The Composition of High-Performing Teams
Why a board doesn’t cohere through good intent alone, and what has to be true for shared ownership to take root.
Read the essayCase study · Savannah Wind Symphony
Built. Not delivered.
No roles. No strategy. No infrastructure. A 50th anniversary coming. What the coaching revealed, what the board built, and what the numbers looked like at the close.
The situation
Decades of community presence, a 50th anniversary approaching, and a leadership foundation that had never been built.
The organization’s longtime conductor passed away during COVID. He was a legend in Savannah, and he had carried the organization personally for decades: he led the board, drove the decisions, and did nearly everything himself. His passing left a huge hole, and it revealed what his presence had long made unnecessary. There was no plan, no management structure, and bylaws that existed on paper but didn’t function, because for years the organization hadn’t needed structure. It had him.
The volunteers who came back from the pandemic inherited a legacy worth upholding and almost nothing to uphold it with. They were in over their heads and knew it. Management happened moment to moment. Budgeting reached about thirty days out.
The presenting request was help getting organized. The real problem was deeper: a board that had never been asked to lead, holding a legacy it had no structure to carry.
What changed
Hard numbers first, reported by the client. Specific dollar figures withheld at the organization’s request.
2.1×Ticket sales,
year over year
year over year
4×Donations
5×Operating budget
14moEngagement
The operating budget that once reached thirty days out grew 5× across the engagement, and the organization now budgets in seasons, not weeks.
What the diagnostic found
The board functioned as individuals rather than a leadership team. Without clear roles, shared decision-making frameworks, or a common picture of where the organization was going, the board couldn’t generate the conditions for ownership. Every decision cycled back to the same conversations. Strategic thinking was impossible because the relational and operational foundation for it didn’t exist yet.
The engagement met its first real test early, when the board resisted naming roles explicitly. The resistance wasn’t turf. It was the opposite: for volunteers who had spent years deferring to a leader who did everything, taking a named role meant owning a job nobody felt qualified to do. Unnamed, the work could stay everyone’s and no one’s. What turned it was seeing what the unnamed roles were costing: every decision cycling back to the same conversations, the same few people absorbing everything, and a 50th season approaching with nobody owning it. A defined job you can learn beats an undefined one you can only worry about. They named the roles, and then they defended them.
Our conductor did everything for us for decades, and when we lost him, we found out how much everything was. We came out of COVID with a legacy to uphold and honestly no idea how to run the organization carrying it. The coaching didn’t hand us a plan. We argued, we named roles we’d been avoiding, and we built the structure ourselves, which is why it works with nobody standing over us. We went into our 50th season knowing who does what for the first time in our history.
Board President, Savannah Wind Symphony
The work
01
The coaching track
Team coaching with the board on roles, decision-making lanes, and interpersonal dynamics, with individual coaching running in parallel for the Executive Director and key board members. The strategic vision and the 1-3-5 framework (one-year commitments, three-year positions, five-year direction) emerged from the coaching itself. It was built by them, through the coaching, which is why it held.
02
The operational track
Bylaws reconstructed. Document infrastructure centralized so the organization keeps its institutional memory. Network for Good implemented for donations and donor relations. Data tracking across ticket sales, audience geography, audition attendance, and marketing. Concert operations redesigned, from check-in processes to card readers to branded materials. A donor stewardship program organized around the 50th anniversary.
What held
The test of an engagement is what the organization can do without you in the room.
The board keeps documented processes, roles it owns, a strategic framework it built, and the relational clarity to use all of it independently. The 50th anniversary season the entire engagement was built toward is underway now, running on that foundation: the donor program, the concert operations, the governance, all of it owned and operated by the organization itself.
I can rehearse an ensemble. I can’t rehearse an organization, and when I arrived three seasons ago, that’s what this one needed. Today the board leads, decisions stick, and concert nights run the way they should. I get to put all of my energy into the music, and you can hear it.
Music Director, Savannah Wind Symphony
Built by the people who have to run it.
A board that cares, without the foundation to act.
If that describes your organization, the conversation is worth thirty minutes. Boards have to ask about cost, so ask. We scope nonprofit engagements to nonprofit budgets, and we’ll tell you on the call what’s realistic at yours. The call is with Bryan or Justin.
- Client
- Savannah Wind Symphony
- Scope
- Board and Executive Director
- Sector
- Nonprofit performing arts
- Practice
- Organizational effectiveness
Where this argument continues
The people are fine. The system isn’t.
Coaching for leadership teams as a working system, with the whole team in the room and a parallel thread for the leader. Measured in how the work moves.
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