takes longer than it should.

This friction isn’t necessarily a sign that something is broken. It’s a sign that something is worth looking at, because unnecessary drag spends the time, energy, and attention you’d rather put toward work that actually matters.

This month, both our Leadership Strategy Session and Monthly Momentum Call explore what’s getting in the way and how to address it without squeezing the life out of how you work.

We hope to see you in March! (Details below 👇🏽)

Leadership Strategy Session

For leaders navigating team dynamics, organizational priorities, and the challenge of maintaining sustainable momentum while delivering results.

Wednesday, March 4, 2026 at 11am PST

March’s Focus: Finding the Drag in Your Team’s Work

Last month, we looked at whether your team had what it needed to execute. This month, we’re looking at what might be slowing them down even when those things are in place.

In almost every team, there are patterns of waste hiding in plain sight: work that stalls because someone is waiting on a response, projects that get touched too many times before they ship, outputs that require rework because something wasn’t clear upstream. These aren’t signs of a bad team. They’re signs of a system with friction that no one has named yet.

In this session, we’ll use TIMWOOD to identify where the drag is coming from and what to address first. We’ll focus on the patterns most common in knowledge work and creative teams:

• Where wait times are building up, and who or what is causing the bottleneck

• Where overprocessing is holding things back instead of making them better

• Where overproduction creates drag — multiple versions of the same thing, work that gets created but never used, reinventing from scratch when a template would do

• How defects (rework, miscommunication, unclear handoffs) ripple through a team and eat capacity

The goal isn’t to turn your team into a machine. It’s to clear the friction that’s making good work harder than it needs to be before the Q2 ramp-up adds more to everyone’s plate.

Bring questions about: Bottlenecks you’ve noticed but haven’t been able to name, decisions or deliverables that keep getting recycled instead of shipped, how to talk to your team about friction without it feeling like criticism, and how to create better conditions for your team’s best work in Q2.

Monthly Momentum Call

For anyone looking to focus on what matters most, clarify goals, and make meaningful progress on what's important to you.

Wednesday, March 18, 2026 at 11am PDT

Heads up: North America shifts to daylight saving time on March 8. If you’re joining from outside North America, we recommend checking your local time before joining.

March’s Focus: What’s Actually Getting in Your Way?

We talk a lot about doing our best work. But what about the things that quietly make it harder?

There’s the project sitting at almost-done that you keep not finishing. The focus block that evaporates before you’ve gotten anywhere. The day when you’ve checked everything off your list and still feel, by the end of it, as if nothing important moved.

Some of what looks like wasted time isn’t waste at all — the walk where the idea finally arrives, the afternoon that looked unproductive but gave you exactly what you needed to move forward. We are not robots, and we shouldn’t try to be.

But there’s a real difference between the space that restores you and the friction that just drains you. This month, we’re looking at the latter: the patterns that keep showing up, the places where you lose momentum, not because the work is hard but because something keeps snagging you on the way to it.

We’ll explore:

• Where you’re spending energy on motion that isn’t actually moving your projects forward

• When “getting it right” tips into overprocessing, and what it costs you

• How to clear the friction that’s making your best work harder to reach, without stripping out the space that makes it possible

Bring questions about: Projects that have been stuck longer than they should be, the difference between productive stepping back and stalling, getting to “good enough” when perfectionism is the drag point, and how to set yourself up for a strong Q2 without grinding through the end of Q1.

These monthly calls are part of a paid/premium subscription to Productive Flourishing.

If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, we encourage you to upgrade your subscription and join us in February for one or both of these calls.

Please note that North America shifts to daylight saving time on March 8. If you’re joining from outside North America, we recommend checking your local time before joining.

Our Monthly Momentum Calls are designed to help you focus on what matters most, offering a supportive space to clarify goals, overcome challenges, and make meaningful progress — whether you’re pursuing a creative project, growing your business, or balancing life responsibilities.

Each 60-minute session blends teaching, hot- support-seat coaching, and interactive Q&A, providing real-time support and actionable insights to help you move forward with clarity and purpose.

March’s Focus: What’s Actually Getting in Your Way?

We talk a lot about doing our best work. But what about the things that quietly make it harder?

There’s the project sitting at almost-done that you keep not finishing. The focus block that evaporates before you’ve gotten anywhere. The day when you’ve checked everything off your list and still feel, by the end of it, as if nothing important moved.

Some of what looks like wasted time isn’t waste at all — the walk where the idea finally arrives, the afternoon that looked unproductive but gave you exactly what you needed to move forward. We are not robots, and we shouldn’t try to be.

