Independent team check-ins
Run independent, conversational check-ins to build on solid ground, and see where work stands and how to move forward well.
How it works
What a report looks like
Eight people on the same sales team gave their own account, separately. Here is what came back.
Nine of the twelve live deals are with somebody who cannot sign, at a tenth of the size the quarter was planned on.
Surfaced at check-in 3 of 6. The next time it would have come up on its own is the end-of-quarter number, when the meeting count will still look healthy.Each person's own account of their own work. Nobody is describing anybody else.
The new CRM went live in week two. The team is on it.Kofi, sales operations
Still working in the old sheet and entering everything twice. Three of them describe it as the reason their admin has doubled.
Dan, Rachel, Naomi and YusufWhich buyer can actually sign, and who owns turning a finished pilot into a paid contract?
A new chief executive, the outgoing one, the board chair and a programme lead each gave their own account, separately.
Two of the three things you started apart on have closed. The third is about money and has not moved.
Both closed in the session after they surfaced. Neither was raised in a meeting first.What exactly does the grant require each month, per site rather than across the network, and who is accountable for the two sites that have filed nothing?
Fourteen field officers in fourteen districts, who have never met, each gave their own account.
Nine of the fourteen described the escalation rule the same wrong way. That is the induction, not the people.
Fourteen accounts given separately, in fourteen districts, by people who have never met. One briefing produced all nine.What does a stock-out require, in one sentence every officer can repeat, and who do they call? The three districts out of kits are waiting on that answer.
Tobi joined as a delivery lead. His manager, a colleague who works alongside him, and Tobi each gave their own account, separately.
He is hitting the only target anybody gave him, and it is not the one he is being judged against.
Week seven of twelve. Nothing in the record has pointed at the ninety-day goal yet, and nothing has told him to.Which of the two is he being measured on for the rest of the ninety days, and what changes in his week if the answer is judgement rather than the queue?
An extract from a shared report, as the person running it sees it. The people in it read this same shared picture. It quotes what people said about their own work, and it never says who said what about whom.
Nobody was hiding anything.
Nobody had the whole picture.
Why leaders miss problems
As the company grows you stop seeing the work yourself. You rely on meetings, written updates, chat, and the managers between you and the people doing it. Each of those is someone's summary, and every summary leaves something out.
Some people dominate meetings. Some avoid conflict. Some do not feel safe challenging a decision. So the account you get is shaped by who is confident, who was in the room, and what they think you want to hear. Someone explains it brilliantly and delivers poorly. Someone else quietly does excellent work nobody records. Most people are simply trying to do a good job.
The result is not a shortage of information. It is that everyone believes they are talking about the same thing, and nobody has checked.
If you are the one being checked in on
Your account carries the same weight whether or not you were in the room, and whether or not you got to anybody first.
Fairness here is not a value on a wall. It is how the questions get asked, and a team that trusts how it is asked argues about the work instead of about who said what.
Your answers do not go sideways.
What you say about your own work can appear, in your own words. What you say about anybody else never does, and the report never says who said what about whom. That is why people tell the truth in it, and why the reports are worth reading.
Nobody can speak for you. Your check-in is read and synthesized by a language model, not by a person: not by us, and not by whoever brought your team here. Leaders get the report. They cannot request an individual's check-in, and there is no screen anywhere that shows one, including ours.
Your first 10 check-ins are free, for teams of 5 or fewer. Each takes about ten minutes.