The Who is about intentionally building the right team, the one that aligns not just with your vision but with the way you want to work and live. It’s about defining and living your core values, creating a culture that doesn’t just function, but flourishes. A culture where people feel both empowered and responsible, trusted and accountable.
This is more than just hiring for skill. It’s creating a high-trust culture where each person knows how they contribute to the future you’re building. It’s a deliberate shift from managing tasks to developing leaders, and from putting out fires to proactively shaping outcomes.
Core Values: The Living Framework of Culture
Too many businesses treat core values as branding statements. They treat them as phrases written on a wall but never truly embodied. In contrast, intentional businesses define core values as behavioral expectations, modeled first by the founder. These values are based on what actually matters and the way you want to work, relate, and grow.
Living your values means:
- Embedding them in hiring and onboarding
- Talking about them in 1:1s and team meetings
- Asking team members to define what the values mean to them and to give examples
- Celebrating actions that reflect them and and correcting misalignment early
Client-centricity, for example, doesn’t have to be a core value. But your core values should naturally produce a client-centered experience. Values drive behavior. Behavior shapes culture. Culture drives client outcomes.
Leadership Redefined
Leadership here is not defined by title or hierarchy. It is defined as:
Creating a future that would not otherwise exist, in a way that meets (or seeks to meet) the needs of all involved.
This definition promotes co-creation. It invites your team, and even your clients, into a shared future. It’s not about having all the answers. It’s about asking the right questions and holding space for others to contribute, lead, and grow.
Accountability Through Co-Creation
High-functioning teams don’t rely on micromanagement. They rely on shared ownership. That means:
- Co-creating agreements, not just assigning tasks
- Making sure expectations are clearly defined and mutually understood
- Revisiting agreements when needed—because adaptability is key to trust
Without this clarity, accountability becomes coercion. With it, accountability becomes a commitment.
Culture Built on Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose
People do their best work when they feel:
- Autonomy – they have control over how they work
- Mastery – they’re encouraged to improve and innovate
- Purpose – they see the impact of their work on others
These three elements are the foundation of true freedom, for both you and for your team.
If your company is the vehicle for your vision, then your team is the engine. But they won’t thrive on control and compliance. They thrive on ownership. That means building structures that support self-leadership, ongoing feedback, and clarity of expectations, especially through well-crafted agreements, not assumptions.
Agreements are how you build trust. They’re co-created, clearly defined, and include:
- What will be done
- By when
- Why it matters
- What success looks like
You hold people accountable to agreements, not assumptions or feelings. This applies equally to clients, team members, and yourself.
Building a Team That Manages Itself
You can’t scale if every decision runs through you. Your job is not to be the bottleneck. Your job is to build teams that lead themselves.
“Leaders don’t manage. They build teams of leaders that manage themselves.” – Dr. Benjamin Hardy
This is the hallmark of true freedom and high-leverage growth.
It requires:
- Coaching your team to think strategically, not just execute
- Giving them the tools to self-manage (clear KPIs, weekly tracking, open communication)
- Challenging them with meaningful work, not just routine tasks
Routine clients lead to complacency. Challenges drive excitement.
People grow when they’re trusted with real responsibility. Boring, repetitive work disengages your team and breeds turnover. But co-created challenges aligned with purpose? That’s what keeps people in flow.
Distributed Leadership and 10x Thinking
True scalability happens when leadership is distributed, not hoarded.
Let team members own outcomes, shape their roles, and even drive new strategic initiatives. Use the four capabilities of high-performing teams:
Relating – understanding others and creating cohesion
Sensemaking – interpreting complexity and taking aligned action
Visioning – connecting current work to a compelling future
Inventing – creating new ways of working to fulfill the vision
This creates a culture of intrapreneurship, where people think like owners and act like partners.
10x leaders don’t do it all. They focus on their unique ability and delegate the rest. They elevate others, co-create agreements, and measure performance based on output and impact, not hours clocked.
Practical Tactics to Build “The Who”
- Ask team members to identify their Unique Ability (UA) and design roles that align with it
- Replace time tracking with outcome-based metrics and clear agreements
- Have ongoing coaching conversations that explore both performance and experience
- Use rocks and drivers to align individuals with business goals, while also respecting personal growth
- Celebrate who each person is becoming, not just what they’re doing
The Win-Win: Client Experience + Team Culture
When your internal culture is values-aligned and trust-based, your client experience becomes seamless.
When your team knows how to lead themselves, they can lead clients too.
And when your business culture prioritizes growth, autonomy, and purpose, you create the conditions for long-term sustainability, without burning out the founder or the team.