Leadership Isn't Personal · Chapter 3

The Leadership
Loop

Leadership isn't a style. It's a closed loop. Inputs produce signals, signals shape behavior, behavior produces outcomes, and outcomes feed back into the inputs you set next. Skip the feedback, and leadership becomes personality. Run the loop, and it becomes a system.

The Leadership Loop diagram
How to read the loop
Inputs. The standards, structures, and routines you put in place.
Signals. What the system tells people every day — what gets attention, what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, what gets corrected.
Behavior. What people actually do in response.
Outcomes. What the team and the business actually produce — good and bad.
Feedback. The one most leaders skip. Outcomes should reshape the next inputs you set. When they don't, drift hardens into culture.
Leadership Isn't Personal — Companion Worksheet getov.xyz/book
The Loop Tracer

Reverse-engineer one bad outcome.

Pick one recent failure — a missed commitment, a blown deadline, a one-on-one you kept skipping. Trace it backward through the loop. The point isn't blame. The point is to find the missing or misaligned input that's still sitting there, ready to produce the same outcome again.
1
The outcome.
What actually happened? Stick to the observable — the event, the miss, the injury, the delay.
2
The behavior behind it.
What did people do (or not do) that produced the outcome? Again — not their character. Their actions.
3
The signal the system was sending.
Given what got attention, rewarded, tolerated, and corrected over the last 90 days — what did the system tell people was actually important? Be honest.
4
The input that was missing or misaligned.
Which standard was verbal instead of written? Which feedback never reached you? Which consequence never landed? Name one.
5
What changes about the input this week.
Don't fix the behavior. Fix the input that produced it. One change. One owner. One date.
The Loop Tracer · from Chapter 3 getov.xyz/book