Olivia: Jackson, I have a five-word review for you. Ready? Jackson: Oh, I was born ready. Hit me. Olivia: Okay. The book we’re discussing today: “Your team isn’t broken, just… badly assembled.” Jackson: Ha! Okay, my five words: “Stop blaming people, fix things.” I like it. It’s got that IKEA instruction manual vibe, but for managers. Olivia: It’s surprisingly accurate. We’re talking about a book that was named one of the Top 30 Business Books of 2014, and it tackles a massive, expensive problem. A Gallup poll found that 70% of American employees are disengaged at work. Seventy percent! That costs the economy up to half a trillion dollars a year. Jackson: Half a trillion. That’s a number so big it doesn't even feel real. And we usually blame the people, right? We say they’re quiet quitting, they’re lazy, they lack motivation. Olivia: Exactly. But what if the problem isn't the people at all? What if our workplaces are perfectly designed to produce that exact result: disengagement? Jackson: Okay, now that is a spicy take. I’m listening. Olivia: And that’s the core question behind A Team of Leaders: Empowering Every Member to Take Ownership, Demonstrate Initiative, and Deliver Results by Paul Gustavson and Stewart Liff. What's fascinating is the pairing of the authors. Gustavson is a deep-systems organizational design expert from BYU, and Liff comes from the trenches of government management, turning around struggling agencies. It’s this blend of high-level theory and boots-on-the-ground practice that makes their approach so potent. Jackson: Theory meets reality. I like that. So, ‘designing leaders’ sounds great, but it also sounds incredibly abstract. Where does a team even begin?

Olivia: It begins with understanding that teams, like people, grow up. The authors lay out a Five-Stage Team Development Model, which is their roadmap for this entire process. And it’s not about finding people with ‘leadership personalities.’ It’s about creating the conditions for a team to mature into a state of leadership. Jackson: I’m familiar with the classic 'Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing' model. Is this just a new spin on that? What makes this different? Olivia: It’s a great question. While it shares the idea of stages, the focus is entirely different. It’s not about resolving conflict to get to performance. It’s about the gradual transfer of ownership and responsibility from the supervisor to the team. It’s about who holds the power. Jackson: Okay, that’s a clearer distinction. Power and ownership. Olivia: Let me make it real with one of their best examples: a college football Special Teams Unit. At Stage One, the coach is a dictator. He scripts every play, reviews all the film, and makes every decision. The players just execute. They are, in a word, followers. Jackson: Right. The coach is the brain, the players are the body. I get that. Olivia: Then, in Stage Two, the coach starts to let go a little. He has the players watch the film with him. They start giving input, pointing out what they see. They begin to take responsibility for following up with each other, but the coach still leads the meetings and sets the priorities. Jackson: So they’re starting to use their own eyes, not just the coach’s. They’re becoming analysts. Olivia: Precisely. Then comes Stage Three. The coach selects Special Teams Captains. These captains start taking over training for new players, they help manage performance. The coach is still there to help, but the leadership is now being distributed. It’s not just one person anymore. Jackson: The power is decentralizing. The captains are becoming middle-managers, in a sense. Olivia: And by Stage Four, those captains fully own the priorities. They run the performance reviews. The players are motivating each other. The coach is now more of an overseer, a mentor. And finally, you hit Stage Five. The team is so good, it consistently exceeds its goals. The role of captain rotates among the members. The team fully owns everything: selecting new members, deciding who plays, managing their own training. The coach is now just an advisor, free to focus on scouting the next opponent. Jackson: Wow. So the team becomes its own coach. They’ve evolved from followers to owners. That’s a powerful analogy. But a football team is a high-stakes, clear-goal environment. Does this really work in a typical, messy office setting, say, in a government agency? Olivia: That is the perfect question, because one of the most powerful examples in the book is from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs New York Regional Office, the NYRO. In the early 90s, it was a classic government assembly line, drowning in paperwork and bureaucracy. Veterans’ claims took forever, and no one owned the process. Jackson: I can picture it. A sea of beige cubicles and lost forms. Olivia: Exactly. But a new director, Joe Thompson, came in and applied these same principles. He broke down the assembly line and created teams. He turned supervisors into coaches. And he gave each team ownership of a veteran's claim from start to finish. They went from Stage One drudgery to a Stage Four, nearly Stage Five, powerhouse. They even won a national award for reinventing government. It proves the model isn't just for sports teams; it's for any team that wants to grow up.

