When leaders create clarity, it helps direct reports connect their daily work to larger business objectives, giving employees a sense of purpose that unlocks momentum.
Patrick Moore, a director of engineering at dental software startup Dandy, believes that no one should experience a spike in blood pressure when giving or receiving feedback.
That’s why he strives to ensure that everyone who joins his team feels comfortable contributing their ideas, while encouraging a culture of positive reinforcement.
“I strive to set the tone that we have a safe and open space, and that without feedback, we are leaving tremendous opportunities for growth on the table,” Moore said.
Leadership habits like this one help create clarity, and put everyone on a clear path toward progress. At cloud storage provider Wasabi Technologies, Software Director Jeff Pace’s team relies on AI-generated weekly planning notes to understand the previous week’s accomplishment, tasks for the current week, areas that need to be followed up, and what they should prioritize.
“If something is important, it’s on that page,” Pace said.
Below, Moore, Pace and leaders from six other companies share their approach to creating clarity on their teams, how it’s reinforced through rituals and practices, and how it motivates their teams to drive progress.
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BAE Systems, Inc. specializes in building products for air, land and naval military forces in addition to developing solutions for use across a wide range of industries, including commercial transportation and aviation.
What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced weekly?
A hallmark of good management on my team is that we run decisions through three filters: put the work where it belongs; codify and document what we do so it is repeatable and teachable; and keep a business-focused perspective in the room.
These guiding principles matter because cyber assurance cannot operate in a vacuum. If assurance is disconnected from the business, it becomes a barrier. We reinforce those principles every week in how we review work, assign ownership, and make processes clearer and more scalable. If something is not documented, it cannot be shared. If ownership is unclear, execution will suffer. And if the business context is missing, we are not solving the right problem.
A simple philosophy guides us: Say what you do, do what you say, and prove it. My team is the “prove it” function.
“A simple philosophy guides us: Say what you do, do what you say, and prove it.”
Which forum or artifact keeps priorities obvious?
The forum that keeps priorities most obvious for us is our team standup with no formal agenda, which occurs twice each week. Since much of the team is remote, that unstructured time creates the equivalent of hallway conversations, and it often surfaces the issues that matter most.
We also have a broader operating rhythm that keeps alignment visible. Each week, our cyber assurance program teams across sectors meet to compare approaches and outcomes, which helps us reinforce repeatable processes and make sure people understand not just what we’re doing, but how we’re doing it.
On top of that, we have an oversight committee made up of senior leaders across cybersecurity, compliance and assurance. That forum reviews deficiencies, discusses response plans, and helps keep priorities clear at the decision-making level.
For me, it’s the combination that works: informal conversations to surface what’s real, and structured reviews to keep everyone aligned on what matters most.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?
What excites people most is a shift from pure compliance to business outcomes. We’ve moved beyond just telling teams the rules and toward a more productive conversation: What are you trying to accomplish, and how can we help you achieve it within the rules or identify another compliant path forward?
That changes the role of cyber assurance. We aren’t here just to enforce requirements; we’re here to protect the business while helping it move with confidence. When teams see assurance as a partner in solving problems, not just identifying them, engagement increases, decisions improve, and collaboration is stronger.
A key sign of progress is how much more time we now spend beyond traditional cyber channels. We’re engaging more directly with programs and business technology officers, not just assurance teams, to understand goals earlier and help shape practical solutions that support mission delivery and business growth.
To me, that is the right measure: stronger business engagement while still delivering the compliance and assurance outcomes we are accountable for. When we help the business pursue more strategic efforts in the right way, that creates momentum and more opportunities.
Magna International combines hands-on manufacturing expertise with innovative vehicle systems to build solutions designed for performance, safety and quality.
What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced weekly?
A hallmark of good management on our team is that people are well-informed and clear about priorities and expectations. We reinforce that through a few weekly habits: weekly one-on-ones, clear priorities, reviews and feedback, and tracking performance as well as development goals.
Every team member has a dedicated weekly check-in focused not just on status updates but on blockers, career growth and well-being. Team members are encouraged to challenge ideas, ask questions, and raise risks early without fear of blame. Feedback is given in real time and kept specific and actionable rather than saved for formal reviews. Good management becomes visible when communication is predictable, accountability is fair and people feel supported yet challenged to grow.
“Feedback is given in real time and kept specific and actionable rather than saved for formal reviews.”
