From the Team
During my time in the Marines I developed a theory about engaging high performers, and it has shaped how we built this company. It did not come from a book. It came from watching exceptional people thrive under a particular set of conditions, then watching those same people go flat when the conditions disappeared.
Three levers carry most of the weight.
Autonomy: build the box, then stay out of it
Do people have the clarity, the guard rails and the context to do their job without asking permission at every turn?
The word autonomy gets heard as the absence of rules, which is backwards and is why most attempts at it fail. We deliver autonomy by being more specific, not less. Our Leadership Standards put it this way:
A dollar ceiling is the clearest version of this. A technician who knows he can make a call up to a specific number without phoning anyone does not need permission, and he does not have to guess where the edge is either. Vagueness is not freedom. Vagueness means everybody checks with you, because nobody wants to find the line by crossing it.
High performers want to execute. They want to solve the problem in front of them. They do not want to wait on approval for decisions they are perfectly capable of making.
Confidence: competence, plus a way to keep score on yourself
Do people have the training, the expectations and the resources to know how to do the job well, and to know whether they are doing it well?
This is not about arrogance and it is not about encouragement. It is about competence. It is knowing you have what you need, and having a standard clear enough that you can measure yourself against it without waiting for someone to tell you how you did. We build it with regular feedback, coaching and training. A team member who is guessing whether they are good at their job is not confident, however much praise you throw at them.
Impact: they have to be able to move something
Do people have the visibility and the feedback to know whether they are making a difference, and the ability to actually make one?
That second half is the part companies skip. Impact is not a feeling you can generate with a newsletter. We increase it by letting the team genuinely change the organization, through their own ideas and actions or with our help to get them over the line. If a team member brings you three good ideas and none of them ever ship, you do not have an impact problem you can fix with communication. You have an impact problem you can only fix by shipping something.
Get these three right and you will build a team that is genuinely bought in. Get them wrong and you will wonder why the place feels flat no matter what you spend on it.
The fundamentals are where this is won or lost
The framework is straightforward. The execution is where most companies fail, and the execution is unglamorous.
- Consistent one-on-ones that actually happen.
- Leaders who stay plugged into the pulse of the organization rather than the reports about it.
- Leaders who understand they exist to support their teams, not the reverse.
- Expectations stated clearly enough to be argued with.
- Frequent, specific praise for good work.
- Feedback from the frontline turned into action fast enough that people can see the link.
There is a great deal more that goes into building a culture, but this is the foundation. Without these dialed in, everything else is built on sand.
This is not for everyone, and we say so first
Not everyone thrives when handed autonomy, confidence and impact. Some people do not want the responsibility that comes attached to them. They do not want to own outcomes, and they would rather be told.
We encourage those folks to find a place better suited to them. That is not a criticism of anybody. It is a question of fit, and we would rather be honest about it in an interview than discover it eighteen months later. We are building something specific, and it needs people who want what we are offering.
How we measure it
Engagement is a thing you feel, and feelings make a poor instrument. So we put a number on it.
We use Gallup's Q12, twelve questions that get at whether a team member's basic needs are met, whether they can contribute as an individual, whether they feel part of a supportive team, and whether they have had the chance to grow. We run it quarterly and anonymously, and we ask for honest answers rather than kind ones.
What we measure, and how often
4.5 of 5.0Our most recent Gallup Q12 meanHigh Ground internal survey
QuarterlyHow often we run it, anonymouslyAll team members
In practice it has turned into a report card for our leaders. It lets us put a number on this alongside sales, conversion and profit, and it means a leader whose team is quietly disengaging cannot hide behind a good month.
The work does not finish
We are proud of where the team has got this to. It is not a thing you accomplish once and then move on from, and the score has never gone up on its own.
Autonomy, Confidence and Impact is the bedrock the rest of it sits on. It is not aspirational and it is not a poster. It is how we run the place, and it is one of the standards our leaders are held to by name.
Questions we get about this
- Is this just a rebranded version of employee engagement surveys?
The survey is how we check. The framework is what we actually do. Plenty of companies run a survey, read the number, feel something about it, and change nothing. The Q12 result is only useful to us because it is attached to specific leadership standards that someone is accountable for.
- What does autonomy look like for a technician on a job?
It means knowing the limits of what you can decide in the house without calling in, and being trusted inside them. The person standing in your basement knows more about your situation than anyone sitting in our office does, and they should be able to act on that.
- Who owns the result?
The leaders. "We are not victims" is one of our standards, which means a soft number anywhere in this organization is ours to own and to fix rather than something to push down the ranks.