One Week at a Time – How Leadership Grows Through Curiosity and Courage
Daring to Develop in Parallel
This case study tells the story of a concrete coaching collaboration with a manager who wanted to grow in his leadership role while facing complex organizational challenges. Instead of starting with ready-made answers, we began with curiosity, courage, and a simple rhythm: one week at a time. The work became as much about creating psychological safety as about handling strategic complexity.
Leading in a complex organization requires the ability to move across multiple levels simultaneously. In this case, coaching and development happened in parallel on four levels:
Personal leadership
Collegial collaboration between managers
The organization’s ability to handle complexity
The team’s ability for self-leadership through individualized leadership
To make this manageable, we needed a method that could create structure while leaving room for curiosity.
The choice fell on Improvement Kata.
Improvement Kata – A Framework for Movement and Learning
Improvement Kata is a method for goal-directed learning and improvement in complex environments. Instead of setting a fixed end-goal and planning the path to it, you define a Target Condition – a clearly described next state you want to move toward, even if you don’t yet know how to get there.
“I felt I had to solve everything at once. But taking it one week at a time gave me space to think – and actually do something about it.”
Each Target Condition is guided by an overarching goal – a Challenge – that provides direction for what kind of movement you want to explore.
Only one Target Condition is active at a time, but they don’t have to build linearly on each other.
In this case, the manager worked across several areas at once and at a high pace. One week’s Target Condition could focus on team collaboration, while the next week’s explored strategic structure or leadership communication – as long as each was linked to the overall Challenge.
Within each Target Condition, several experiments are designed to explore the unknown and generate learning.
An experiment should ideally be short (a day or less) and documented as follows:
What will be done
What I expect will happen
—(afterward) What actually happened
What I learned (the learning lies in the gap between expectation and outcome)
The critical step is to document expectations before the experiment, to avoid rewriting memory afterward.
The Improvement Kata involves two roles – the coach and the coachee (in this case, the manager). The Kata can be conducted by anyone in the organisation, but it is extra effective when a manager drives change by using the Kata. The manager’s role often includes coaching elements, for example, when supporting team members or fellow leaders.
The coach’s role is to support the coahee in formulating meaningful Target Conditions and identifying suitable experiments to explore what’s still unclear.
Coaching is not about delivering answers, but about enabling learning and building courage to take the next step.
That also means supporting reflection, helping to see patterns, and sometimes challenging assumptions or frames of interpretation.
“I never felt judged – only curiously challenged. That made me dare to experiment and grow as a leader, for real.”
Part 1: Personal Leadership – From Uncertain to Facilitating
The manager in this case already had self-awareness and a clear sense of what he wanted to develop: conflict management, structure, retrospectives, strategic planning, and people topics.
By formulating concrete Target Conditions and exploring them through short experiments, he gradually evolved his leadership approach.
“I realized how much it meant for the team just to be listened to. When I started asking more questions than giving answers, the dynamics changed.”
Examples:
Instead of mediating conflicts through individual talks, he invited all parties to joint dialogue sessions – carefully prepared and facilitated with support from the coach.
He let go of his preferred multitasking, “organized chaos” style when he realized the team needed clarity, flow, and predictability to stay afloat in an already volatile context.
He became confident in facilitating retrospectives, designing a format that worked in hybrid setups and focused on identifying experiments rather than fixing everything in the meeting. Both he and the team began to appreciate them.
He changed how he communicated upward: instead of merely informing, he brought topics for feedback, decision, and follow-up – which strengthened trust in both directions.
Part 2: Managers Leading Together – Structural Shift
Previously, collaboration between managers mainly consisted of 1:1 meetings.
During the process, the manager initiated a new rhythm: the three managers now meet twice a week to build shared understanding and coordination.
“It felt like leading inside a system where no one could really see the whole picture. Coaching helped me zoom out and see how things were connected.”
This led to:
Fewer frictions between teams
Faster decision-making when issues arose
A shared stance toward new demands and changes from above
Together, they could assess whether new initiatives from leadership were worth acting on or better left to settle – creating more stability further down in the organization.
Part 3: Self-Leadership in Practice – How the Team Grew Through Individualized Leadership
The team’s development wasn’t luck; it was the result of a leadership style increasingly tuned to individual differences rather than generalized needs.
The manager identified who had the capacity and motivation to take more responsibility – and gave them space to grow. Others were encouraged to focus deeply on their expertise, with protected zones for concentrated work.
“I had underestimated how much my own behavior affected others. Daring to stand by my decisions – even when uncomfortable – became a key turning point.”
“We went from postponing important conversations to actually having them. It wasn’t always easy, but it created a completely different calm in the group.”
This strengthened both motivation and collaboration. People felt seen, challenged, and relevant on their own terms. The team started to drive improvements from within, request structure, and demand clarity around bottlenecks and priorities.
Their growing self-leadership became even more evident when external demands increased. One member took on responsibility for a new area outside the team’s original domain. Through dialogue, sense-making, and trust, they handled it both practically and relationally.
The manager and team showed they could absorb change without breaking.
Part 4: Leading in Complexity – Shaping Direction When the Path Is Unclear
The improvement work happened within a reality that never stood still. New tasks, roles, and demands emerged constantly.
The manager used Improvement Kata to:
Integrate new areas of responsibility meaningfully into the team
Create dialogue around unexpected changes
Identify opportunities for individual growth
Reveal obstacles in the team’s flow and design improvement experiments
Gradually, he began to see his role as one of creating direction and conditions rather than holding everything together himself.
The result: the team took more ownership, started holding each other accountable – and began to challenge him as well.
Results and Summary
| Area | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership | Uncertainty in conflict handling, retrospectives, and upward communication | Confidence in facilitation, clear dialogue structure, ownership of direction |
| Team | Dependent on the manager for decisions, unclear roles | Self-leadership, initiative, and demand for improvement |
| Collaboration between managers | Only 1:1 conversations, fragmented picture | Shared leadership rhythm, coordination, proactive handling of external demands |
| Culture | Blame culture, team protectionism | Shared responsibility, solution-oriented dialogue, trust |
The Takeaway
This case shows how systematic work through small, targeted experiments can create movement across multiple dimensions at once:
A safer and more nuanced leadership style
A stronger, more aligned management trio
A team culture where improvement and ownership grow from within
None of this came from a major reorganization – it was built through small, deliberate steps that each week moved the organization a little closer to what was possible, but not yet known.
Using Improvement Kata as the framework created a habit of direction, reflection, and continuous learning – laying the foundation for real movement in the individual, the team, and the organization.
