During our session days, you emphasize building a healthy leadership team. What specific exercises or behavioral ground rules do you use to force honest dialogue inside the room?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Building a healthy team requires moving past artificial harmony and entering into constructive conflict. To achieve this during our session days, we establish and enforce strict behavioral ground rules.

First, we enforce the rule of being open and honest. This means you must say what you are really thinking inside the room, not in the hallway after the meeting. If I sense someone is holding back, I will call them out and ask for their raw opinion.

Second, we use targeted team health exercises. For example, during our annual sessions, we conduct trust-building exercises where team members share their personal histories and identify each other's greatest contributions and areas for improvement. This builds vulnerability and mutual respect.

Third, we utilize a strict rule of no assumptions. If there is friction between two executives, we address it directly using the GWC™ tool and the Accountability Chart to identify if the conflict is personal or structural.

- Say everything inside the room, with zero backdoor conversations.
- Attack the issues, not the people.
- Commit to decisions once they are made, even if you disagreed initially.

These ground rules ensure that our session days are a safe place to have the difficult conversations required to build a healthy organization.