Do people grow here? The four-pillar sheet

Goal. The sheet shows whether your company has the traits of places where people grow. You look at facts from the last 30 days, not at what you would like to think about yourself. At the end you choose one pillar and one move for the month.

In 15 minutes. (our estimate, not measured) To be honest: without conversations with the team you get your own picture of the business, not the team’s. The three questions to your people are left for the full version.

1. (6 min) For each of the 12 signals, write 0, 1 or 2. Can’t remember a situation from the last 30 days? Write 0. Add a situation only next to the lowest scores.
2. (2 min) Add up each pillar (at most 6) and find the weakest. If more than two pillars have 2 points or fewer, start with Truth.
3. (4 min) From “Ideas for moves,” choose one move for that pillar. Write who, starting when, and how you will know it worked.
4. (3 min) Write one line: “I decide that … Who … By when … I will check …”.

Instructions (full version) (estimate: 45 to 60 minutes, plus 3 short conversations; we have not measured this):

1. For each of the 12 signals, write a specific situation from the last 30 days. Can’t remember one? Write 0.
2. Score it: 0 = didn’t happen, 1 = once or by chance, 2 = regularly. Add up each pillar (at most 6).
3. Ask two or three people the three questions, one on one. Listen, and don’t get defensive.
4. Choose the weakest pillar. If more than two pillars have 2 points or fewer, start with Truth. Write down one move and a date to check it.

Template fields

Company: ____ · Number of people: ____ · Filled in by: ____ · Date: ____

Total: Truth __/6 · Challenge __/6 · No ceiling __/6 · Mistakes __/6

Three questions for the team (notes):

1. What should I stop doing so that you can work better?
2. What do you want to learn this year, and what gets in the way?
3. What don’t we say out loud in this company?

One move for 30 days: Pillar ____ · Move ____ · Who ____ · Starting ____ · We check (date and how we will know) ____

Ideas for moves: Truth: for two weeks, you only ask for criticism and say thank you. Challenge: give each person one task a little above their level and ask every week how it’s going. No ceiling: a conversation with each person about where they want to be in a year. Mistakes: on Fridays, five minutes of “my slip-up of the week”; you go first.

Fictional example (the firm and the numbers are fictional, for this template)

An accounting firm, 9 people. Filled in by the owner.

• Truth 4/6. Signal 2: “An accountant wrote to me right away that a client in construction wants to leave” (2).
• Challenge 3/6. Signal 5: “Two people learned the new payroll software, the rest didn’t” (1).
• No ceiling 3/6. Signal 8: “The assistant asked for her own clients in August and is still waiting” (0).
• Mistakes 1/6. Signal 10: “A client found the error in a tax return, not us” (0). Signal 12: “After a late payment to ZUS (Polish social insurance), we added a checklist” (1).

From the conversations: “The boss fixes our work without a word, so we don’t know what was wrong.”

Move: Mistakes. On Fridays, 10 minutes: everyone talks about one slip-up of the week and what they learned from it. I go first. A slip-up you report yourself is forgiven. We check in 30 days: how many slip-ups were reported by the people who made them, and what we changed.

From us. The pillars rest on books: on truth, Ray Dalio (Principles) describes open disagreement and a culture where it is okay to make mistakes but not okay to fail to learn from them, and Kim Scott (Radical Candor) supplies the question “what could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me”; Patrick Lencioni (The Five Dysfunctions of a Team) shows that the leader is the first to admit mistakes and that healthy conflict saves time. “Just right” tasks come from Daniel Pink (Drive), praising effort rather than talent from Carol Dweck (Mindset), and handing people ownership of results and talking about your own mistakes from Liz Wiseman (Multipliers). What we added are twelve signals from the last 30 days, three questions for the team and one move for the month.

When to call us.

• The Truth or Mistakes pillar scores 0 or 1, and you can see that people don’t tell you things straight.
• The conversations showed something you can’t change on your own, e.g. someone wants to leave or two people stopped talking to each other.
• After 30 days the same pillar is still the weakest.

The first call (30 minutes) is free. We will go through your result from the sheet.

Prompt for your AI. Paste it into your own ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini account; our own method, working from your company’s knowledge, is what we do in a Diagnosis.

You are a calm coach for the owner of a small business. Walk me through the
sheet “Do people grow here?”: one question at a time, wait for my answer.
At the start, remind me: “Do not paste passwords, account numbers or personal data.”
Ask me to paste the 12 signals from the table on this page, then ask about them
one by one: a score of 0 (didn’t happen), 1 (once or by chance) or 2 (regularly)
and one situation from the last 30 days.
Add up the four pillars (Truth, Challenge, No ceiling, Mistakes; at most 6 each)
and name the weakest. If more than two have 2 points or fewer, start with Truth.
If an answer is vague, ask for a number or an example. Never invent facts about
my business or team.
At the end, write one line: “I decide that … Who … By when … I will check …”.