Which forum or artifact keeps priorities obvious?
Our organization goals and KPI reviews are the main forum that keeps priorities obvious: the highest-priority goals, current progress and issues, upcoming tasks or work, and any changes in direction/plan.
The yearly goals and KPIs are making sure everyone understands why something is important and how their work connects to the bigger picture. We reinforce this with weekly team check-ins, clear ownership of activities, transparent decision-making, and written updates people can refer back to asynchronously. That consistency helps reduce confusion, prevents duplicate work and keeps the team aligned even as priorities evolve.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?
What excites people most is seeing how their work directly moves the business forward.
The strategy focuses on building things that create clear customer impact, so the team can connect day-to-day execution with meaningful outcomes.
The main metrics we use to track progress are customer adoption, engagement and retention, delivery against roadmap goals, and overall business impact. Keeping those metrics visible helps the team stay aligned, motivated and focused on outcomes rather than just activity.
STR builds software solutions that are designed to solve national security challenges.
What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced weekly?
Our guiding principle is that clarity at the core enables scale, growth and autonomy throughout the team. Within my group, we reinforce this through a cadence of focused weekly one-on-ones that prioritize unblocking our engineers and actively discussing career development, rather than just running through status updates. By ensuring feedback is continuous, tied directly to our broader mission and aligned with individual growth, we empower the team to make autonomous decisions with confidence.
Which forum or artifact keeps priorities obvious?
Our group all-hands meetings serve as the primary forum for keeping priorities obvious and celebrating our team. We use this time to review our group OKRs so everyone is aligned to our core goals. Beyond the technical priorities, we make it a point to highlight staff program accomplishments, recognize work anniversaries, discuss group marketing activities, and share exciting staff engagement events. It’s a comprehensive touchpoint that connects our daily work to the bigger picture and keeps the team connected.
“Our group all-hands meetings serve as the primary forum for keeping priorities obvious and celebrating our team.”
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?
What excites my team the most is the transition from advanced research to real-world impact, taking incredibly complex concepts and turning them into scalable, robust technology. We track our progress not just by traditional engineering metrics, but by the successful integration and deployment of our capabilities into environments where they solve pressing, high-stakes challenges.
Dandy develops devices and software-based solutions for the dental industry.
What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced weekly?
“Expect feedback and feedback is expected. Our blood pressure should not rise when giving or receiving feedback.”
I set this expectation with every new team member during their onboarding one-on-one with me and in our onboarding document that all new team members complete. I strive to set the tone that we have a safe and open space, and that without feedback, we are leaving tremendous opportunities for growth on the table. The managers within my team also uphold this expectation as part of their one-on-ones with their direct reports or in other mechanisms. Together, the leaders on the CAD team sync in our weekly meetings and calibrate on the feedback we are giving and receiving to make sure we are balancing our attention.
“I strive to set the tone that we have a safe and open space, and that without feedback, we are leaving tremendous opportunities for growth on the table.”
Which forum or artifact keeps priorities obvious?
Candidly, we are working on it and will always work on it. Keeping with the feedback theme above, the number-one upward feedback that CAD leadership has received from our team members is that our engineers want more visibility into long-term priorities. At the sub-team level, priorities are reviewed in sprint planning ceremonies. There are public artifacts, like our KR check-ins and in our weekly updates, which consist of five to 15 documents, where we surface what the team is working on that’s aligned with the goal. So, while we have mechanisms in place, the outcome is not ideal, based on feedback from our team. Transparency and reflection is a core principle on the team, so I don’t mind candidly saying this is something we can always do a better job at.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?
Hot topic number one: provo yield. The yield metrics around the automated manufacturing processes at Provo are a major focus right now. Our quality process already ensures that what leaves the door is high-quality, but the metrics we care most about today reflect how much effort goes into getting that high-quality unit out the door. This is exciting because improving those metrics has a direct impact on the scalability of our process and ultimately our ability to grow as a company.
Hot topic number two: internal CAD and AI-assisted design platform. As part of our pursuit to build a dental prosthetic design software platform that enables Dandy to deliver the highest-quality prosthetics with an industry-leading cost structure and turnaround time for doctors, we partner heavily with the ML team. Many of these metrics are co-owned with machine learning.
There are a few key metrics we consistently keep our eyes on within our internal CAD design ecosystem and our partnership with ML: the percentage of prosthetics designed within our own software, the design time and quality outcomes for those units, and how many of those designs were AI-assisted.
