Insights
Being Liked Won't Carry Your Team Through Change. Trust Will.
Dennis Richter is the Chief Business and People Officer at Fullscript, a billion-dollar healthcare platform, with prior leadership roles at Meta, Google, Deloitte, and 12 years in the Army. In this episode of Herding Squirrels, Dennis explains why people aren’t actually tired of change. They’re tired of change that feels disconnected, unfinished, or poorly explained. He shares why information travels down an organization far faster than it travels up, what a live town hall teaches that a scripted one can’t, and why the people holding your company together rarely show up as critical on the org chart. If you’re leading a team through change and wondering what isn’t reaching you, this conversation gives you practical ways to get the real story sooner.
M&A Is Financial. Integration Is Human.
Sachin Gulati is an M&A integration leader at HP with almost 14 years of deal experience across HP, Google, and management consulting. In this episode of Herding Squirrels, Sachin explains why M&A gets sold as a financial transaction but wins or loses as a human transition, and why even a good playbook only gets you 50 to 60 percent of the way there. He shares the three things he listens for on day one (fear, pride, and uncertainty) and the three habits that build employee trust during a merger. If you're leading a team through an acquisition, a divestiture, or any big organizational change, you'll leave with the conversations to stop avoiding and a way to make change painful but predictable.
Why First-Time PE Acquisitions Fail
In this episode of Herding Squirrels, Kit breaks down why roughly 80 percent of founder led companies acquired by private equity for the first time go off the rails, and the five specific failure points that cause it. If you're leading a team through a PE acquisition, a board transition, or any high stakes change, this conversation gives you the exact questions to ask and the timeline to ask them on.
Why "Don't Bring Me Problems" Trains Your Team to Go Silent
The "bring me solutions, not problems" rule feels efficient. It actually trains your team into silence. Here's why the signal disappears and how to fix it.
How to Write Team Working Agreements That Don't Become Posters
You know the arc. Someone schedules the session, sticky notes go up, the agreements get posted on a wiki page. Three months later somebody breaks one and the room kind of looks around. Most working agreements get written one of two ways, and both ways break. There is a third structure that holds up, and most teams have never tried it.
Your Teams Don't Have a Personality Problem
Every organization has the same fight. Sales thinks engineering is inflexible. Engineering thinks sales is reckless. Product thinks everyone is slow. But the personality labels are a symptom, not the cause. The real problem is that no one ever named the shared goal that makes all their individual goals matter.
Why Team Building Doesn't Work
Just like treating my knee pain with ice and rest didn't address the piriformis muscle issue, team building activities that focus on surface-level bonding rarely address the deeper systemic problems affecting your team's performance.
The symptoms aren't always obvious. You have to dig into the cultural systems that exist to get at the root cause - or more likely, multiple root causes working together.
Team Performance Systems: Building High-Performing Teams That Deliver Results
Team performance isn't about working harder—it's about working smarter together. Research shows that teams with effective performance systems are 25% more productive and deliver 2.7X more value than those without structured approaches. Yet most organizations struggle to move beyond surface-level team building to create lasting performance improvements.
The Power of a Spotter in Team Meetings
By appointing a “spotter” in your team meetings—someone whose sole responsibility is to observe body language and verbal cues—you can ensure that these often-overlooked signals are captured and addressed in real-time. This role can help unearth key insights and balance the extrovert/introvert equation, ensuring everyone's perspectives are considered.i
The Human Communication System in Teams
Using this as a mental model makes it easy to see why and how communication breakdowns happen, especially in teams.
For this post, I'll dig specifically into the system itself, applying the 5 stages of a communication system to people, and then extract how this impacts people and teams in various scenarios. Once you see how the system is easily applied, you'll be able to deconstruct communication challenges in a new and simpler way.
Hierarchy of Communication Challenges: Unveiling the Layers
Effective communication is often cited as the cornerstone of successful organizations. However, communication issues are typically symptoms of deeper, underlying challenges. By understanding these layers hierarchically, companies can pinpoint where true communication challenges lie and address them more effectively. Let's explore this hierarchy and uncover the root causes of communication breakdowns.
Communication: The Heartbeat of High Performing Teams
When we speak of organizational development and success, communication consistently emerges as the cornerstone. The mission to build high performing teams hinges profoundly on effective, transparent communication.