The Investor: Delivering a Return on Investment
In my last article, The Debate Maker: Where Opinion Evolves Into Optimal Solutions, we explored how great leaders turn tension into alignment and alignment into action.
Now, we close the loop.
In this final article of the Multipliers Series, we bring every behavior together — the Talent Magnet, the Liberator, the Challenger, and the Debate Maker — and show how they mature into a self-sustaining system of leadership through The Investor.
The Investor doesn’t just lead people; they bring together all of the behaviors to grow leaders who grow leaders. The Investor culminates the Multiplers mindset by multiplying leaders. They are the glue that holds the multiplier system together, nurturing clarity, safety, discipline, and alignment into outcomes that matter, powered by the Flywheel of Execution.
Most leaders stop at empowerment. Investors go further by using the work to build leadership capability into every team member at scale.
For the Investor, development doesn’t end when your people can deliver. It ends when they can lead others to deliver, and develop them to lead.
The Investor is the umbrella behavior that ties the Multiplier together, turning autonomy, collaboration, and empowerment into a living rhythm of execution.
They don’t just build high-performing teams. They build teams that build high-performing teams.
The False Investor
The False Investor believes empowerment is the goal. They develop their team members to the point that they can be trusted to deliver the work. Then they give people freedom, step back, and hope that capability will continue to grow on its own.
Their intent is good; they genuinely want to show trust and give their team room to run. But if the leader stops developing team members when they are good “doers,” where do the future leaders come from?
Is a team with only one leader truly high-performing? What happens when that leader is out sick? What happens when they get promoted?
A leader who isn’t developing future leaders isn’t contributing to the growth or resilience of the company, and they aren’t building a team capable of backing each other up when the odds are against them.
Empowerment isn’t the finish line. It’s the starting line. The Investor’s work begins where empowerment ends, continuing to develop people until they can lead others with the same clarity, trust, and discipline.
The Real Investor
The Real Investor leads with engagement and intention; they aren’t just driving work, they are using the work to develop leadership capability in every team member.
To do that, they can’t just trust people to deliver, they teach them how to grow through delivery.
Investors don’t manage by proximity or control; they develop through structure, inspection, and curiosity.
They connect every behavior — Talent Magnet, Liberator, Challenger, and Debate Maker — through the Flywheel of Execution, creating a rhythm where learning and performance advance together.
The Flywheel keeps the system alive — each spin creating sharper alignment, stronger capability, and more confident teams.
How the Investor Moves Through the Behaviors
1. The Talent Magnet — Hire Believers, Not Bodies
Investors know that skill can be taught, but belief cannot. That’s why they hire people who already believe what the team believes, people inspired by the mission and drawn to the standard of excellence that defines your company.
Investors create radical clarity before the interview. At 120VC, every candidate reads the Thrive document before they ever meet a hiring manager. Thrive lays out exactly who we are, how we work, and what it takes to thrive here. No pitch, no selling, just truth. Candidates self-select: “Does this inspire me?” Those who opt out aren’t rejected; it’s alignment. Those who opt in have already taken the first step toward becoming “One of the 120.”
They screen for alignment, not accommodation. Hiring conversations center on belief and motivation, not perks or comfort. We don’t ask what people want from the job; we ask what drives them and how our mission resonates with that. The focus is always on fit to mission, not just fit to role.
Before anyone joins the team, the new hire and their future leader review their Job Architecture alongside their employment agreement. The Job Architecture defines the role’s purpose, how it measurably improves the Three Pillars: customer satisfaction, team member satisfaction, and profitability, and the specific requirements for promotion and mastery. This removes ambiguity and ensures that both sides understand what success looks like and how it will be measured.
Within the first 14 days, the new hire meets with their Execution Leader to create a Professional Development Plan (PDP). Together, they identify the mastery points to focus on during the first quarter, which 120VC tools and leadership behaviors to practice, and what measurable outcomes those improvements will drive.
The Professional Development Plan is then operationalized in the 2x2 Prioritization Matrix, a one-page alignment tool that organizes work by value and effort to ensure every team member is focused on the right outcomes. PDP objectives are entered into the “Work-In” section of the 2x2 so growth work is visible, scheduled, and aligned with daily priorities. Development isn’t a side project; it’s part of how the work gets done.
Every week begins with a Weekly Focusing Exercise (WFE), where team members define what will be true by week’s end, update their 2x2s, and time-block those outcomes on their calendars. The WFE sets the direction and creates a visible agreement between the leader and the team about what success looks like for the week.
Each day ends with a Daily Focusing Exercise (DFE), a brief reflection that inspects progress against those weekly commitments. Team members record what they accomplished, note what carried over, identify blockers, and reset priorities for the next 24 hours. The DFE only delivers value when a WFE exists. One defines the plan; the other keeps execution aligned to it. Together, they create the daily and weekly rhythm of accountability that drives predictable progress.
At the end of the week, during the Weekly Team Meeting, team members share their 2x2s, review accomplishments, and align support. Because the PDP is built into the 2x2, advancement is prioritized and visible right alongside client outcomes. Progress is inspectable, learning is public, and development becomes a shared practice. The team grows together, not in isolation.
The Flywheel of Execution is what transforms the Talent Magnet from a hiring process into a living system of development. Think of it as the engine that converts belief into measurable progress. Each spin of the Flywheel moves the team through a rhythm of clarity, execution, and reflection. It begins when expectations are defined through Thrive and the Job Architecture, gains speed as growth is operationalized in the PDP and 2x2, and stays calibrated through the weekly and daily focusing exercises. Every rotation builds momentum; people get clearer, faster, and more capable. Over time, the system stops depending on individual effort and starts sustaining itself through rhythm and habit. That’s the power of the Flywheel in this first layer of maturity in the multiplier behaviors: it turns belief into behavior and behavior into predictable success.
