✦ SYSTEM TEAM NEXT
Roles are being rewritten and the work is changing, but nobody can tell you what things are supposed to look like. Those conditions are disorienting for the most experienced leader.
Team Next is an extended team engagement for those who are in the midst of disruptive transformation. We work with you and your team to reveal who you are and what you already have built, decide what you want to become and then take steps toward that while things continue to evolve.
Redesign your future team while keeping it running.
TWO WAYS IN
Start with the Levers Lab
Two days with your team, reading and drafting the four levers. Stop there and run with it, or carry straight on into the engagement.
Or start the engagement
Six to twelve months, opening with interviews across the team and a read of where you actually are.
You and your teams are probably doing better than you think
Most leaders who reach out to me do so under the premise that everything is broken. Almost none of them are right about that.
In most cases, teams are not missing competence or ability. They're missing the foundational agreements and shared language and vision. And in the current shape-shifting environment, without this ends up having a cultural "bleed out" that stalls performance, and growth.
So we start from where the team is already standing strong and build upon that foundation. Then we make it visible. And then we make tangible and in everything your team stands for and delivers.
Culture is the result of decision and behavioural consistency.
A team's culture is the sum of the decisions and actions it makes over and over. The Four Levers are where those decisions live and it's within these levers that a team can diagnose and change at any point in time. This is whole sum's approach.
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Rituals
The practices a team protects because they matter
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Roles
Expectations and responsibilities made explicit
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Rhythms
Planning that accounts for load lifts and recovery windows
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Permission giving
What people believe they are allowed to decide, try, refuse and stop.
Underneath all four sits shared language. Four people can leave the same session with four different definitions of what they agreed, and the agreement quietly falls within a month. Getting a team to mean the same thing by the same words is what makes everything else hold.
✳ SELF
What conditions do you bring into leadership?
⚉ OTHERS
How do you build and keep the trust that deep connection needs?
✦ SYSTEM
How do you architect a team that stays responsive and adaptive?
The Team Next Engagement
True transformation requires continuity and consistency, which is why this program is only offered at a minimum of six months. A typical TeamNext engagement works like this:
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1–4 weeks
Interviews across the team, one to one, and a look at how you work when you are actually working rather than describing yourselves. It comes back as a read on all four levers plus your values and agreements: what is holding, what has come loose, and what is underneath it.
It ends with the next set of questions, one per lever, pointed at the function you are becoming: What do our rituals need to be for the work ahead. Who decides what now. What rhythm can this actually sustain. What will people need permission to do.
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Two days, in person
Four things, built by the team rather than handed to it. Values, named as the ones actually in play. Purpose, in words the team would use with each other rather than with the board. Agreements, specific enough that anyone can tell when one has been broken. And shared language, so the agreements mean the same thing to everyone holding them.
This is not a warm-up. It is what creates enough safety for people to say true things quickly, which is the only way a team moves at any speed.
It is built into the engagement and not sold separately, because a foundation nobody builds on is just a nice offsite.
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Straight after foundations
What does this team look like two years from now, and what changes this month because of that? A team that has just agreed how it works together is in the best possible state to answer it honestly.
This is also where the permissions question gets asked out loud, because a picture stays vague when a leader is not sure they are allowed to commit to it.
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The long middle
Fortnightly coaching impulses that work as accountability blocks, where the team practises what it said it wanted to be doing. Quarterly deeper sessions for whatever needs real coaching rather than a check-in. Sponsor checkpoints run alongside. Individual coaching for team members can be added.
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Two days, in person
Honest stock of what held and what did not, and the rituals handed fully back to the team. What should stay behind is not a set of behaviours. It is a foundation the team knows how to rewrite when things change again, and that new people inherit as the way things are done here.
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HOW WE SCOPE
The diagnostic is priced on its own. The engagement is scoped by phase, with the embedded phase on a monthly retainer, because what you are buying there is someone held in the team's rhythm rather than a set of sessions.
Additional cohorts, repeat sessions and new audiences are scoped separately.
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WORKING WITH THE SPONSOR
We contract three ways at the start: with you, with the team leader, and openly with the team about what this is.
You see themes and movement. You never see who said what. That boundary is the reason the team tells me anything useful, and it is not negotiable.
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WHAT COACHING IS & IS NOT
Coaching is a collaborative and co-creative process between the coach and the team/individual. I do not advise on organizational design or personnel decisions. I do not provide mediation unless it is specifically contracted separately. I also do not provide performance management by proxy.
I will raise any grey zones as they come up in accordance with the ICF Code of Ethics and Code of Conduct.
✦ SYSTEM
The Lab touches your values and agreements but does not build them, which is a real limit when the room is a mixed cohort rather than one team. You leave with a draft, and agreements need the people they bind. You can buy the Lab on its own and run with what you build, or take it as the opening phase of Team Next and carry straight on. That decision is yours to make afterwards, not before.
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Because the work has moved faster than anyone could renegotiate how you work together, and the agreements you are still running on were written for a different job.
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Leaders diagnosing their own function, and leadership teams who each need to read theirs. Running it with several functions in one room is the strongest version, because people see each other's patterns.
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A live diagnostic rather than a course. We start with individuals, because a team is people before it is a system and the differences are the material. Then we read the pattern actually running, and draft the four levers against it: rituals, roles, rhythms and permission giving.
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Pre-work · two days in person · an individual needs read · a first draft of the four levers for your team · six weeks of integration. Run with an intact team, individual coaching can follow on what people built.
“Wow! You nailed it, Carrie! I had a vision about bringing my team together, but you took us to an even more inspiring place.”
— Marketing leader, Zurich