Most teams don't fail dramatically. They slow down. Work ships, progress gets reported, and nothing looks obviously wrong — but the team is no longer working on what matters. This is the most common way strong teams lose their edge, and it's the hardest pattern for leaders to see when they're in the middle of it.
This workshop puts you inside that problem and gives you two concrete leadership moves to address it.
We start with the same question asked across 30+ interviews with leaders at Netflix, NVIDIA, Datadog, Google, Apple, Coupang, and Anthropic: when you've had a team that was aligned, adapting, and really working on what mattered — what made the difference? You'll work through this in small groups, then flip to a harder question: given what you just described, what's missing on a team you're leading right now?
From there, we work through the two moves that showed up most consistently across those interviews. The first is making the stakes concrete — translating abstract strategy into something immediate enough that the team feels pulled toward the work instead of pushed. The second is shaping the team around the problem, not the org chart — including forming temporary teams across boundaries and giving clear ownership.
You'll leave with a specific diagnosis of where depth is missing on your own team and a plan for what to do about it. Drawn from 17 years leading engineering teams at Google and research for the book Activate: Go Deep. Move Fast.