The Blind$pot Leadership Accelerator
Everyone leaves with a commitment. Ninety days later,
I check.
One day with your leadership team. All five frameworks, and a re-measure that tells you whether it held.
For chief executives and founders with a leadership team of five or more. Delivered in person, anywhere in the United States.
Up to ten leaders measured before the day, and again ninety days after it.
Delivered by Hacia Atherton, Principal, MLE Advisory.
Certified Practising Accountant
Master of Applied Positive Psychology
Founder, Empowered Women in Trades
Former CEO
Three-time Amazon bestselling author
Take the day rather than the three hours if
The short version of this work is the Blind$pot Intensive. Three hours, six leaders, three frameworks. It is the right choice for most teams and I will say so on the call if it is.
The full day is the right choice when one of these is true.
You already know what is wrong. You have named it twice and nothing moved.
Your leadership team is bigger than six, and the layer below the executives is where the change keeps dying.
You have run a session before, the room agreed, and by March nobody could tell you what had changed.
You need to hand a board or an investor something more durable than a feeling about your team.
There is a decision the team has been circling for a year, and three hours will not be enough to land it.
What you own at the end of the day
A written ninety day commitment from every leader in the room, in their own words, with their name on it.
All five frameworks taught, applied and usable by the team without me.
A measured baseline across up to ten leaders.
A re-measure ninety days later, and a movement report showing which commitments held and which did not.
The name of the thing the team had not been saying, on paper.
The re-measure is the part that makes this different from every offsite your team has sat through. It is also the part people quietly dread, which is exactly why it works.
Twenty minutes. I will tell you if the three hour version is enough.
Why I do this work
July 2017. A six hundred kilogram dressage mare came down on top of me in a training arena. Nine hours of surgery at the Alfred. Millimetres decided how that ended.
They told me I might not walk unaided again.
Months later I was in a hydrotherapy pool, going under, coming up, failing to stand, going under again. I had assumed the obstacle was my spine. It was not. What was actually holding me back was what I had decided about pain, about failure, and about what I was now allowed to expect of myself. None of that appeared on a scan.
I got back on my feet. I later ran a half marathon.
I had spent a career as an accountant reading balance sheets, and I had just learned, expensively, that the thing constraining performance is almost never the thing being measured. So I went back and did a Master of Applied Positive Psychology to understand why.
That is the whole of my work now. Every business I walk into has a number it cannot explain and a conversation it is not having. Those two facts are related, and almost nobody connects them.
Why a full day changes the outcome
The first three hours of any leadership session are politeness. That is not a criticism of your team, it is how rooms work.
In the Intensive I get past that quickly, because the measurement is done before I arrive and the difficult thing is already on the table. Three hours is enough to name it and decide what to do.
A full day buys you the second conversation. The one that happens after the room has already been honest once and discovered that nothing bad happened. That is where a leadership team stops negotiating with the problem and starts dividing it up.
It also buys the two frameworks that need more room than three hours allows, and it buys the hour at the end where every person writes what they will personally do about it.
Then ninety days later everybody gets measured again, and the commitments stop being a wall chart.
The Five Frameworks
Taught in plain language, then applied to your team's own results rather than a generic case study. Your leaders leave able to run all five without me in the room.
01
ABC · Autonomy, Belonging and Competence
What it is. Three psychological needs that Deci and Ryan established as the conditions for sustained motivation. Autonomy, having real choice in how the work gets done. Belonging, being genuinely part of something rather than adjacent to it. Competence, feeling capable at the thing you are being asked to do. Take one away and effort keeps going while discretionary effort quietly stops.
What it does here. Scored across your team beforehand. The missing letter explains behaviour that has been read as attitude. A leader who has stopped bringing ideas is usually short on autonomy. A leader who has gone quiet in meetings is usually short on competence in one specific area nobody has named. A leader who is technically present and actually gone is short on belonging. Three different problems, three different fixes, routinely mistaken for each other.
02
PERMA · The Five Conditions Performance runs on
What it is. Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment. Seligman's model, and the most heavily researched framework in positive psychology.
What it does here. Scored across the team before the day. The lowest condition is where your attrition is coming from and usually where your slowest decisions are coming from. Most executive teams run strong on Accomplishment and weak on Meaning, which is the profile that looks excellent for two years and then loses three people in a quarter.
03
The Ladder of Inference · Where your decisions actually get made
What it is. Argyris mapped the seven rungs a person climbs in about a second, from the data in front of them, to the fraction they select, to the meaning they add, to the assumption, the belief, and the action. A person processes something in the order of seventy four gigabytes of information a day. Almost all of it gets filtered before it reaches a decision.
What it does here. This is where bias lives. Confirmation, affinity, halo, recency and anchoring are the five that cost businesses the most, and every one of them is a rung on this ladder. The team takes the last decision they argued about twice and walks both sides down it. The disagreement is almost never at the top.
