Team reading program
Reading This Book With Your Team
Reading This Book With Your Team, from the book
I wrote this book to be read by a team, not only by the person who bought it. Whatever seat your people hold, they will find themselves in these pages, and every chapter ends with three questions and one action they can work through together.
Read one chapter a week. Give everyone the same chapter and ask each person to answer its three Hero Test questions from their own seat. Then compare the answers in the room. The gaps between them are where the dependency lives.
Go first. Answer the questions about yourself, out loud, before anyone else speaks. Handed down as an accusation, this book becomes one more verdict people wait on. Handed down as an admission, it gives everyone below you permission to answer too.
Hand it up the same way: bring decisions you could already make and ask for one by name, with a date.
Aim every answer at a dependency, not a person. “Approvals wait for me” starts a fix. “She never shares anything” starts a fight. Name the work that waits, not the colleague. If an answer points at one person’s conduct, take it out of the room. Role and performance decisions are private conversations with that person, and they come only after the support and the fair opportunity Chapter 5 describes. They never belong in a reading group.
Then do something with what you hear. Each week, choose one handoff: one decision granted in writing, one piece of knowledge captured, one backup who practices, or one normal week tested without the person everyone waits for. Name the owner and the date, and open the next conversation by checking it. The first-month plan in the Conclusion helps you start with one dependency while you read. Twelve chapters, twelve handoffs. That is how the answer to the Hero Test’s first question moves toward no one.
Twelve weeks, twelve handoffs
One chapter a week. The chapter's three Hero Test questions and one action are the agenda. When the team wants to do the work, run the module's sixty minute session. Week one opens with the Hero Test for everyone in the room. To start one dependency while you read, run the first 30 days of the 90-Day Install: they follow the Conclusion's first-month plan. Week thirteen is the decision to carry one initiative through day 90.
Week 1, before the first chapter
Everyone takes the Hero Test, role titles only
Ask these about yourself first, about a normal working week. What would stop if you were away, why would it stop, and what would a capable replacement need? Then widen the question to the company and name the capability or route an important result waits on. Keep the discussion on the work, not the person, and take any performance question to their manager in private.
Take the Hero TestWeek 1 · Chapter 1: Why You Are the Bottleneck
Module 1: Transfer a Recurring Decision
- Which decisions reached you this week that someone else was already responsible for?
- Which decision did you carry up this month that you could have made, and did it wait because nobody granted it or because checking first had become the habit?
- What stops until you have looked at it, and what would the next person need to carry it without you?
One action. If the decision is yours, hand one recurring decision, in writing, to the person already doing the work and tell everyone it affects. If it is not, write down one decision you could make, ask for it plainly, and agree who will send people back to you.
Week 2 · Chapter 2: Alignment Is Not Execution
Module 2: Turn Alignment into Connected Commitments
- Would your leaders finish this sentence the same way: this strategy means my team will start X, stop Y, and prioritize Z?
- What changes in your team’s work on Monday, and which two commitments need the same people?
- Which priority are you quietly carrying that nobody has funded or named, and who else knows?
One action. If the decision is yours, put the priority and funding choice in writing with the people who control the capital before calling the team aligned. If it is not, take your start, stop, and prioritize sentence to your manager.
Week 3 · Chapter 3: Removing the Politics
Module 3: Resolve an Execution Dispute
- Which decision made this quarter was reopened afterward in private, and what keeps that door open?
- When you disagreed with a decision, did you take it back to the people who made it, or around them?
- If people come to you privately, do you send disagreements back to the room and misconduct to someone who can act?
One action. If the decision is yours, trace one reopened decision from the agreement to the private conversation that changed it, and name the forum it returns to. If it is not, take an ordinary execution disagreement to the people responsible for the decision. Suspected misconduct, retaliation, or serious risk belongs on the protected route described in this chapter.
Week 4 · Chapter 4: Why AI Can’t Save You
Module 4: Test a Better Workflow Before Adding AI
- Which process are you about to speed up that nobody has questioned, and which steps would survive if you built it from scratch?
- Have you asked your team why they use what was built for them, or why they don’t?
- Which of your daily tasks is the value you deliver, and which is only the task?
One action. If the decision is yours, fund nothing until the people doing and receiving the work agree on the outcome, what the system decides alone, and what would stop it. If it is not, write the steps you would kill and bring the list to the build.
Week 5 · Chapter 5: The System That Replaces the Hero
Module 5: Build the Operating Loop and Transfer Judgment
- How many decisions wait on an approver above the person accountable, and how often is that you?
- Who gets the call on your team when the answer is not obvious, and is there time to teach, or only to rescue?
- If you were away a normal week, what would stop, and what would the next person need: knowledge, access, authority, or practice?
One action. If the decision is yours, have the person everyone calls capture what they know, give a backup written authority, and test real work and a relevant exception without their routine intervention. If it is not, name what stops while you are away and ask for time to teach a backup.
