The Brave Cave Standard · for companies
Six sessions install where work lives, how much authority each person has, and what the department is actually going after. Then every quarter I test it against a number off your own report, and tell you what moved, what stalled, and which of your managers is developing people. Keep passing those audits and your company earns the Brave Cave certification.
What the first ninety days change
Ask six people on the same team today where work lives and you'll get eleven answers: email, text, a spreadsheet, the whiteboard, someone's notebook, someone's head. Ask how much authority they have when something changes mid-job and most will tell you they bring it back to you. Ask what the department is going after this quarter and you'll get six versions.
None of that is anybody's fault. It was never written down, so everyone invented their own.
By the end of the install, every one of those questions has one answer, written down, that anyone on the team can give you. That is the whole change, and it is why you stop being in every decision.
The program
Each one is an hour, six people maximum, and the order matters: delegation means nothing until work has somewhere to land, and nobody can commit to a goal that doesn't exist yet.
Six questions, answered privately, read aloud in the room. Everyone leaves with a page on every colleague, including how each of them takes hard feedback and how they give it. It doesn't expire.
One place work lives. Three channels for questions, one text, one voice, one video, and a rule that those are for clarification only. You sign it. We audit it.
Manage, lead, empower. Everyone learns what authority they have and exactly what earns them more, and at the lead level, how to bring you one problem, three options and one recommendation instead of a question. This is the session that frees your calendar.
The processes that live in one person's head get written into The Cave™, given an owner and a review date, so they survive that person's holiday, and their resignation.
One number for the quarter, tested until it's clear, actionable and relevant. Then the two or three moves that get you there.
Every person leaves knowing their level, the one thing they own that moves the department's number, and how they'll be reviewed each month.
What you keep
A page per person, living, and the thing people check before a hard conversation.
Signed, one page, and audited every quarter.
Who's at what level, since when, and what earns the next one.
Every documented process, its owner and whether it's still current.
Your number, the gap, and the moves. It's also the agenda for the next quarterly, handed to you ninety days early.
All of it lives in one place your whole team can open, so nobody has to ask how things work here.
What happens after
Most programs end and go quiet. This one starts reporting.
You send your own number, off whatever report you already produce, and get back a short written read of what it says. Not a meeting. A read.
We grade what you committed to and cut the next plan. Six things get looked at: your number, whether the moves happened, whether your processes are still current, whether the communication policy held, whether your people are growing, and whether your managers are growing them. Anything that does not pass gets named, a date, and the one piece of training that fixes it. You keep the mark while you are working on it.
One for leaders across the companies we work with, and a rotating clinic on each of the six modules, so a new hire in March catches the same training your team got in January, without you scheduling anything.
That last measure is one almost nobody tracks. Four people moved up a level this quarter, and two of them work for the same manager tells you more about your business than any engagement survey will.
How it runs
In a room of six everyone speaks. In a room of twenty, four speak and the rest perform.
Long enough to get somewhere real, short enough that people leave with energy.
Delegation is the leader's job. Installing this anywhere else first is backwards.
You can't put a system around a team that hasn't been honest with each other yet.
Groups run session one back to back before anything else starts.
Questions don't go out until you've told your team this is coming.
Or start with yourself
Either way you end up at the other one, so start wherever it's bleeding. If it's you, that's the F4 assessment and the individual track. Same idea, different subject: your company is the gym, and you're in training too.