04
The Silence Ledger · What your team is not saying, and what each silence costs
What it is. Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Her finding is the part most people skip. Safety does not produce performance directly. It produces learning behaviour, which is people seeking feedback, discussing errors and experimenting, and that is what produces performance.
What it does here. The Silence Ledger turns that into something you can count. Four silences, in ascending order of what they cost. The idea nobody offered, so you never got the improvement. The concern nobody raised early, so you found the problem at full price. The mistake nobody owned, so somebody else repeated it. And the disagreement nobody voiced, which gives you the wrong decision, executed brilliantly.
Why it is not a wellbeing exercise. The foundational study was fifty one teams inside a furniture manufacturer with five thousand employees. Not a software company. Learning behaviour was what carried safety through to performance, which makes this an operations finding rather than a morale one.
05
Character Strengths · What each of your leaders is actually built for
What it is. The VIA classification of twenty four character strengths. Everybody has a signature set, and people perform closer to their ceiling when their week is spent inside it.
What it does here. Leadership teams are structured by function, never by strength, so people spend their days outside what they are best at and call it discipline. Every leader's top five go on the wall. Then the room looks at the work nobody in it is naturally built for, which is usually the work that keeps slipping.
The day, block by block
Every framework is taught briefly and applied at length, always to your team's own data rather than a case study. The uncomfortable block sits after lunch, never first, because people say the difficult thing once they have found out that nothing bad happened the first time.
9:00
9:20
10:25
13:10
11:25
12:25
14:35
15:25
16:25
The data is already in the room
Your team's aggregate on the wall inside ten minutes. The contract stated. The shape of the day.
ABC
Autonomy, belonging and competence, with your team's scores on all three. The missing need explains behaviour that has been read as attitude. Each leader identifies where they are short and what would close it.
PERMA
The five conditions and the team's scores. Small groups take one element each and produce specific actions rather than sentiments.
The Ladder of Inference and Bias
Seven rungs, the perception exercise, and the five biases that cost leadership teams the most. Then the twice-argued decision, walked down both sides.
LUNCH
The Silence Ledger
The longest block and the centrepiece. Four silences, your scores, anonymous examples from the loudest one, and then the question that matters. What made it rational, and who owns the thing that made it so.
Character Strengths
Every leader's top five on the wall. Where strengths are being wasted, and which work in this business nobody in the room is built for. The team reallocates one real piece of work on strength rather than function.
Commitments
Every leader writes their own ninety day commitment and reads it aloud. The room stress-tests each one against three questions. Is it specific, is it observable, and who will know.
Close
What happens at ninety days, and what the re-measure will and will not show.
The exit test. Ten written commitments that survive the specific, observable and who-will-know test, and one piece of work reallocated before anybody leaves the room.
How it runs
Before the day
Up to ten leaders complete the Blind$pot instrument privately, about twenty minutes each. Each receives a one page personal read nobody else sees. I read the aggregated pattern before I travel and build the day around what it says.
On the day
A full day in your building. Five frameworks taught in plain language, then applied live to your team's own data. The afternoon goes on the decision the team has been circling.
The last hour
Every leader writes a ninety day commitment in their own words, with their name on it. Not team goals. What that person will personally do differently, and how the room will know.
Ninety days later
The whole group completes a Pulse re-measure. You get a movement report against the baseline showing what shifted, what did not, and which commitments held.
What is in it for you
You stop being the only person in the building who can see the whole picture.
You get accountability that does not depend on you chasing it, because the re-measure does the chasing.
You find out within ninety days which of your leaders actually moved. That is a succession input as much as a development one.
You get out of the position of being the one who has to say the hard thing.
Your leadership team leaves with one shared language, so the next difficult conversation starts further along.
You walk into your next board meeting with a delta rather than an anecdote.
This is what you get out of it personally, as the one carrying it.
Work out your own number first
Before you look at the price, do this arithmetic. It takes two minutes and it is the only comparison that matters.
Take the fully loaded cost of your leadership team.
Divide it down to an hourly figure. Multiply by the hours a week they sit in meetings where a decision is made and then quietly unmade.
Then add the cost of replacing the last senior person who left for a reason that was not the reason they gave.
I do not know your number. You do.
This day gets measured against that number, not against a day rate. If your number is small, take the Intensive instead. If it made you stop reading for a second, keep going.
The Investment
$35,000
Blind$pot Team Assessment, ten leaders at $1,200
$12,000
Ninety day Pulse re-measure, ten leaders at $450
Individual written read for every leader
Aggregated team report and movement report
Additional leaders beyond ten
$4,500
Included
Included
$1,200 each
$16,500 of that is measurement you keep permanently, taken twice so you can see the difference. The rest is the day itself.
