A seven-person leadership team inside an information management business came together for a two-day residential. Day one tackled the live strategic decisions that needed the team's collective head, vendor renewals, property portfolio, margin pressure. Day two used the First Team Principle to do the harder work, shifting the team from a group of leaders running their own functions to a leadership team that owned the business together.
The team carried two kinds of pressure into the room. The strategic pressure was concrete and time-bound. Vendor and supplier contract renewals coming up. A 13-site UK and Ireland property portfolio that needed a clear strategic answer. Margin pressure across the business unit. Day one needed to move those decisions forward.
The team dynamic pressure was less visible but more consequential. The seven leaders were running their functions well but operating as a group of leaders rather than a leadership team. Communication between departments was siloed and defensive when it needed to be open and trusting. The brief for day two was to address that explicitly.
Pre-work was structured and not optional. Each leader completed a team scorecard ahead of the residential, mandatory for participation, and brought a user manual one-pager on the day. The user manual is a short, practical document: how I work best, where I struggle, what I value, what wears me out. The scorecards gave me a baseline. The user manuals gave the team something concrete to share on day two.
Day one was strategy. I worked the team through the budget, the vendor and supplier decisions, and the property portfolio. External facilitation was used to accelerate the decision-making and prevent circular discussions, the pattern the HR lead had flagged as one of the reasons external facilitation was needed in the first place. The day closed with a First Team Principles refresher that bridged into day two.
Day two opened with a roller coaster check-in exercise, using day one as the metaphor: where were the peaks, where were the dips, what did each leader notice about how the team had worked together under decision pressure. From there into the user manuals, shared in pairs and then back to the group, and then into the First Team Principle proper: your primary team is the one at this table, not the one that reports to you. That principle is straightforward to state and difficult to live. The day's work was making it real for the seven people in the room.
The afternoon turned to team dependency mapping. Who needs what from whom, where does the friction sit, what are the cross-functional conversations the team has been avoiding. I closed the day with commitments written down by each leader, signed off in the room.
The strategic outputs from day one are owned by the team and will land over the coming quarter. Vendor renewals positioned to be re-bid or re-negotiated rather than auto-renewed. A direction of travel on the property portfolio. A shared read on where margin can be protected without compromising the parts of the operation that drive retention.
The day-two outputs are softer and harder to measure but more durable. The user manuals are now in circulation as a team artefact, used in one-to-ones and onboarding. Team dependency mapping surfaced specific cross-functional conversations that needed to happen, each with a named owner and a deadline.
The First Team Principle is the most useful idea I know for leadership teams that have drifted into operating as a group of functional heads. It is also one of the hardest principles to embed. Stating it in a room is straightforward. Living it on a Tuesday morning, when your direct reports need something and the leadership team meeting feels less urgent than your function, is the test.
The reason a two-day residential works for this shift is that day one gives the team a shared experience of doing real work together under decision pressure. That experience is the raw material day two builds on. Without the strategic day, the team dynamics work risks feeling abstract. Without the team dynamics day, the strategic work risks failing to stick.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
