Are you a leader of your function, or a leader of the organization who happens to run a function? In this episode, Keith and James unpack the “Team Number One” mindset, a concept introduced by Pat Lencioni in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and why it’s one of the most important shifts an executive can make. They explore how prioritizing your function over the leadership team can create silos, competing agendas, and an “us versus them” mentality that compounds throughout an organization. Through real client stories, Keith and James discuss what changes when executives take collective ownership of the company’s biggest challenges, why alignment at the top matters at every level, and how leaders can balance functional responsibility with an organization-first mindset. If you want to reduce internal politics, strengthen cross-functional collaboration, and build a truly cohesive leadership team, it starts with deciding which team is your Team Number One.

When John Damon became CEO of Canopy Children’s Solutions, he didn’t announce a new organizational health initiative. Instead, he spent the first year practicing the disciplines exclusively with his executive team, then deliberately worked them through successive levels of leadership before ever introducing organizational health to the broader organization.

In this episode, John joins Keith Hadley and Brad Haynes to reflect on the journey that followed and the responsibility of leading an organization serving some of Mississippi’s most vulnerable children and families. They discuss why lasting transformation requires both patience and moments of decisive change, how trust, healthy conflict, and accountability became embedded in Canopy’s culture, and why leadership development must begin with the leader doing their own work. John also shares his conviction in the power of hope—the belief that the future can be wider than the past, and that we have the ability to make it so—and the responsibility leaders have to sustain it through clear goals, multiple pathways forward, and shared willpower.

The ability to consistently develop great leaders can become one of the most powerful competitive advantages an organization has. In this episode, Keith and James explore why leadership development shouldn’t exist separately from organizational health, but should instead reinforce the clarity, culture, and behaviors an organization has already established. They discuss how the four disciplines can become a practical framework for developing leaders at every level—from building cohesive teams and translating organizational clarity to setting expectations, giving feedback, running better meetings, and having difficult conversations. Rather than adding another program to leaders’ plates, they explain how development can happen through the work leaders are already doing, including one-on-ones, performance conversations, hiring, coaching, and cascading communication. Whether you’re building a leadership development program from scratch or already have a robust L&D function, the goal is the same: develop leaders in a way that strengthens your culture, scales organizational health, and equips your people to develop the leaders beneath them.