Management Team Effectiveness
Your growth plan is only as strong as the team that runs it.
Most scale-up management teams grew rather than being designed: founders, early hires and senior people from outside. Strong individuals at one table, not yet one team. And your growth plan depends on exactly that team. Over six to twelve months, we turn them into a management team that decides, disagrees and delivers together.
What it looks like and what sits underneath
Patterns we often see in management teams. None of them mean the team is weak. They point to habits that formed without anyone choosing them, rather than ways of working that were set on purpose. Left alone, these habits harden, and every person you hire learns them too.
What it looks like:
The founding team became a formal management team, but key decisions still go through the founders.
What often sits underneath:
For Founders letting go feels like losing grip on the company they built and the team has learned it’s safer to wait for key decisions than to decide themselves.
What it looks like:
Conflict is avoided in the room and resolved, or not, in the corridor.
What often sits underneath:
Early loyalty makes open disagreement feel like betrayal. So the real conversations happen one-to-one, and the team never builds the trust to have them together.
What it looks like:
Management team meetings are updates, not decisions working towards growth goals.
What often sits underneath:
Reporting feels safe while full transparency does not. Deciding together means disagreeing in the open, and the team hasn’t learned to do that yet.
How it works
An effective MT ready for growth, in six to twelve months
Step 1
Diagnosis and design
We start with a Growth Assessment as the diagnosis, and an individual conversation with every member of the team. The trajectory is built around what we find, not around a standard curriculum.
Step 2
In-depth MT sessions
Half or full days with the management team. We build the capabilities needed to carry your growth plan, including trust and accountability, as well as open conflict, shared decisions and follow-through. Sessions go into the underlying patterns that run the team: that is where change starts, and where it lasts.
Step 3
Executive coaching in parallel
Every team member gets individual coaching on the same rhythm. The room surfaces the pattern; the individual sessions do the work on it. That is what makes the team work last.
Where the change needs to reach the wider organisation, we add culture transformation.
Results
Leaders who know their own strengths, patterns and pitfalls, and lead deliberately rather than by default.
A management team that decides together and holds each other accountable.
Founders who have genuinely let go; and a team that has genuinely stepped up.
Feedback that flows in every direction, including to the founders, before small issues become expensive ones.
A leadership team that can carry the next funding round and what it demands.
Format
6, 9 or 12 months, depending on what the situation needs.
Team session every four weeks, coaching for each member on the same cadence.
Optionally combined with cultural transformation and/or leadership development.
Proposal based on the size of your team and the length of the trajectory.
What this looks like in practice
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Healthcare · Series A · 35 FTE
Situation — A healthcare startup was transitioning from an informal structure to a management team. The founders struggled to delegate, new leaders lacked clarity on roles and decision-making authority.
What we did — 9-month engagement on 2 layers: Founder Coaching and MT Effectiveness. Accountability and decision-right rebuilt from the ground up.
Result — A cohesive MT with clear accountability. Founders freed to focus on strategy and growth. -
Cleantech · Series B · 90 FTE
Situation — Post-round: silos, misalignment, inconsistent execution. The startup culture was no longer fit for the performance demands of the next phase.
What we did — Growth Assessment revealed e.g. a ‘Warmth Trap’ and a ‘Reliability Gap.’ Culture trajectory rebuilt values as behaviours and established new accountability rituals.
Result — Reinvigorated culture and cross-functional collaboration as the company launched a new product and entered a new market. -
SaaS · Series A · 65 FTE
Situation — Everything flowed through the founder. Mid-level managers lacked the confidence, tools, and authority to lead independently.
What we did — Founder coaching on genuine delegation combined with a leadership program for the middle layer. Explicit KPIs and accountability structures at every level.
Result — Faster decisions, stronger accountability, a leadership layer that no longer needed the founder in every room.
Who you’ll work with
Senior practitioners, each with a different lens on the same room.
Anna Dia Adriani
Experienced COO · Executive Coach · Corporate Anthropologist
Experienced scale-up leader who has been in your shoes. Brings a systemic lens: the patterns between people and the unwritten rules of how a company and team functions.
Laurie Kemp
Psychotherapist · Entrepreneur · Facilitator
A trained psychotherapist with a decade designing leadership programs for Founders, MTs and scale-ups. Sees the behavioural patterns limiting a team before leaders can name them themselves.
Neena Madhok
Executive Coach & Facilitator • ICF Master Certified Coach
Over a decade of startup and scale-up experience and a background in investment banking. Done 4,000+ coaching hours and nearly 1,000 workshops on team and group dynamics.
Learn more about the team.
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Willem Herter of Wouter Kroese
Founder & CEO Pacmed
Get started
Is your team ready for what’s next?
Each trajectory starts with a Growth Assessment, so we work on the right things from day one.