Land the Plane: A Framework for Restoring Team Momentum
Have you ever led a team that felt stuck? Meetings are met with blank stares, communication seems to erode, and there’s a concerning lack of urgency and enthusiasm from the team. As you spin up new initiatives and establish annual goals, you find forward movement clunkier, and it becomes more difficult to “land the plane.”
Is the team losing motivation? Are they resisting change? Or have you, without realizing it, started flying at the wrong altitude?
Every leader of a complex team will bump up against what I like to call altitude problems: the friction that occurs when there is a gap between how the leader sees the landscape and how the team experiences it on the ground. As context shifts, it’s easy for leaders and teams to start operating at different levels of awareness. It often feels as if the leader and their team are speaking different languages.
There are three common patterns, each stalling momentum in a different way:
When the leader flies too high: Vision soars, but execution loses shape. Teams are left with abstraction instead of direction, unsure how to turn the plan into daily action.
When the leader flies too low: Leadership collapses into the weeds. The focus on details—whether in reviews or in messaging—drains momentum and flattens enthusiasm. What should inspire instead starts to feel procedural.
When the leader is out of sync: The message lands wrong. The gap between the leader’s reality and the team’s reality erodes trust and engagement. (For example, a leader announcing “an exciting efficiency push” just weeks after layoffs.)
Altitude problems are predictable hazards of leadership, especially as complexity, scale, and pace increase. Whatever the trigger, the result is the same: coherence—the sense that everyone understands the same picture and is pulling in the same direction—breaks down. Without it, momentum slows.
Distilled from a decade of working with the CFO's executive team at Google, this is the framework I use to help leaders navigate altitude gaps and restore coherence.
Maintaining Coherence Through Complexity
In complex systems, maintaining coherence and shared understanding becomes a critical but elusive leadership capability. It’s what allows people at different levels to make good decisions without waiting for instructions. When coherence is strong, context cascades naturally and teams remain aligned, move quickly, and stay engaged. When it’s weak, even simple changes feel uphill.
Coherence doesn’t come from control, but from a shared grasp of reality. Leaders who sustain it continually test their assumptions against what their teams experience and shape their strategy and messaging accordingly. How well you do this depends on how attuned you are to your team and how intentional you are in communicating with them.
To navigate altitude problems and land the plane (with the passengers still on board, critically) leaders need:
Awareness of conditions (A.I.R.)
Ability to adjust controls (C.R.A.F.T.)
Check the A.I.R.
Most leaders don’t lose traction because they are imprecise with their words; they lose it because they can’t feel where their team is.
To keep your team moving in the same direction even as it shifts and grows, you need be aware of the climate and how your messages are landing. This requires greater intentionality as scale and complexity increase. How regularly are you checking the conditions before takeoff?
That’s where A.I.R. comes in. When you are shaping strategy or messaging for your team, check the AIR:
A — Atmospheric Pulse: What’s the overall climate? How’s morale, energy, and belief in direction? Do people understand and buy into the overall vision?
I — Issue-Specific Pulse: What’s the sentiment around this particular change, initiative, or topic? What’s the current level of understanding around it? What sensitivities do you need to be mindful of?
R — Real Talk: Are people telling you the truth, or just what’s safe to say? Are you leaving room for your team to surface their concerns and elevate what they’re hearing from their on-the-ground teams? How can you cultivate candor so that warning signals hit your radar early?
Without this awareness, you’re flying blind. Skipping this step means acting on assumptions: rolling out plans to a team that’s already fatigued, expecting results from a quietly confused workforce, or triggering frustration about issues you didn’t realize were brewing.
If you don’t already have robust channels to help you answer these questions, it’s time to start building the infrastructure. Surveys, skip-level conversations, red-teaming messages, reverse-mentoring, and pulsing your most empathetic, well-connected team members can help. Even just pausing to ask these questions in the first place before leading an all-hands meeting, introducing a new initiative, or sharing strategic direction will go a long way.
C.R.A.F.T. Your Message
Once you can see the conditions, the next challenge is steering through them. You have to become intentional about how you communicate with your team. The goal is clear and well-attuned communication, which means being precise, empathetic, and consistent in your messaging.
The C.R.A.F.T. framework helps leaders get ahead of potential altitude problems and shape messages that land. I recommend that leaders adjust their messaging through this lens:
C — Clarity: What’s the one thing people must understand? What are the three headlines that support this? By honing in on the salient takeaways, you’ll increase the likelihood that everyone will walk away on the same page.
R — Relevance: Think of your audience. Why does this matter to them? What are they expected to do with this information? How might they benefit or be inspired by this? This is how you filter out unnecessary complexity and translate vision into practical action.
A — Alignment to Strategy & Feedback: Why this, why now, and how does it connect to the bigger picture? Is this a response to feedback from the team or others? What opportunity do you have to demonstrate consistent or responsive leadership? This serves as a lever for keeping engagement and shared direction high.
F — Friction Scan: Bring in what you learned from your AIR check. Where might the team feel frustrated, roll their eyes, or push back? Get ahead of out-of-sync issues— you have some options:
Acknowledge it → name reality directly to demonstrate awareness. Like a pilot warning passengers of turbulence, this raises faith in your navigational ability.
Reduce it → adjust the plan, sequencing, or scope to ease the impact.
Support your team through it → provide resources, enablement, and two-way channels to adapt.
Underscore why you need to do it anyway → in high-friction scenarios, you need to be razor-sharp on the rationale if you hope to bring your team along with you. Remember: when the friction is high, strengthen the ‘why.’
T — Team Stance: How can you show you’re on the same side of the table? What’s your shared purpose? Coherence depends on trust. Bringing people onside with you turns hard asks into shared goals and keeps motivation intact when intensity rises.
Together, AIR and CRAFT form a feedback loop that restores coherence. AIR keeps you grounded in reality by surfacing how your team is interpreting direction, where friction is building, and how messages are landing. It helps you notice when altitude drift might be occurring and invites curiosity before action. CRAFT then helps you calibrate your delivery: Clarity, Relevance, and Alignment to Strategy keep your communication at the right level, while a Friction Scan and Team Stance ensure it lands in sync with your team. These practices create a system for staying attuned and aligned even as conditions shift, bringing vision, execution, and engagement back into the same frame— so you can finally land the plane.
Where Coaching Comes In
This work is less about communication technique than about calibration.
Coaching strengthens the same muscles behind A.I.R. and C.R.A.F.T. —awareness, discernment, and intentional action— so you can sustain clarity of direction and coherence when turbulence increases. It creates the conditions to assess reality clearly before acting, isolate the true source of friction, and respond with intention rather than reflex. With the benefit of partnership, you learn to read the dynamics shaping how your team experiences you and adjust your approach with precision.
I created this framework in support of the leaders I work with as they navigate complexity and change. The work truly comes alive in practice: together, we use this map to explore the unique nuances of your context, address competing demands, and cut through the fog to chart a clearer path forward for you and your team.
If you’d like to work on this together, reach out to me here.
A Simple Check-In
Before your next all-hands, pivotal one-on-one, or major announcement, pause to check the AIR:
What’s the current atmosphere?
What issue-specific signals am I hearing?
How can I increase the upstream flow of real-talk about how this will land?
Then, test your CRAFT: is your message clear, relevant, aligned to strategy, friction-aware, and grounded in team partnership?
If you found this helpful, you can download or save the one-page version of the A.I.R. + C.R.A.F.T. framework below for quick reference.
