Leadership Academy — Session 2: Personal Commitments, Team Operating Rhythm, and SBI Feedback
Turning the leadership/management distinction into personal commitments, a deliberate rhythm of team touchpoints, and a real structure for 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)
From the pre-reading: a fuller 1:1 cadence, and a reframe of “operating rhythm”
Leadership trainer Heather Elkington teaches a four-tier version of this same idea, worth layering onto the table above rather than replacing it: a fortnightly 30-minute 1:1 with no agenda at all — just held space for whatever’s important that week — a deeper 90-day check-in where both sides prepare written answers in advance, an annual salary/career review kept deliberately separate from day-to-day performance talk (the employee brings a written case of their wins beforehand), and daily, un-ignored praise or course-correction in the moment. Her sharpest rule: the leader can never be the one to cancel the 1:1 — the team member may, but never you, because cancelling it as the leader is the clearest possible signal about what actually matters. She also names three ways 1:1s quietly fail: they slide into a status update, the leader assumes the report’s priorities mirror their own (you want them promoted, they want less on their plate right now), or “my door is always open” gets treated as real access when people don’t want to feel like they’re “bothering” you. (Heather Elkington — How to Run Successful 1-on-1s)
Separately, Petrous Leadership’s material on “Operational Rhythm” reframes the whole idea usefully: it’s not just a personal calendar habit, it’s a strategy-execution mechanism that should cascade through an entire organization — covering five recurring activities (planning, communication, decision-making, performance, and pivots) happening at the right time, in a coordinated way, at every level. Worth holding as the “why this matters beyond your own 1:1s” version of the table above. (Petrous Leadership)
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.
From the pre-reading — a different model worth contrasting: the assigned videos also included the well-known Manager Tools Feedback Model, which isn’t the same tool as SBI even though it looks similar on the surface. Its four steps: ask permission (“may I give you some feedback?” — and a “no” has to be honored), describe the specific behaviour observed, describe the impact, then ask for next steps — for positive feedback, “good work, keep it up”; for negative feedback, an open question like “what could you do differently next time?” rather than a directive. The difference that matters: SBI stops at Impact and lets a pause do the work of surfacing the other person’s reaction; Manager Tools adds a consent-gate at the front and explicitly hands the “what changes” question back to the other person at the end, rather than the giver prescribing it. Worth knowing both exist rather than treating either as the one true feedback model. (Manager Tools)
One more line worth keeping, from a Chick-fil-A leadership session also in this week’s pre-reading: “great leaders see and invest in employees as whole persons.” It’s a one-liner, but it’s the same idea the Weekly 1:1 table above is built around — the 1:1 is for the person, not the project. (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.
Previous: Session 1 — Management vs. Leadership, and the Trust Equation · Next: Session 3 — Psychological Safety, Stakeholders, and Managing Expectations
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