🔥 5 Minutes of Leadership Fuel
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🫶 A Dose of Inspiration
While successful culture can look and feel like magic, the truth is that it’s not. Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.
— Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code
We’ve all seen it… the team that just clicks. Meetings that move. Hard conversations that land. People who genuinely love doing the work together. From the outside, it can look like they simply got lucky with the right mix of people.
I’ve been part of teams like that, and it was never luck. It was the steady, everyday work of getting clear on who we are, where we’re headed, and how we’ll treat each other along the way… and then living it, again and again.
That’s the good news in Coyle’s words. If culture is something we do, it’s something we can build. And it usually starts just below the surface.
📥 Download the quote graphic to use in your next staff email or meeting.
🤓 A Dose of Learning
Most leaders I know are excellent problem solvers. So when a team starts to struggle, we’re quick to name the problem… these two don’t get along, that one isn’t pulling their weight, this group just doesn’t gel. It’s a people problem.
Molly Graham would gently suggest we look again.
On a recent episode of WorkLife, Molly walks through the Waterline Model, a diagnostic tool developed by organizational psychologist Roger Harrison back in 1970. She first learned it while leading 75-day wilderness expeditions for the National Outdoor Leadership School, where a team that isn’t working falls apart fast… and there’s no hiding it.. She’s been using it ever since.
Picture your team as a boat headed toward a destination. Maybe you’re rowing in circles. Maybe you’re fighting choppy water. Either way, nobody can say why. Either way, nobody can say why.
The Waterline Model asks one question: what’s happening below the surface? Then it gives you four layers to check, in order, with a motto I can’t stop repeating… snorkel before you scuba.
🤿 Structure: Just below the surface. Vision, goals, roles, and expectations… the things that tell people what they’re doing, why it matters, and what good looks like. Molly says this is where a huge share of team problems actually live.
This one has my whole heart. In my experience, I’ve yet to come across a team with strong, shared clarity around its mission, vision, core values, and goals that wasn’t thriving… both in results and in how much people enjoy doing the work together. If you want to dig into building and nurturing those foundations, my organizational pillars series walks through each one.
🤿 Dynamics: The norms people actually experience day to day, not the ones written down. Who really makes the decisions? What gets rewarded? What happens when someone takes a risk and it doesn’t land? Teams adapt quickly to the signals leaders send.
Core values are the fascinating one here… they live on both sides of this line. Written down, they’re structure. Lived out loud every day, they become your dynamics. It’s the difference between values on a poster and values in a culture. #ohyeah
🤿 Interpersonal: Two people who don’t trust each other. This is real and worth addressing directly… but it’s often downstream of unclear roles or shaky dynamics up above.
🤿 Individual: Only after the first three layers are sound do we ask whether someone is the right fit for the role as it exists today. Molly’s tell: if you’ve cycled through two people in the same seat and gotten the same result, it probably isn’t the people.
That’s the invitation of this model… start at the top. Before we decide someone is the problem, we owe it to them (and to ourselves) to make sure the boat is pointed somewhere clear.
🎧 Listen to the podcast episode here: WorkLife: Diagnose Your Team’s Problems with the Waterline Model
🌀 A Dose of Action
Ready to snorkel? Molly offers a simple structure check. It’s the same one she used when she stepped in to lead a struggling marketing team that everyone assumed had a people problem.
Ask each person on your team, one at a time, to answer these four questions:
- Do you know what our organization’s goals are?
- Do you know why those are the goals and what the bigger vision is?
- How do you think our team fits into that? What piece do we own, and what are our goals?
- What is your role, and what do you think success looks like in that role?
Then lay the answers side by side. If they line up, you have structural clarity… and Molly would say you’re already ahead of 90% of leaders out there. If they’re all over the map, don’t worry. You just found your starting point.
You got this. Let’s lead with belief.
In your corner,
Melody
Founder, Culture of Belief
P.S. Just doing my part to save the planet… ♻️😂
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