But there’s a real difference between the space that restores you and the friction that just drains you. This month, we’re looking at the latter: the patterns that keep showing up, the places where you lose momentum, not because the work is hard but because something keeps snagging you on the way to it.

We’ll explore:

• Where you’re spending energy on motion that isn’t actually moving your projects forward

• When “getting it right” tips into overprocessing, and what it costs you

• How to clear the friction that’s making your best work harder to reach, without stripping out the space that makes it possible

Bring questions about: Projects that have been stuck longer than they should be, the difference between productive stepping back and stalling, getting to “good enough” when perfectionism is the drag point, and how to set yourself up for a strong Q2 without grinding through the end of Q1.

These monthly calls are part of a paid/premium subscription to Productive Flourishing. 

If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, I encourage you to upgrade your subscription and join us Wednesday, March 18, 2026 at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Paid subscribers, here’s what you need to know to join the call:

Read more

To be a leader means managing constant complexity. Shifting priorities, team dynamics, capacity challenges, and the pressure to execute while everything keeps changing.

Our Leadership Strategy Sessions are supportive, no-fluff monthly virtual meetings for leaders navigating the real challenges of modern team life.

Each session blends practical guidance, coaching, and peer Q&A. We tackle what’s most timely and relevant, from clarifying team roles and managing capacity to leading through change and building trust.

You don’t need to prep. You just need to show up as you are, with whatever’s on your plate. These sessions are designed to meet you where you are.

March’s Focus: Finding the Drag in Your Team’s Work

Last month, we looked at whether your team had what it needed to execute. This month, we’re looking at what might be slowing them down even when those things are in place.

In almost every team, there are patterns of waste hiding in plain sight: work that stalls because someone is waiting on a response, projects that get touched too many times before they ship, outputs that require rework because something wasn’t clear upstream. These aren’t signs of a bad team. They’re signs of a system with friction that no one has named yet.

In this session, we’ll use TIMWOOD to identify where the drag is coming from and what to address first. We’ll focus on the patterns most common in knowledge work and creative teams:

• Where wait times are building up, and who or what is causing the bottleneck

• Where overprocessing is holding things back instead of making them better

• Where overproduction creates drag — multiple versions of the same thing, work that gets created but never used, reinventing from scratch when a template would do

• How defects (rework, miscommunication, unclear handoffs) ripple through a team and eat capacity

The goal isn’t to turn your team into a machine. It’s to clear the friction that’s making good work harder than it needs to be before the Q2 ramp-up adds more to everyone’s plate.

Bring questions about: Bottlenecks you’ve noticed but haven’t been able to name, decisions or deliverables that keep getting recycled instead of shipped, how to talk to your team about friction without it feeling like criticism, and how to create better conditions for your team’s best work in Q2.

These monthly calls are part of a paid/premium subscription to Productive Flourishing. 

If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, I encourage you to upgrade your subscription and join us Wednesday, March 4, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PST.

Paid subscribers, here’s what you need to know to join the call:

Read more

Those you lead are continually asking themselves two questions:

1. Can I trust my leaders?

2. Where are we going?

By trust, I mean functional trust, not moral trust. Functional trust is the feeling that people will do what they say, have our backs, stick with us when things get tough, share or spotlight credit, and do their best to help us succeed. If they’re worried about moral trust — lying, cheating, stealing, etc. — the game’s already up.

The second question is a question of vision. Too many leaders confuse having a vision with having a plan and undershare where the team or organization is going because they’re waiting to figure out how they’re going to get there. Teammates are surprisingly open to there not being a solid plan and often like being part of creating the plan. But not knowing, in general, where you’re going makes it hard to do much but move within the parameters of explicit plans and guidance.

It’s really hard to overdo it when it comes to cultivating trust and sharing vision. It’s surprisingly easy to underdo it.

But leading from trust and vision isn’t just about the relationship from leaders to their teammates. It’s really:

1. Can leaders trust their teammates?

2. Can teammates trust their leaders?

3. Can teammates trust each other?

And on the vision side, it’s:

1. Are leaders sharing their vision with their teammates?

2. Are their teammates aligning their priorities, challenges, opportunities, communication, and efforts to their leaders’ vision?

3. Are teammates using their leaders’ vision to collaborate, coordinate, align, and partner with each other?

Those are the six trust-and-vision vectors. If any one of them is weak, the others strain to compensate.

As much as we might wish it were the case, cultivating trust and aligning to vision across all six vectors doesn’t happen automagically and they require continual reinforcement. This vexes many leaders.