JumpCloud’s platform is designed to help IT, security operations and DevOps teams control and manage employee identities and devices.
What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced weekly?
The work itself gets visibility through a layered cadence: two design-only regional critical reviews for both the Asia-Pacific region and the United States, where designers bring in-progress artifacts for craft feedback, one large cross-functional design review that surfaces work across our product, engineering and experience teams, and a business checkpoint where upper leadership sees what’s heading to market. Managers are expected to coach craft in the regional crits, not just run the calendar. Growth plans are revisited monthly against the work shown in those forums, so feedback compounds instead of getting saved up for performance season. The result is two reinforcing loops — peer feedback on the work in crits and consistent performance tracking through one-on-ones — so designers always know where they stand on both craft and growth.
Which forum or artifact keeps priorities obvious?
Our Global Priority List is the single source of truth for current, upcoming and backlog initiatives across every feature team. It gives everyone clear visibility into what they’re working on, how it's prioritized, and how it ladders up to the larger picture so designers aren’t guessing where their work fits. For individual growth, designers maintain artifacts that feed directly into performance reviews. Those get reviewed regularly during goal progress check-ins, where managers give feedback on direction, milestones and whether things are tracking. It keeps priorities legible at both ends: the company’s bets and each designer’s path inside them.
“[JumpCloud’s Global Priority List] gives everyone clear visibility into what they’re working on, how it's prioritized, and how it ladders up to the larger picture so designers aren’t guessing where their work fits.”
What part of the strategy excites people—and what metric shows progress?
The most energizing bet is that designers don’t just spec the product; they help build it. We’ve invested heavily in AI-augmented workflows — Cursor/Claude Code, prompt-driven prototyping and local agents — so designers can take an idea from sketch to working artifact in a day. The clearest signal so far is how quickly a problem gets in front of a customer in a testable form, down significantly from where we started. But it’s clear that the systems and pace are evolving faster than our measurement, and the team is actively working on better metrics that capture craft, code contribution and customer impact together.
Wasabi Technologies’s software is designed to make cloud storage affordable, predictable and secure.
What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced weekly?
The team I lead operates around Wasabi’s H.O.T. values: humility, ownership and togetherness. The hallmark I look for most is ownership. More specifically, people who succeed on my team and at Wasabi are those who fully own their outcomes and build influence beyond their immediate team.
We reinforce our values through consistent one-on-ones and clear communication rhythms. Each of my direct reports has dedicated time with me on a fixed cadence focused on alignment, growth and removing blockers. We talk about where they want to grow, what opportunities map to that growth, and how their work connects to the broader organization. Operational status lives elsewhere so our conversations stay focused on people, priorities and progress.
“Each of my direct reports has dedicated time with me on a fixed cadence focused on alignment, growth and removing blockers.”
Which forum or artifact keeps priorities obvious?
My team’s single source of truth is an AI-generated weekly planning note. It captures the previous week’s accomplishments, themes for the current week, carried-forward follow-ups, and priorities. If something is important, it’s on that page.
The note is built from the flow of the week itself. Monday starts with an operational review of how our software is performing. My one-on-ones with my vice president help me understand where leadership is focused and where priorities may need to shift. Friday’s release sync shows us where every initiative stands against that direction. By the end of the week, those conversations have generated enough information to shape what next week’s note should say.
Rather than being decided in isolation, priorities emerge from the work, the operational signals and the conversations happening across the organization. From there, my one-on-ones help carry those priorities forward. The note creates clarity while our ongoing conversations create alignment.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?
We’ve been moving the engineering organization toward an AI-assisted software development lifecycle and agentic development; not engineers using AI as a tool, but an SDLC where the workflow from requirements to production monitoring is designed for humans and agents to collaborate.
What excites people is that they can build things now that they couldn’t before. The old constraints on what’s worth attempting start to go away, and engineers see they can do some of the most interesting work of their careers right now, and they’re showing up for it. We went from a handful of pilot users to over a hundred active users of AI coding tools in the last quarter, with parallel adoption of automated code review and agent-based workflows.
One metric I watch most closely within my team is adoption depth, not according to how many licenses we’ve handed out, but what percentage of our engineering work actually flows through a sensible AI-assisted lifecycle: agent rules, skills files, structured code review and automated test scaffolding. When that number moves, it means our engineers have stopped building within the old constraints and started building like the constraints aren’t there.