Olivia: And the reason it worked at the VA, and in that football team, comes back to the book's most provocative idea: Teams are perfectly designed to get the results they get. Jackson: Whoa, that's a bold statement. It feels a little like blaming the victim. If my team is underperforming, you're saying I designed it to fail? Olivia: It's not about blame, it's about diagnosis. The authors argue that a team's results are the direct output of its underlying design—its systems, its reward structures, its communication patterns. If you don't like the results, you have to change the design. Jackson: So it’s not that the people are bad, it’s that the machine they’re in is built to produce a bad product. Olivia: Exactly. And they tell this incredible, cautionary tale about a large organization that wanted to improve both productivity and quality. Senior management gave speeches about quality being their number one priority. "Quality is our North Star!" they'd say. Jackson: I think I've heard that speech. It usually comes with a stock photo of a compass. Olivia: (laughing) It probably did! But in their weekly meetings, all they talked about was productivity. How many units did you ship? How many cases did you close? The reward systems, the bonuses, everything was tied to pure output. Quality was an afterthought in practice. Jackson: Actions speak louder than words. Or in this case, spreadsheets speak louder than speeches. Olivia: You nailed it. At the end of the year, the team with the highest productivity numbers—but the second-lowest quality scores—received a massive bonus. The message to every single employee was crystal clear: management doesn't actually care about quality, they only care about speed. Jackson: Oh, that's a gut punch. The trust would just evaporate. You can't recover from that easily. Olivia: It took them years. Because the team wasn't broken; it was perfectly designed to prioritize speed over quality. The system worked exactly as it was built. This is what the authors mean by alignment. If you want a team of leaders who take initiative, you have to design every system—from hiring to rewards to meetings—to support that outcome. Jackson: Okay, that makes so much sense. We say we want innovation, but we only reward hitting existing targets. So the 'design' is the reward system, not just the org chart. Olivia: It’s the entire invisible architecture of work. And the authors argue the most important part of that architecture, the foundation of it all, is a shared sense of purpose. They have this great quote: "Nobody jumps out of bed and runs to work and says, 'Thank goodness I work for a cost center.'" Jackson: (laughs) Definitely not. No one says, "I can't wait to maximize shareholder value today!" Olivia: Right! People want to believe their work has meaning. And when you design a team around a clear, compelling purpose, you unlock that human need. That's the engine that drives a team through the five stages.

Jackson: So we have the stages of evolution—the roadmap. And we have the design principles—the vehicle. But how do you make this stick? How do you keep that purpose and those goals from just becoming another memo that gets ignored? Olivia: This is my favorite part of the book, and it's where co-author Stewart Liff's practical, on-the-ground experience really shines. They call it Visual Management. Jackson: Visual management? That sounds like corporate jargon for putting up motivational posters. "Hang in there, kitty!" Olivia: (laughing) That's what everyone thinks! And the authors know it. They say people's first reaction is, "Why are we spending time on an interior decoration program?" But they describe it as a combination of a NASA war room and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a dash of Vegas glitz. Jackson: Okay, NASA war room plus the Met. That is a much better image than a cat on a branch. Olivia: The best story is how it started at the VA's Los Angeles Regional Office, or LARO. This was another struggling office. Stew Liff took over as director, and the place was, in his words, "shoddy, unkempt, and unprofessional." Morale was in the basement. Jackson: Sounds like a place where hope goes to die. Olivia: Completely. So, what did he do? He started by redesigning the physical space. He hung up historical photographs depicting the veteran's experience. He created a virtual museum of veterans' benefits right there in the office. He put up displays celebrating employee accomplishments. And, crucially, he put performance data on big, public monitors for everyone to see. Jackson: So he made the mission visible. He was reminding them every single day who they were serving. And at the same time, he was making their performance transparent. Olivia: He made it inescapable. There was a "war room" for performance meetings. He moved file cabinets away from the windows so employees could have natural light. He even moved his own desk out into the open, in the center of the team, to signal that his role was support, not dominance. Jackson: That's a huge move. Taking the corner office and putting it in the middle of the chaos. Olivia: And the results were staggering. The overall grant rate for veterans increased by 50 percent. The customer satisfaction rate went up by 37 percent. The number of veterans they helped rehabilitate went up by 600 percent. They went from being one of the worst-performing offices to winning national awards. Jackson: Wow. So it's not about decoration, it's about making the mission and the metrics unavoidable. You're literally surrounding people with the 'why' and the 'how' of their work. It's environmental design for the mind.

Olivia: Exactly. And that's how all three pieces of the book lock together. You guide a team through the five stages of development by intentionally designing the systems—the rewards, the roles, the purpose—that foster ownership. And then, you make that design permanent and tangible through visual management. Jackson: So the book is arguing that leadership isn't some abstract quality you just hope to hire. It's an outcome you build. You create an environment where leadership becomes the most logical, natural behavior for everyone. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the authors say. Olivia: Precisely. You design the conditions for leadership to emerge. And in a world where, as we said, 70% of people are checked out from their jobs, creating an environment where people feel like valued leaders isn't just good for the bottom line. It's a profoundly human thing to do. It makes work meaningful again. Jackson: It’s about building a better machine, not just demanding more from the people inside it. I’m thinking about my own workspace now. I’m not sure if it’s a NASA war room or a DMV waiting room. Olivia: (laughing) That’s a great question for our listeners. Take a look around your own office or workspace. What message is it sending? Does it inspire leadership, or just… waiting? We'd love to hear your thoughts on our social channels. Jackson: Let us know. We’re genuinely curious. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.