How to build a team that actually wants to work for you

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 at Multiverse ranged from scaling teams from negative employee engagement scores to 63+ NPS in five months to building operational infrastructure through hypergrowth to establishing sustainable hiring and retention frameworks. Neda was also a team builder at Fox and National Geographic, leading expansion across Europe, Middle East, and Africa through the Disney acquisition.

What you'll learn:

Some takeaways:

Turn around toxic team cultures through radical honesty and permission to exit. When Neda inherited a team with -5 employee engagement NPS, she didn't sugarcoat the situation. Instead, 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 no-bullshit approach, combined with commitment from those who stayed, enabled a turnaround to 63 NPS in five months. Leaders often fear that transparency will drive people away, but actually it builds trust with those who choose to stay and prevents the slow poison of ambiguity.

Invest your leadership time in training managers, not doing their work. 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 them to identify and attract the right talent), retention (from onboarding through performance management to graceful exits), and 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.

Implement weekly office hours where you only 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 and absorb what's happening on the ground. 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 as carefully as you design onboarding. When someone leaves Neda's teams, they receive a structured goodbye: they announce their departure on their 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. How you treat departing employees signals to remaining team members whether they're valued humans or replaceable resources.

Stop building roles around people and start building around business needs. 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 square-pegs-in-round-holes scenarios where you're constantly trying to up-skill people in areas where they lack foundation, or bringing in senior people who expect resources you don't have. Contractors and fractional experts exist to solve today's urgent problems; your full-time team should be built to solve tomorrow's strategic challenges.

Budget for hiring reality, not hiring fantasy. 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 don't account for mis-hires, which can cost 18+ months of salary when you factor in severance, lost productivity, and restarting the search. Neda insists clients budget for salary plus a minimum six months (ideally nine) to create realistic financial planning that won't crater when hiring takes longer than hoped.

Apply the CHAOS framework quarterly to reclaim your time and focus. CHAOS stands for Keep, Automate, Optimise/Outsource, and Scrap. Start by categorising everything you do into four quadrants: what you love and should keep doing, what you hate but must keep doing, what you love but shouldn't be doing, and what you hate and shouldn't be doing. Then systematically decide what to keep, what to automate with technology, what to optimise and outsource to others, and what to simply eliminate. Neda applies this rigorously, even scrapping activities like networking for three out of four quarters annually to focus on deepening existing relationships rather than constantly meeting new people.

Prioritise healthy teams over happy teams, and happy teams over high-performing teams. Neda's hierarchy of team needs (healthy, then happy, then high performing) mirrors Maslow's hierarchy. A sick team can only think about survival, not growth. McKinsey research shows that organisations in the top diversity quartile (a key health indicator) were 39% more likely to financially outperform those in the bottom quartile. Yet Gallup's 2024 data reveals global employee engagement has fallen to just 21%, costing the global economy $8.9 trillion in lost productivity. 9% of global GDP. These numbers prove that skipping health and happiness in pursuit of performance is a catastrophically expensive mistake.

Recognise that chaotic structures inevitably lead to savage restructures. When companies build unsustainably, hiring too fast without proper foundations, creating roles around people rather than needs, or failing to invest in manager development, they inevitably face brutal corrections later. The wave of layoffs at profitable companies isn't primarily about AI or economic downturns; it's the predictable result of scaling broken systems. Build slowly and sustainably from the start with proper organisational design, and you're far less likely to face the reputational damage, productivity loss, and talent exodus that mass layoffs create. As Neda observes, holes in your foundation don't disappear when you scale, they erupt.

Where to find Neda

Where to find Milly

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🙏 Special thanks to our podcast producer James McKinven! (get in touch for all your podcast needs, he’s really great!)