Blissway’s software, powered by machine learning and IoT, is designed to simplify the collection of tolls and improve road safety.
What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced weekly?
A hallmark for us is open, routine feedback — big or small, and from everyone. We make space for each person to share what’s working and what isn’t, whether it’s about projects or how we collaborate.
What’s been great to see is the evolution. Early on, feedback was surface-level. Now, it leads to clear actions and real outcomes, and it’s not confined to meetings anymore — it’s part of how we operate day to day. When people are comfortable saying the hard things, nothing gets buried. We address it quickly together, and it makes both the team and the work better.
“When people are comfortable saying the hard things, nothing gets buried.”
Which forum or artifact keeps priorities obvious?
We operate in six-week cycles, followed by a two-week cooldown. During cooldown, engineers can explore new ideas or clean up lingering issues — but it’s also when we plan the next cycle.
Everyone contributes to defining team and company goals, and we finalize them as a group. That does two important things: It brings in perspective from across the team, and it ensures everyone understands exactly what we’re aiming for and why. That said, startups move fast. Even six weeks can feel long. So, we revisit priorities weekly to make sure they’re still the right ones and adjust if needed.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?
Our key results are built to be achievable within each cycle, and we track progress weekly. That creates a tight feedback loop; everyone knows if we’re on track or need to adjust, in real time.
But the real excitement comes during the cooldown period. We host several ideation discussions where we zoom out, looking at what we’ve accomplished over the past year and where we could go in the next two or three years.
It’s energizing to see how far we’ve come and even more motivating to imagine what’s next. We push for big thinking with a simple mindset: no crazy ideas — just people willing to challenge what’s possible.
Sittercity’s platform enables parents to connect with babysitters, nannies, specialized care providers and other family support resources.
What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced weekly?
Business management expert and author Patrick Lencioni said, “Direct and personal feedback really is the simplest and most effective way of motivation.”
This quote has stuck with me because I’ve seen it play out over and over. Providing feedback that is direct, timely and specific is the single most effective thing I can do for my team’s growth. It’s not the kind that only shows up in an annual review, but the kind that happens close to the moment and is tailored to the person receiving it.
“Providing feedback that is direct, timely and specific is the single most effective thing I can do for my team’s growth.”
I take time to truly get to know my team: what motivates them, what challenges them, what they’re working toward and where they want to go. That’s what makes feedback stick. It’s not just about gaps; it’s equally important to name what’s working and why because people grow when they understand the full picture.
I meet with direct reports weekly and indirect reports quarterly, and I regularly ask for upward feedback in return. People can tell when feedback comes from a place of care. That’s what builds trust and helps them actually receive it.
Which forum or artifact keeps priorities obvious?
At Sittercity, we keep priorities visible in two ways: a weekly habit and a quarterly reset.
Every quarter, we roll out our objectives and plans companywide so each team knows what we’re working toward and why. We start with a look back at the previous quarter, remaining honest about what we hit, what we didn’t, and what got in the way. The planning process itself is cross-functional by design, so every team can see not just their own priorities but the constraints and dependencies shaping everyone else’s roadmap. That context is what turns a wishlist of work into something people can actually work from.
Week to week, our KPI meeting keeps us on track. We review the metrics that move the needle, check in on the roadmap, and dig into anything that isn’t trending the way we expect. Every metric has an owner, so accountability is never ambiguous. When something surfaces that needs follow-up, it becomes an action item with a name attached, and we review it the following week. The follow-through is built in.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?
Our goal at Sittercity is simple: to deliver for families who need trusted care and caregivers who need meaningful work. When we do that well, everything else follows.
That’s what we’re really watching; not just registration or revenue numbers — though those are absolutely important — but whether the network is alive and delivering on its promise. Are caregivers active, trustworthy and available? Are families finding the right fit when they need one? Sittercity has been around for 25 years because we’ve never optimized for short-term gains at the expense of the people using the platform. That’s what excites our team most — when we can see the network working the way it should.
Part of that is making sure wins don’t go unnoticed. In Slack, shoutouts happen in real time on big days when something launches or a number lands the way we hoped. Our weekly KPI meeting is also a place where we call out what’s going well, not just flag what’s off. When a goal gets hit or something important gets shipped, we take the time to recognize the people whose work made it happen — the tiny wins and the big ones.
