The Energetic Wholeness Behind the Most Effective Teams

Most founders can tell something is off with their team long before they can say what it is.

Nothing is obviously broken. You can't point to any one thing that went wrong.

But the enthusiasm isn't what it used to be. Deadlines are starting to slip. Everything takes more effort than it should.

So you do what most founders do. You bring it up at the all-hands. You add incentives. You push a little harder.

Nothing changes.

Usually, the cause is a pile of small things no one thinks twice about.

Someone says they'll do something and never does. Someone has a concern about a colleague and keeps it to themselves. A missed number gets blamed on another team. A founder swallows their frustration to get through the meeting.

Every one of those is an integrity problem.

That might sound strange. When we hear the word integrity, we often think of ethics: honesty, being a good person. By that measure, most of these barely register.

But integrity comes from the word integer, a whole number. At its root, it means wholeness. And when a team stops being whole, it leaks the energy it needs to build.

Those leaks tend to show up in the same four places. Once you know where to look, you can find them on your team this week and get that energy flowing back toward your vision.

The Four Places Your Team Leaks Energy

The key to success is the percentage of your and your team's creative energy that's focused on creating the future you want.

When all your energy is available, you can enroll people in a vision. You can run through walls. When it isn't, everything feels harder.

The Conscious Leadership Group, building on the work of Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, describes integrity as energetic wholeness.

One way I like to think about it: imagine your life force energy flows through a pipe. The degree to which that pipe is intact, with no leaks and no kinks, determines how alive and powerful you feel.

CLG names four pillars of integrity. When you're out of integrity in any one of them, energy leaks out.

1. Unfelt feelings. All feelings flow through the same pipe, so if you stop one of them, you stop all of them.

2. Unkept agreements. When you don't do what you said you would do, some part of your mental energy stays stuck on it, like an open loop that needs to be closed. And when the agreement was with someone else, it erodes the trust between you.

3. Unowned responsibility. When we blame, we leak some of our power out, because we see ourselves as the victim. A team that blames has nobody left with the power to fix anything.

4. Unsaid communication. When you have an important thought or feeling about someone you work with, one that keeps coming up, and you hold it back, it gets stuck in the pipe. Then there's buildup. On a team, that buildup is the tension in the meeting nobody names.

So how do you find them?

How to Restore Integrity Across Your Team

Start with yourself. Founders underestimate how energetically sensitive their teams are. Whatever state you're leading from, your team mirrors it back.

1. Run the audit on yourself.

CLG has a simple tool for this, called the Integrity Inventory. Write down whatever comes up for each of these:

• What feelings have I not felt?
• What agreements have I not kept?
• Where am I blaming instead of taking responsibility?
• What have I not said, and to whom?

Usually, I find something in all four.

2. Close the loops.

Treat every unkept agreement as a signal that something might be out of alignment. Then do it, renegotiate it, or cancel it. Keeping every agreement you've ever made would make you a slave to your former self.

If the agreement was with someone else, tell them as soon as you know: "I told you I'd do this, and I didn't. Is there anything I can do to repair that?"

That includes the agreements you make with yourself. A lot of our self-trust comes from honoring them.

3. Model how to be with feelings.

When your team is scared or frustrated, the instinct is to manage it. You reassure, you fix, you move on. Usually that's because you don't want to feel what you feel when they're upset.

One of the most useful things you can do as a leader is to model how to relate to those feelings instead. Name what you're feeling and allow yourself to be with it.

And when someone on your team tells you they're scared, reflect it back: "I hear that you're scared." If they haven't said it, offer it as a guess and check: "I imagine you might be feeling scared. Is that right?" Either way, do that before you try to fix anything.

4. Reveal first.

People say what they're really thinking when it feels safe to, and they find out whether it's safe by watching you.

When my second startup couldn't raise its Series A, my co-founder and I decided to tell the team the truth. It was super scary. I was sure people would leave. Instead, team members started telling us when they were interviewing elsewhere, and how it was going.

The candor ran both ways because we went first.

5. Hold each other accountable without blame or guilt.

When something gets missed, separate the accounting from the response. The accounting is just the facts: what did we say we'd do, and what happened? The response is what we can learn from it, and how each of us helped create it, without making anyone bad or wrong. Using the past to punish yourself or anyone else is a lose-lose.

When your whole team agrees to work this way, accountability becomes an act of service. You're supporting each other to stay in integrity, which is energizing.

One thing makes all five easier: teach your team this same language. Once everyone knows the four leaks, you can name one out loud and look at it together.

When Your Team Is Whole Again

Go back to that feeling that something was off with your team.

The instinct was to push harder. But pushing harder on a team that's leaking energy is like turning up the pressure on a leaking pipe. The leaks only get worse.

When the pipe is whole, you don't need the extra pressure. Frustration gets named instead of swallowed. The concern that's been sitting with someone for weeks finally gets said. Agreements get kept, or renegotiated out loud. Problems get owned instead of passed around.

And the creative energy that was leaking out goes back into building what you actually want to build.

That's what integrity looks like on a team.

So this week, before you reach for the next incentive or push a little harder, sit with one question: where is my team leaking energy, and where does it start with me?

This is a big part of the work we'll do together at the Sun Valley Founders Retreat, January 20 to 24, 2027. Twelve founders, four days in Sun Valley, Idaho, to find where your own energy has been leaking, come back into integrity, and go home with tools to restore it across your team.

If you're a founder who wants to operate at your full potential, and help your team do the same...

​Click Here To Learn More And Apply>>​

With love

Dave Kashen