From the leader’s point of view, if there’s not an explicit indication that their trust has been breached and/or diminished, trust between teammates should be automagically enhanced and built. In a similar vein, their vision feels something like the floor — it’s always there in a very tangible way and it’s what we walk on and build from.

Unless there’s a problem with it, we don’t talk about the floor much. Just like, unless there’s a financial problem, we don’t continually reaffirm that people will get paid — there’s just an unspoken trust that makes these conversations “invisible.”

But from their teammates’ perspectives, trust and vision are not static givens. It turns out that teammates aren’t mono-dimensional beings that only exist in a work context.

In their world, there’s a lot of VUCA. They’re betrayed in small and major ways by the people they trust. Their friends and families are having their world turned upside down.

And because it’s common to be left in the dark about vision and to not get enough explicit and truthful feedback about how they’re doing at work, they often don’t know where they’re going or how they’re doing. Leaders swooping and pooping new initiatives and goals that are poorly contextualized can feel like continual whiplash, as can leaders quiet firing or quiet demoting people (intentionally or not) by taking back projects and responsibilities or redirecting them to someone else without adequate communication.

And aside from some of the dysfunction I mentioned, humans need and appreciate trust signals and affirmation that everything is still on track. Professionals crave the feedback that they’re doing things well and are on track, just as much as they appreciate knowing the truth that they need to improve in some areas and are out of alignment.

When I share the standing imperative to lead from trust and vision with managers and clients, the honest ones speak up and comment about how much work it takes. When are they going to do their real work?

My response is always the same: this is your real work and, like team habits, you can’t really opt out. Given the nature of work and human beings, if you’re not intentionally leading from trust and vision, you’re probably allowing distrust, scattered work, overreach, and general background anxiety to grow.

If you’re a leader, you already know how hard it is to come back from a trust breach or to get people to be all in when there’s low trust. You also already know how easy it is for teams to scatter, drift, or tread water when they’re not aware of and aligned to your vision.

So, yes, it’s work. But less work than not doing it, especially when we acknowledge that so much of the hard part of leadership is the social and emotional labor it takes to lead when things aren’t going well.

I’m working on a book that will go much deeper on this topic, but I’m sharing the main idea now because it’s so foundational to everything I teach and, honestly, I’ve been stuck without having the main thrust here.

I’ll leave you with this today:

1. Take the top-of-mind team or leadership challenge that you started with before this post. Might the core problem be a matter of insufficient trust or unclear or unknown vision? How would you address it?

2. Consider the top-of-mind growth opportunity that keeps getting punted to someday. Have you articulated how it fits in with your vision? Have you given your team some time they can trust to pursue it?

3. What can you do in less than five minutes today that cultivates trust with your teammates and/or aligns them to your vision?

Whether it’s a problem to solve, an opportunity to grow into, or just not being sure what your team needs, start with trust and vision.

You might be surprised to see what it unlocks.

February reveals what January concealed: vision alone doesn’t guarantee execution. There’s a gap between where you thought you’d be and where you actually are. Missed deadlines. Team members spinning their wheels. Work that should be moving isn’t.

The instinct may be to add more people or to push harder. But execution gaps aren’t solved by throwing resources at the problem or demanding more effort. They’re solved by understanding which constraint is actually in your way.

Most execution problems come down to one of three readiness constraints:

Capacity: Too much planned for the resources actually available. Your team is stretched too thin, and adding more people won’t help if you haven’t identified the real problem first.

Competency: Wrong skills or knowledge for the work required. You have the people, but they don’t have the training, experience, or expertise to do what needs doing.

Workways: Individual skills are strong, and people have the time, but the team can’t come together. You have all-star players, but they aren’t performing at the all-star level. That’s a team habits problem.

Each requires a different solution. Misidentify the constraint, and you’ll waste time, money, and team morale solving the wrong problem.

During this session, we explored:

• How readiness shapes what you can reasonably expect your team to execute

• Setting realistic expectations when your team tackles new or infrequent projects

• Creating editorial standards that preserve individual voice while maintaining organizational quality

• Establishing yourself as the leader when stepping into a new role or returning after an absence

• Why outcome language works better than process directives with experienced teams

We mentioned during the call that it might be time for another Readiness Workshop, and we’ll gauge interest from the community. If you’d like to be part of conversations like this and access workshops when we offer them, consider upgrading your subscription.

Our next Leadership Strategy Session will be on Wednesday, March 4, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PST. (Details coming soon)

Premium subscribers can watch the full opening teaching and access all related resources shared during the call.👇🏽

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