Flagship Leadership Team Development Program That Drives Growth

The Compass Team Experience

This structured, sequenced, best-in-class approach shifts your leadership team from being a constraint to a catalyst, and transforms your team into your growth engine.

Built especially for growth-stage, privately funded tech companies where the stakes are high and the timeline is real.

LET'S TALK
Cynthia Farrell, 110 West Group Founder

Your leadership team has the talent. What it’s missing is the relational operating system.

At growth-stage companies, the leadership team is often the last thing to catch up with the business. The strategy is sound. The people are capable. But somewhere between individual excellence and collective execution, things break down, and it compounds quietly until it shows up in the numbers.

THE APPROACH

What makes this different is the sequence

Most team development fails not because the tools are wrong, but because the order is. Bring in 360 feedback before the team has built trust, and you get defensiveness instead of growth. Run an offsite before you have real data, and you get good conversation that changes nothing. In The Compass Team Experience we don’t skip steps, and we don’t bolt on work that hasn’t been earned yet.

THE PARALLEL PATH

Simultaneously developing individual leaders and the team

A team of self-aware leaders who haven’t built trust still can’t execute. And team-building that ignores individual patterns creates surface alignment that doesn’t hold. We work at both levels at the same time.

DATA FIRST

Every conversation grounded in what the diagnostics surface

Not gut feel. Not what leadership thinks is happening. The assessments show you what’s actually true about your team, and gives us space to start with data and then get to what’s happening beneath the surface.

EARNED PROGRESSION

Every phase creates the conditions for the next

The right interventions at the right time: Our approach builds self-awareness before external feedback. Trust before accountability. Alignment before accountability. Clarity before capability.

PHASE 01 • COMPASS TEAM FOUNDATIONS

Where the work begins.

Before the team gets in a room together, we first build a clear diagnostic picture of team health and culture. Then a three-day facilitated offsite is the midpoint, not the starting point. Two months of team coaching afterward ensures what was built doesn’t fade the moment everyone goes back to their day jobs.

Confidential 30-minute interviews with every member of the leadership team to understand what’s working, what’s not, and what no one is saying out loud.

WHY IT MATTERS

Surfaces the real dynamics before any assessment or offsite so you’re working from truth, not assumptions. What leaders say in a room together and what they’ll say one-on-one are often very different.

A data-backed diagnostic of how the team functions together. Assessment tool selected based on the current state of the team; options include Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team, DiSC Work of Leaders, or BRITE.

WHY IT MATTERS

Tells you how well the team works as a team — not how the individuals perform, but how the unit operates. These are often very different pictures.

An assessment completed by the team and their raters, measuring collective leadership culture across creative competencies and reactive tendencies. Captures both current state and the desired future state.

WHY IT MATTERS

Reveals the gap between where you are and where your own team knows you need to be. That gap becomes the roadmap and establishes the baseline we measure progress against in Expansion.

Each leader completes a Leadership Circle Profile self-assessment, getting a structured look at their leadership patterns, strengths, and reactive tendencies from their own perspective

WHY IT MATTERS

Builds self-awareness in a low-stakes environment before external feedback arrives in Expansion. Leaders who understand their own patterns first receive 360 data with more openness and significantly less defensiveness.

A designed, facilitated experience where the team works with its diagnostic data to build trust and relationships, explore team health and leadership culture results, set behavioral norms and rules of engagement, create a team culture action plan, and align on accountability structures and decision rights.

WHY IT MATTERS

The offsite is the midpoint, not the starting point, and every conversation is grounded in data that allows us to explore what’s under the surface. Three days gives the team enough time to move through discomfort and into real commitment.

Facilitated team coaching sessions where the team is coached through the real-time challenges of putting new norms and commitments into practice.

WHY IT MATTERS

This is why the work sticks. Most team offsites fade within weeks because there’s no mechanism to hold new behaviors in place. The coaching catches old patterns before they become the default again.

PHASE 02 • COMPASS TEAM EXPANSION

Where clarity becomes capability.

Expansion follows Foundations. The mirror turns inward as each leader receives 360 feedback with individual coaching to translate the data into real change. At the six-month mark, both team health and leadership culture are re-measured, and the team reconvenes to evaluate their progress so that it’s visible and articulated, not just felt.

