The Biggest Team Performance Challenges

Cut a hundred million dollars. Thirty days. That was the mandate handed to Louise Francesconi and her leadership team. They assembled their best people, carved out a full day, asked everyone to present their contribution to the goal. The result? Painful. They weren't going to make it happen.

Then something shifted. Instead of asking "what will you cut?" they paired up and spent two hours asking entirely different questions: What do you really need help with? What could I do from my resources to help you save money—not cut yours, save yours?

Magic happened. They exceeded the hundred-million-dollar target. Not one person felt they had sacrificed. Because instead of protecting their own territory, they were thinking about what they could do to help each other succeed.

This webinar tackles the poll results that brought participants here: engagement (the clear winner), collaboration, and morale. But rather than treating these as problems to fix, Dave Moss reframes them as symptoms of a deeper issue—the "big empty space" that exists when we remain ignorant of others' needs, objectives, and challenges.

That ignorance isn't neutral. It's a black hole crushing galaxies. It's constantly communicating "you don't matter enough to me for me to take you into account." And then we wonder why engagement is low.

Two deceptively simple tools—Meet to Learn and Meet to Give—provide the mechanism for filling that empty space. Not through forced curiosity, but by creating environments where genuine curiosity can emerge. The goal isn't perfection. It's progress. And sometimes, as the Louise story demonstrates, progress looks like exceeding impossible targets because people finally started seeing each other.

Learning Objectives

1. Distinguish symptoms from problems—low engagement, collaboration, and morale are symptoms; the "big empty space" of ignorance about others is the problem
2. Recognize the "big empty space" as the result of indifference and ignorance when we fail to see others as worthy of curiosity and consideration
3. Apply Meet to Learn to fill knowledge gaps about colleagues' roles, objectives, challenges, headaches, and aspirations
4. Apply Meet to Give to identify how you may be creating drag for others and proactively remove it
5. Shift from fixing to improving—celebrate progress rather than waiting for perfection