Leadership Academy — Session 2: Personal Commitments, Team Operating Rhythm, and SBI Feedback

Part of the Leadership Academy series — notes from Exaze’s Leadership Academy, Batch 1.

From abstract to personal

Session one drew the line between management and leadership. Session two made it personal, opening with three reflection questions: what do I stand for as a leader, what will I change about how I lead starting this week, and what will I protect in my team regardless of pressure from above.

The answers people gave were reasonable on the surface — support the team no matter what, integrity, protect psychological safety — and each one got pushed on, which is where the real teaching sits.

The pushback that mattered

• “Support the team no matter what” is wrong as stated. You shield the team from external pressure and blame — but you still hold them accountable for doing the right things. If there’s a production incident, the answer isn’t “run.”
• Integrity and ethics aren’t personal certainties — they’re shared, and a team has to actually agree on them together rather than assume everyone already sees it the same way you do.
• Fairness means calling out underperformers, not just being pleasant to everyone. Letting someone coast while others carry the load is unfair to the people doing the work. Calling someone out privately and directly isn’t public shaming — it’s honesty: “you’re not cutting it.”

“A leader’s mindset is: if something isn’t working, how do I make it work. Wanting someone to just leave because they’re not working — that’s a manager’s mindset.”

Assignments

Two things were due this week: the Personal Leadership Reflection template (the same three questions, written down properly), and a harder prompt — what kind of leader does Exaze need right now? Not “visionary” or “transformational” — those are words, not actions. It has to be grounded in where the business actually is, the team it has, and specific behaviours that would move the needle in the next twelve months, including your own.

The framework: Team Operating Rhythm

A deliberately designed set of touchpoints a team needs to function — not the default Agile ceremonies by default, but four cadences chosen on purpose, each tied back to a piece of the Trust Equation.

Touchpoint	Frequency	What it’s FOR — and what it’s NOT for
Weekly 1:1	30 min · weekly, non-negotiable	FOR the team member’s own agenda, blockers, development, how they’re doing as a person. NOT for project status — if it’s become a status meeting, they’re not getting what they need from it.
Team Standup	15 min · daily (delivery) / 2x weekly minimum (functional)	FOR surfacing blockers only — did, doing, blocked. NOT for discussion or problem-solving; that happens elsewhere.
Monthly Check-in	60 min · monthly	FOR the bigger picture as a group — progress against goals, emerging patterns, what needs to change. NOT a replacement for 1:1s or standups, and deliberately done together so the message isn’t unevenly filtered through individual relationships.
Quarterly Review	2 hrs · quarterly	FOR reviewing the quarter honestly — wins, misses, next priorities. NOT individual performance management; that’s a separate conversation.

This applies to anyone you lead — not just formal direct reports. Mentees and people you train count too. The underlying purpose across all four is the same: building trust.

Example (illustrative — not from the session): A 1:1 that opens with “where are we on the migration?” is a status meeting wearing a 1:1’s time slot — that question belongs in standup. A 1:1 that opens with “what’s on your mind this week?” and only gets to project topics if the team member brings them up is doing what the touchpoint is actually for.

In the real world: the modern 1:1 traces back to Andy Grove at Intel, laid out in his book High Output Management. Grove is explicit that the meeting belongs to the subordinate, not the manager — they set the agenda, bring it in advance, and the manager’s job is to listen and probe rather than deliver updates. He specifies roughly an hour, long enough that “the subordinate must feel there is enough time to broach even a difficult topic.” (summary of Grove’s framework)

Stripe’s former COO Claire Hughes Johnson took this further and made it explicit: when she joined, she wrote and openly shared a personal “how to work with me” document covering exactly how she runs 1:1s and team meetings — including telling reports directly that she’s “not a micro-manager” and their job in a 1:1 is to argue things out with her, not report status. The practice spread through Stripe as other managers copied the format. (Stripe: Scaling People)

The framework: SBI feedback

Situation, Behaviour, Impact — a way to give feedback that describes what happened rather than who someone is.

Component	What it means	Not this / Yes this
Situation	The specific context — when and where.	NOT “you always do this.” YES “in yesterday’s 3pm client call…”
Behaviour	The observable fact, not your interpretation of it.	NOT “you were unprofessional.” YES “you interrupted the client twice while they were speaking.”
Impact	The concrete effect — on you, the team, the client, the outcome.	NOT “it was bad.” YES “the client visibly disengaged and we lost that information.”
Pause	Stop talking. Give space. Their reaction is data.	The step most people skip — and the one that surfaces context you didn’t have (the “bad” behaviour might have been invited by the client earlier).

SBI works both ways — it’s just as effective for praise as for criticism. It describes what already happened, never what might happen next — “don’t do that again in future” isn’t SBI, it’s a warning wearing SBI’s clothes.

Two more distinctions worth keeping: objective feedback is the leader’s mindset — you say what you believe genuinely needs improving. Subjective feedback is the manager’s or peer’s mindset — you only offer what was explicitly asked for. And when feedback keeps landing badly, the cause is often a channel mismatch, not a content problem — if it’s not working over chat, try a call; if it’s not working face to face, try writing it down.

Example (from the session — the reference card’s worked example)

• Critical: “In yesterday’s 3pm client call [S], you interrupted the client twice while they were speaking [B]. The client visibly disengaged after the second interruption and didn’t share their concern, which means we lost that information [I].” Then — pause.
• Positive: “In today’s session [S], you asked the question nobody else was willing to ask [B]. It opened up the whole conversation [I].”

In the real world: SBI isn’t a training-room invention — it comes from the Center for Creative Leadership, and their own published examples are close to what was taught in the session. CCL also extends it to “SBI-I” (adding Intent) for two-way conversations where the gap between what someone intended and the impact they actually had is the real issue — useful context for the difficult-conversations material coming up in session four. (CCL: SBI Feedback Model)

Assignment

Write one real piece of SBI feedback — a situation where you either gave feedback badly, or should have given it and didn’t.

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Previous: Session 1 — Management vs. Leadership, and the Trust Equation · Next: Session 3 — Psychological Safety, Stakeholders, and Managing Expectations

Sources:

• Lighthouse — summary of Andy Grove’s High Output Management
• Stripe Press — Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson
• Center for Creative Leadership — SBI Feedback Model