Ongoing facilitated sessions where the team is coached through increasingly complex challenges, such as strategic tradeoffs, cross-functional tension, execution under pressure.

WHY IT MATTERS

As the stakes get higher, the team needs a space to practice operating differently with a coach who can name what’s happening in real time. The challenges don’t get easier, but the team’s capacity to handle them does.

Confidential monthly sessions with the CEO focused on how they’re leading the team, holding accountability, and modeling the operating norms the team has committed to.

WHY IT MATTERS

The CEO sets the tone. If they haven’t shifted how they lead, the rest of the system stalls. How the CEO shows up cascades through the entire team, which means the CEO’s development isn’t a side benefit, it’s a requirement.

Each leader receives a full Leadership Circle 360, which gathers feedback from peers, direct reports, and stakeholders, then compares their results to a global norm set to quantify how they’re actually experienced as a leader.

WHY IT MATTERS

The gap between self-perception and how others experience you is where the real breakthroughs happen. This comes in Expansion, not earlier, because the team has now built enough trust and psychological safety to make the feedback productive rather than destabilizing.

Every leader gets a private debrief of their 360 results, followed by two coaching sessions to translate insights into a concrete leadership development plan.

WHY IT MATTERS

Data without support creates anxiety, not growth. The coaching turns 360 feedback into targeted action on the specific patterns that are either accelerating or constraining the business.

At the six-month mark, both the team health assessment and CLA are re-administered, using the same instruments from Foundations, measuring the same dimensions.

WHY IT MATTERS

Gives you a precise, data-backed picture of what has shifted. For a CEO reporting to a board, this is the difference between “we did team development” and “here’s what it produced.” The baseline from Foundations makes this possible.

The team reconvenes to confront what the updated diagnostics show: where they’ve grown, where they’re stuck, and what commitments need to be reset for the next chapter.

WHY IT MATTERS

This isn’t about building the foundation again. It’s about honest assessment and recalibration, grounded in data rather than opinion. The team arrives with six months of new experience and the measurement to evaluate it honestly.

WHAT CHANGES

The before and after in plain language

BEFORE
  • Decisions are slow or get stuck waiting on the CEO
  • Conflict routes through the CEO instead of being resolved laterally
  • CEO is refereeing instead of focused on strategy
  • Leaders operate in silos, duplicating effort
  • The team nods along but doesn’t follow through
  • Gut-feel on whether the team is improving
AFTER
  • Faster decisions with clear ownership and fewer escalations
  • Direct, productive disagreement that moves the work forward
  • CEO focused on strategy, not managing around the team
  • Cross-functional collaboration without coordination overhead
  • Genuine alignment backed by accountability structures
  • Data-backed measurement of what’s actually shifted
IS THIS THE RIGHT FIT?

We’d rather tell you now than find out later.

RIGHT FOR YOU IF…
  • Your leaders are talented but not functioning as a team.
  • Conflict routes through the CEO.
  • Decisions are slow, or don’t get made at all.
  • You know something needs to change but can’t pinpoint what it is or fix it from the inside.
  • You recognize that how every leader shows up shapes what the team can do.
  • You’re willing to slow down slightly in order to accelerate.
NOT THE RIGHT FIT IF…
  • The CEO wants to observe, not participate. “Just fix my team” isn’t a directive we work with.
  • You believe they “They just need to get on board.” If compliance is your goal, our approach isn’t for you.
  • The only lens is metrics and KPIs, and nothing else matters.
  • There’s no appetite for slowing down to speed up.
  • The real goal is a team-building event, not a change in how the team operates.
IN THEIR WORDS

“At the start of our engagement, our team recognized that to accelerate growth and maximize results for our owners, we needed to operate with greater alignment, clarity, and cohesion. By the end of our work together, we were not only  aligned on the path ahead, but shared a much stronger understanding of how we would move forward together to achieve greater results.”

CHRO · INDUSTRIAL SOLUTIONS COMPANY

Ready to explore whether this is right for your team?

A real conversation — no pressure, no pitch. Just an honest look at where your team is and whether this is the right work for where you’re going.