Two a month. I read every team report myself, so that number does not move.
up to ten leaders · travel billed at cost
Full day, all five frameworks taught and applied
Included
What people say afterwards
Hacia Atherton is the kind of operator you want in your corner. She brings genuine thinking to work that most companies treat as purely strategic, and she delivers. In an industry full of people who talk about impact, Hacia actually creates it.
Alexandra Senter, Chief Executive, Sentral Media Group
Time in the room
The Blind$pot Intensive
$15,000
The Leadership Accelerator
$35,000
Full day
Leaders included
Frameworks taught
Team assessment beforehand
Written 90 day commitments
Measurement included at list value
Three hours
Up to 6
Three of the five
Yes
No
$7,200
All five
Yes, from every leader
The shorter version
If the day is more than your team needs right now, the Intensive covers the same ground in three hours with three of the five frameworks. Most teams start there.
90 day re-measure and movement report
No
Up to 10
Yes
Yes
$16,500
If you are not sure which one your team needs, book the conversation and I will tell you.
How you know before you commit
I do not offer a money back guarantee. An outcome that depends on what ten people are willing to say in a room is not mine alone to promise, and a guarantee I could wriggle out of is worth less than none.
Here is what I do instead. Four checkpoints, and you can stop at any of them.
The call. Twenty minutes. If the three hour Intensive is enough for your team, I will say so, and it is a $20,000 difference in my own pocket to say it.
The data, before the day. The instrument runs a week ahead. If it comes back showing an aligned team with nothing significant underneath, I will tell you before I travel rather than after.
The re-measure is the proof. Ninety days later everybody is scored again against the same baseline. You are not asked to take my word for whether it worked. You get the delta.
One engagement at a time. No retainer, no minimum term, nothing to cancel. If you never speak to me again after the day, the baselines, the reports and the frameworks are still yours.
Book it even if
Your team says everything is fine. Especially then. A team that reports no friction is either exceptional or quiet, and those look identical from your chair.
You have run a full day before and nothing changed. Ask what was measured afterwards. If the answer is nothing, that is the whole answer.
You already know what the problem is. Knowing it and having ten people put their name against doing something about it are different events.
What waiting costs
The risk of leaving it is not that the problem gets worse. The risk is that it becomes normal.
A team that spends another year not saying the thing stops noticing that it is not being said. New people learn the silence inside a fortnight, and by then you are not fixing a conversation, you are fixing a culture.
This is not for you if
You want a motivational day. Nobody will feel especially good before lunch.
You want your own message delivered to the team by an outsider. The data says what the data says.
You cannot commit to the ninety day re-measure. Without it this is an expensive offsite and you should take the Intensive.
You are not prepared to hear what your team reported about your leadership. Your name is in that report too.
Who is running it
Hacia Atherton. Certified Practising Accountant, Master of Applied Positive Psychology, former chief executive, and three-time Amazon bestselling author of The Billion Dollar Blind$pot.
I advise boards and founders across construction, manufacturing, mining, finance, private equity and family business on the behavioural systems driving business outcomes.
I founded Empowered Women in Trades to move women's representation in skilled trades from three per cent to thirty by 2030. That work happens on construction sites, in manufacturing plants and in mining. They are the least sentimental rooms in business, and they are the reason none of what I teach is theoretical.
Telstra Best of Business Award, Victoria, 2024. Named among the Top 100 Women in Construction. Co-author with Joe Foster of Reebok in the How to Survive and Thrive series, and an advisory board member to university business schools and to government on workforce reform.
I deliver every Intensive personally. Four a month is the ceiling, because I read every team report myself.
What makes this different from an offsite
Two things. The diagnosis is finished before the day starts, so nobody spends the morning working out what the problem is. And there is a re-measure ninety days later, so the commitments made in the room have somewhere to be checked.
Why does the ninety day re-measure matter so much
Because commitments that are measured get kept and commitments that are not get forgotten by March. It is also the only way you find out which of your leaders actually moved, which is a more useful piece of information than anything said on the day.
Questions people ask
Who needs to be in the room
Up to ten, and they must include the people who actually decide. Ten is deliberate. It reaches the layer below your executives, which is where most change quietly dies.
Is what my team says confidential?
Individual responses are never shown to you or to each other. You see the aggregate pattern. Each leader gets their own personal read. That condition is what makes people answer honestly.
What if the data says the problem is me?
Then you will have found that out in a day rather than over the next two years, and you will have the ninety day re-measure to tell you whether what you did about it worked.
Should we do this or the Intensive
Most teams should start with the Intensive. Take the day when you have already named the problem and nothing moved, or when your team is larger than six. Ask me on the call and I will give you a straight answer.
Where do you travel
Anywhere in the United States. Flights and accommodation are billed at cost with receipts, never marked up.
Request a conversation
MLE Advisory operates by introduction. Tell us who you are and what the business is contending with, and you will hear back within one working day.
Read and answered personally. No sequence, no follow up from anybody else.
Or write directly. enquiries@mleadvisory.com