A leadership program designed to help teams lead with clarity, focus, courage, and accountability — as one team.
Every operation reaches a point where what got you here won't get you there. The pressure to deliver keeps increasing — faster decisions, tighter margins, more complex stakeholder environments, workforces that want more meaning and more autonomy than ever before. The instinct is to tighten controls, add process, and demand more from the team.
That instinct is not wrong — but on its own, it breaks teams. Control without trust produces compliance, not ownership. Process without judgement produces rigidity, not resilience. Pressure without clarity produces burnout, not performance.
This program was built for leaders at the FedEx QAR Hub who are being asked to deliver all three at once: stronger performance, a healthier culture, and a genuine capacity for change — without losing the operational discipline that makes the business work.
It does not treat culture and performance as competing priorities. It treats them as one system.
Three mandates that reinforce one another. None of them work alone.
Embracing change as an opportunity, not a threat — and driving it with energy and purpose. This mandate is about the inner shift before the outer one. You cannot lead a team through change you have not yet accepted yourself. Participants practice noticing their own resistance, reframing uncertainty as signal rather than noise, and communicating change in ways that invite commitment rather than compliance.
Setting clear expectations, holding yourself and your team accountable, and celebrating what works. Performance management is often misunderstood as a control mechanism. In this program, it is taught as a leadership discipline: the ability to be specific about what good looks like, to have honest conversations when the bar is not met, and to recognise effort and outcome distinctly. It is how ownership becomes visible.
Leading with integrity, making decisions, and having the conversations that matter. Courage is not the absence of doubt — it is the willingness to act in its presence. Participants work on the specific conversations they have been avoiding, the decisions they have been deferring, and the signals they send when they do and do not speak up. This is the hardest of the three because it is the most visible.
Culture is not a separate initiative from performance. It is the system by which performance actually happens.
Salomons.Coach · Program Principle
A multi-workshop series delivered to the Hub Leadership Team — designed so each session builds on the last, with deliberate space between sessions for leaders to apply what they have learned in their own context.
Each workshop builds deliberately on the last. The arc moves from truth to sustainability — naming reality before translating it into behaviour, designing the daily system before reinforcing it, and only then asking how to make it last.
From fragmentation → one leadership team
From alignment → execution through others
From intent → daily leadership system
From system → consistent behaviour
From improvement → sustainable results
The program does not rely on participant enthusiasm. It measures movement. Before Workshop 1 begins, each member of the Hub Leadership Team is interviewed individually against the ten program goals — producing a diagnostic baseline grounded in behavioural observation, not self-report. After each workshop, the team scores itself again. The gap between those two lines is the story.
The most telling movement in the final workshop was not an increase — it was a decision to score lower. The team revised its own rating on "We deliver hub performance!" downward, even though the underlying trend is upward and targets are now in sight. Their reasoning: good enough is not yet good enough.
That willingness to be more honest with themselves, rather than claim credit for progress, is itself the shift the program set out to produce. Senior management read the lower score the same way — not as a setback, but as a signal of the increased ownership the team will need to accomplish a service performance breakthrough. Operational excellence became the team's own agenda, not a directive from above.
It is the clearest evidence on this page that culture has become the system by which performance actually happens.
Diagnostic baseline n = 9 leaders, interview phase, September 2025. Workshop 5 self-assessment n = 9 leaders, final workshop. Scores are team averages on a 1–10 scale; the diagnostic is grounded in interview-based behavioural observation, not self-report, which is why it is a more honest reference point than a first-day survey.
Name the change they are leading — in their own words, in a way their team can repeat back.
Set a clear performance expectation and hold it, without collapsing into either avoidance or aggression.
Have a difficult conversation they have been avoiding — and do it in a way that strengthens the relationship.
Distinguish between a decision that is theirs to make and one that belongs to the team, and communicate each clearly.
Recognise the signals they send as a leader — especially the ones they are not aware of.
Operate as one Hub Leadership Team — with shared language, aligned expectations, and visible follow-through.
Founder · Salomons.Coach
Based in Arnhem, Jan works with leadership teams on transformation, performance, and culture — drawing on a practice grounded in HBR, INSEAD, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the work of Karl Weick, Daniel Pink, Clayton Christensen, and Argyris & Schön.
His approach is deliberately people-centered and systems-oriented: he surfaces the tensions organisations prefer to leave unspoken — ownership versus structure, empowerment versus control, learning versus zero-defect logic — and helps leadership teams work through them rather than around them.
Jan publishes the bi-weekly newsletter The Leadership Compass and contributes to the broader leadership conversation as a member of the HBR Advisory Council for Leadership. His current book, Leading in a VUCA World, is in writing.
Your development does not end with the certificate. Subscribe to The Leadership Compass — a bi-weekly newsletter with concrete tools and frameworks to keep applying what you built. You can also reach out directly with situations you want a second perspective on.
Subscribe to the newsletterIf you are responsible for leadership development, transformation, or operations — at another part of FedEx or at a different organisation entirely — and you are facing the same pressure to deliver performance, culture, and change at once, this program can be adapted. The mandates travel; the material does not.
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