Skills
What we build and grow: technical depth, relationships and business acumen, graded separately rather than collapsed into one score.
The book
The Ice Mold Leadership Model
A framework for building high-performing, culture-first teams, drawn from years of leading technical organizations, and now being rewritten for an age when some of your teammates are AI agents.
- #1 New Release
- Multiple months on the Business Teams bestseller list
- 4.5 of 5 stars
Where the name comes from
Three triangles around a hexagon.
As a new manager, I was asked to rate everyone on my team with a single number. I couldn’t do it honestly, because my best people were great at very different things. So I started grading the attributes separately, the way scouts grade a ballplayer, and that exercise turned into years of studying what makes high-performance teams work.
The name came from an ice mold for making large cubes. Taken apart, it looks like three triangles surrounding a six-sided shape. Those three triangles were the impact I first wanted to measure: technology, business acumen and the ability to build relationships. The model grew far beyond them. The name stuck.
Operational impact
Collective intelligenceHow we work together
SkillsWhat we build and grow
Team virtuesWhy we do what we do
BehaviorsWhat we do, and our habits
LeadershipThe bedrock: model, coach, care, create clarity
Exports
InfluenceStakeholders, team growth, pathfinding
OutputsThe currency: engagements, wins, IP
Inside the model
Six building blocks of a high-performance team.
Each part of the model gets its own chapter, with practical tools leaders can use the next morning.
Behaviors
What we do and our habits: operational excellence, communication and professionalism, with the SCARF model for understanding ego-driven reactions.
Team virtues
Why we do what we do: respect, integrity, accountability, customer obsession and inclusion, and the tripwires that signal a values conflict.
Collective intelligence
How we work together: why high-performance teams are worth more than the sum of their high-performance members.
Leadership
The bedrock: model, coach, care, create clarity, generate energy and deliver success, steadied by prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance.
Influence and outputs
The team’s exports: its influence on stakeholders and the future, and the outputs that act as its currency, measured without losing the culture that produced them.
Second edition, in progress
Leading when AI is on the team.
The first edition described teams of people. The second edition asks what changes when AI agents become working members of the team, and what doesn’t. It adds a new section on leading in the AI era, drawn from building production systems with AI agents and from advising the leaders now adopting them.
- Why AI adoption triggers the same status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness threats as any other change, and what leaders can do about each
- Agents as new teammates: what it takes to observe, manage and verify work you didn’t do yourself
- How collective intelligence extends across human and agent teams
- Why the field-tested way of taking technology to market, embedding experienced people beside the work, matters even more now
- Protecting what makes a team great while rethinking how the work gets done
“High performance teams are more valuable than the sum of their high-performance team members.”
Bring the model to your team
Workshops, keynotes and leadership coaching.
The model is most useful when a leadership team works through it together, applied to their own people and their own AI plans. I run half-day and full-day workshops, keynotes for kickoffs and offsites, and ongoing coaching for leaders building teams that include AI.
AI adoption and leadership services
Let’s find where AI changes your business.
Start with a 30-minute conversation. Bring the workflow, the stalled pilot or the team question that keeps coming up. You’ll leave with a clear next step, whether or not we work together.