Week 6 · Chapter 6: The Power of No
Module 6: Turn a Strategic No into a Change in the Work
- What did the company say no to this quarter that cost someone something?
- Which customer or executive request are you absorbing with the same few people who carry everything else?
- When the exception lands on you, what finishes before it starts? Who authorized it?
One action. If the decision is yours, end the next priority session with one authorized stop, decline, or conversion, the capacity it frees, and the evidence that would reopen it. If it is not, show the person who can decide what the competing commitments cost the chosen priority, and ask for a decision by a date.
Week 7 · Chapter 7: Done Is a Decision
Module 7: Decide Whether the Result Is Done
- Does your dashboard show where the car has been, or what has to happen next, and who owns it by when?
- For what your team calls done this month, what can the customer now do, and who besides the builders says so?
- Which deal or project stalls next week because its next step, owner, and date live only in your head?
One action. If the decision is yours, end every review with a next step, an owner, a date, and the evidence that will establish completion. Name who accepts that evidence. If it is not, write those details beside your own work and confirm the acceptance conditions with the person who depends on it. In the Chapter 5 example, the trial is complete when the case records show correct resolution and the backup demonstrates the exception handoff.
Week 8 · Chapter 8: Ownership Without Theater
Module 8: Make the Authority Agreement Hold
- Can someone you hold accountable name, without notes, the decisions they can make without you? Do your lists match?
- Are you in the room when your number is decided? When the plan changes above you, does the target change too?
- If everyone asks you and nobody includes you, what have you stopped raising because the arrangement became normal?
One action. If the authority is yours to grant, write it down for one owner: the decisions, budget, people, tradeoffs, standards, and escalation deadline. If it is not, write what your current authority lets you deliver and what it prevents, and take that to whoever can close the gap. Apply the same test to the support example. The support manager can assign work and approve training time. The security owner controls the named exceptions. If the backup loses access or the training time is reassigned, record who changed the condition and what that does to Friday’s commitment. The original owner should not quietly carry an unchanged date after the means of delivering it have moved.
Week 9 · Chapter 9: Make Inaction Expensive
Module 9: Choose Action or Deliberate Waiting
- Which profitable business is rescuing your numbers so that nobody has to decide what replaces it?
- Which decision in your area has waited more than a quarter, and what has each month of waiting cost?
- If your product pays the bills, who has told you your clock is ticking, and what did you do with it?
One action. If the decision is yours, compare acting with waiting over the same 30, 90, or 180 days, then set the date the choice closes, escalates, or is deferred at a named cost. If it is not, build the comparison and put it, dated, in front of whoever holds the decision.
Week 10 · Chapter 10: Backbone, Not Bureaucracy
Module 10: Set One Integration Boundary
- What did you buy this business for, and who has said aloud how the integration could destroy that value?
- Which standard do you enforce because work cannot cross a boundary without it, and which because the center wants control?
- What could nobody else do if you left next month, and who is funding the time for you to teach it?
One action. If the standard is yours to set, write both lists with the leaders whose work it will change before anyone standardizes anything. If it is not, say your fear out loud, as the engineer in Bangalore did, and name what only you know and need time to teach.
Week 11 · Chapter 11: Decisions Before Data
Module 11: Make One Decision with Useful Evidence
- Which numbers in your next review would change how you run the business, and what decision does the review close?
- Which numbers you report upward would change what you do, and which exist only because someone once asked?
- If a decision waits until you are satisfied, have you said what would satisfy you, and by when?
One action. If the review is yours, begin with the decision, its owner, the evidence needed for its risk, and the date it closes. Keep the measures that help make that choice. Record the action and what the next review will check. If it is not your review, lead with the decision your number informs, and ask what further evidence would settle it and by when.
Week 12 · Chapter 12: Commitments Before Scale
Module 12: Give the Pilot a Path to an Operating Decision
- Which pilot in your company is still alive only because you keep pressing for it?
- Did you agree to try a tool, or to change how your team works, and which one are you inspecting?
- If a tool built for your work sits unused, have you said why before someone calls it resistance?
One action. If the decision is yours, record the production owner, funded support, evidence of use and customer benefit, necessary controls, and the date the pilot must earn its next stage. Name what would lead you to scale, extend for specific proof, redesign, or stop. If it is not, explain what the tool changes in your work and what evidence would show that change is useful.
Week 13
The 90-Day Install
One outcome, one owner, one record, and reviews on the calendar through day 90. This is where the course stops being twelve options and becomes a schedule.
A team that reaches week thirteen needs a facilitator. The Facilitator Track is free, and KeyDelta can run the first session.
Start your team view
Create a team in your account and send one invite link. Everyone takes the Hero Test from their own seat; the team sees how results spread across the three cases, never who answered what.
Create a teamCompare it in the room
A facilitated session puts the team view on the wall and leaves with one owner, one record, and the first ninety days on the calendar.
Ask about a facilitated session