In short: Building a team people genuinely want to be part of isn’t about perks or ping-pong tables. It’s about radical honesty, investing in manager development, designing graceful exits, and prioritising team health before happiness or high performance. This guide breaks down the frameworks and lessons from organisational psychologist Neda Sahebelm, who turned a team with -5 employee engagement NPS into 63+ NPS in five months. Based on a conversation on The Generalist World Pod.
Why Most Teams Are Broken (And How to Fix Them)
Neda Sahebelm is an organisational psychologist, fractional COO, and founder of Keshty, a consultancy supporting minority-founded tech-for-good companies. Previously, she was an early joiner at Multiverse (now a tech unicorn), joining pre-seed and staying through six funding rounds. Her work ranged from scaling teams through hypergrowth to building operational infrastructure to establishing sustainable hiring and retention frameworks. She also led expansion across Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Fox and National Geographic through the Disney acquisition.
Her approach to team building offers a blueprint for anyone leading people — especially generalists who often find themselves in cross-functional leadership roles.
Turn Around Toxic Cultures Through Radical Honesty
When Neda inherited a team with a -5 employee engagement NPS, she didn’t sugarcoat the situation. She laid out exactly what the next six months would look like and gave people explicit permission to leave if it wasn’t for them.
This approach sounds risky. Leaders often fear that transparency will drive people away. But the opposite happened: it built trust with those who chose to stay and prevented the slow poison of ambiguity. Within five months, the team’s NPS had climbed to 63.
The lesson for generalists in leadership positions: honesty isn’t just an ethical choice, it’s a strategic one. Ambiguity kills motivation. Clarity — even uncomfortable clarity — creates the foundation for trust.
The Leadership Multiplier: Train Your Managers
The fastest way to scale your impact as a senior leader is ensuring your managers can represent your values and standards in rooms you’re not in. Neda spent every available moment developing her leadership team across three critical areas:
- Hiring — teaching managers to identify and attract the right talent, not just fill seats
- Retention — from onboarding through performance management to graceful exits
- Self-management — the ability to look in the mirror first before addressing team issues
This investment creates a multiplier effect where good leadership cascades through every level of the organisation. Instead of one leader doing everything, you build a system of leaders who each amplify the culture.
Weekly Office Hours: Just Listen
One of Neda’s non-negotiable rituals is holding weekly office hours where team members can raise concerns, ask questions, or flag issues early. This isn’t a status update meeting — it’s dedicated listening time where the senior leader’s only job is to be accessible.
This simple practice prevents small problems from becoming crises and builds psychological safety by demonstrating that leadership genuinely wants to hear from the team before issues escalate.
Design Graceful Exits
How you treat departing employees signals to remaining team members whether they’re valued humans or replaceable resources.
When someone leaves Neda’s teams, they receive a structured goodbye: they announce their departure on their own terms, their manager publicly acknowledges their contributions, and they get closure with colleagues. This stands in stark contrast to the dehumanising practice of people simply disappearing from Slack with a blanket email announcement.
Graceful exits aren’t just kind — they’re strategic. Every remaining team member is watching how departures are handled and calibrating their own trust in the organisation accordingly.
Build Roles Around Business Needs, Not People
One of the most common organisational design mistakes is creating positions for individuals you want to hire rather than roles the business actually needs. This leads to constant misalignment: up-skilling people in areas where they lack foundation, or bringing in senior people who expect resources you don’t have.
The distinction matters: contractors and fractional experts exist to solve today’s urgent problems. Your full-time team should be built to solve tomorrow’s strategic challenges. Mixing these up creates unsustainable structures that inevitably require painful restructuring later.
Budget for Hiring Reality
Companies routinely budget only for a new hire’s salary, ignoring the 3-6 months typically required for recruitment and the ramp-up time before productivity. Worse, they rarely account for mis-hires, which can cost 18+ months of salary when you factor in severance, lost productivity, and restarting the search.
The fix is straightforward: budget for salary plus a minimum of six months (ideally nine) to create realistic financial planning. This doesn’t make hiring more expensive — it makes your projections honest.
The CHAOS Framework for Reclaiming Your Time
For generalists who tend to accumulate responsibilities across multiple domains, the CHAOS framework offers a systematic way to regain focus. Apply it quarterly by categorising everything you do into four quadrants:
- Keep — what you love doing and should continue
- Automate — what can be handled by technology or AI
- Optimise/Outsource — what to delegate or hand to someone better suited
- Scrap — what to simply eliminate
The key is applying this rigorously and honestly. Neda even scraps activities like networking for three out of four quarters annually, choosing to deepen existing relationships rather than constantly meeting new people. For generalists who are naturally drawn to doing everything, this discipline is essential.
Healthy Before Happy, Happy Before High-Performing
Neda’s hierarchy of team needs mirrors Maslow’s hierarchy: a team must be healthy before it can be happy, and happy before it can be high-performing. Skipping straight to performance targets with an unhealthy team is like trying to run a marathon with a broken leg.
Health isn’t a soft metric — it’s a financial one. Teams that invest in foundational wellbeing consistently outperform those that skip straight to KPIs.
The Bottom Line: Chaos Structures Lead to Savage Restructures
When companies build unsustainably — hiring too fast, creating roles around people rather than needs, failing to invest in manager development — they inevitably face brutal corrections. The wave of layoffs at profitable companies isn’t primarily about AI or economic downturns. It’s the predictable result of scaling broken systems.
Holes in your foundation don’t disappear when you scale. They erupt. Build slowly, build sustainably, and invest in the people infrastructure before chasing growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you turn around a team with low engagement?
Start with radical honesty: lay out exactly what the situation is and what the next few months will look like. Give people explicit permission to leave if it’s not right for them. Then invest heavily in the people who stay — through manager training, weekly listening sessions, and building psychological safety.
What is the CHAOS framework?
CHAOS stands for Keep, Automate, Optimise/Outsource, and Scrap. It’s a quarterly exercise where you categorise everything you do and systematically decide what to keep doing, what to automate with technology, what to delegate, and what to eliminate entirely. It’s especially useful for generalists who accumulate responsibilities across multiple domains.
How much should I budget for a new hire?
Budget for the salary plus a minimum of 6-9 additional months to cover recruitment time, ramp-up period, and the risk of mis-hires. Mis-hires can cost 18+ months of salary when you factor in severance, lost productivity, and restarting the search. Realistic budgeting prevents financial surprises.
This article is based on a conversation between Generalist World founder Milly Tamati and Neda Sahebelm on The Generalist World Pod. Connect with Neda on LinkedIn or visit Keshty.