2. The Liberator — Coach Safety Into Performance
Once belief and clarity are established, the Investor turns that foundation into capability. The Liberator behavior is how they do it. Liberators create safety not by lowering the standard, but by building the confidence and discipline that make risk and feedback productive. Safety is never about comfort; it is about trust, the belief that accountability and empathy can exist in the same conversation.
At this layer of maturity, the Flywheel evolves. The Investor does not just lead work; they lead thinking. Every rhythm in the system becomes a coaching opportunity. The 1-3-1, the Challenge | Opportunity discussion, the Weekly Team Meeting, and daily execution reviews all give the leader visibility into how people think. Each cycle of the Flywheel, alignment, execution, inspection, and reflection, reveals the next opportunity to coach, refine, and strengthen capability.
Coaching happens in the work, and it begins before execution. The 1-3-1 and Challenge | Opportunity sessions are toll gates that force rationalization and put thinking on stage before effort begins. Both create visibility into the team’s logic, allowing the Investor to vet the proposed work, ensure it will measurably improve the 3-pillars, and develop capability before cost or drift appear. The 1-3-1 is used for high-value, low-effort work that can be completed individually, while the Challenge | Opportunity format addresses high-value, high-effort projects that require a team of people to complete.
In both cases, the Investor starts with non-directive coaching, asking clarifying questions that sharpen reasoning, strengthen judgment, and test alignment to the Three Pillars. When a team member or group lacks the experience to create a viable plan through questions alone, the leader shifts to directive coaching, teaching through the work, and modeling how to define outcomes, reduce ambiguity, and eliminate unnecessary trade-offs. These moments make thinking visible, normalize transparency, and turn planning into shared accountability.
The Weekly Team Meeting reinforces this culture of coaching in the open. During the 2x2 Alignment Round, each person shares their planned outcomes and support needs for the week. The Investor listens for vague language or drift and immediately coaches for clarity. During Challenge | Opportunity Surfacing, they teach the team to identify drag early and own resolution before it becomes escalation. In Team Mastery Development, they use real work as the teaching material, reviewing an artifact, dissecting a decision, or practicing one of the three coaching techniques: active listening, experience sharing, or directive coaching. When one person gets sharper in public, everyone watching levels up.
Outside of meetings, coaching continues through Daily Execution Leadership. Each day ends with an Eyes Up Report, where team members complete their Daily Focusing Exercise (DFE) to record accomplishments, carryovers, and blockers. The leader reviews these reflections daily. What people write is what they are thinking. If it is vague, so is their path to results. This inspection turns ordinary documentation into a developmental checkpoint. The same approach applies to meeting notes and Weekly Status Reports (WSRs); each one exposes thought process and maturity. The Investor uses these artifacts to coach for precision, reinforce outcome thinking to develop disciplined thinkers.
Through the Liberator behavior, the Flywheel of Execution gains its second layer of intentional coaching. The 1-3-1 clarifies direction, the 2x2 anchors focus, the WFE sets the plan, and the DFE calibrates it daily. The WSR captures learning and feeds it back into the next cycle. Every turn of the wheel makes thinking more visible and the team more capable. The work becomes the classroom, and the leader becomes the coach.
This is the second layer of maturity in the Multiplier system. The Talent Magnet curates belief and clarity. The Liberator uses that clarity to build confidence, accountability, drive outcomes, and build leadership capability. Each rotation of the Flywheel develops both the people and the process, refining thought from muddy to disciplined, from reactive to intentional. Through this rhythm, the team does not just perform; it learns to lead.
3. The Challenger — Challenge the Work, Not the People
Once belief and clarity are established through the Talent Magnet and capability is developed through the Liberator behaviors, the next layer of maturity is discipline. The Investor uses the Challenger behavior to protect capacity, drive growth, and elevate leadership development to the next level. This is where teams learn to challenge the work, not the people, by elevating their thinking. Elevated thinking is elevated capability, and the 1-3-1 and Challenge | Opportunity discussions put that thinking on stage. The Challenger forces people to rationalize their ideas publicly, refine them through coaching, and define measurable value before they earn the team’s effort.
Simon Sinek told the world to “Start With Why,” and he was right. He saw that purpose drives commitment, and commitment drives performance. But no one built the system to make it stick. The world loved the idea and kept doing the opposite. People still start with what and how because it’s easier, faster, and safer. That’s our human default, the status quo.
Seth Godin reminded us, echoing Theodore Levitt, that “people don’t want a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole.” He was right, too. But most organizations are still selling drills. IT sells cloud migrations and AI. HR sells engagement programs. Manufacturing sells state-of-the-art upgrades. Everyone’s selling tools when they should be carefully defining holes.
John Mackey’s Conscious Capitalism convinced a generation of leaders, me included, that if we focused on purpose and people, profit would take care of itself. I bought in hard. I built my business around his four pillars: higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, and conscious culture, and they became my quarter-inch drill bits. They sounded good, they felt good, and they almost bankrupted me. Purpose without accountability isn’t leadership; it’s drift.
The Challenger fixes that. It ties purpose back to measurable value for customers, team members, and shareholders. Being cool isn’t the strategy. Outcomes that measurably improve the lives of our customers, team members, and shareholders are the only strategy. John’s Four Pillars nearly killed my company. My Three Pillars saved it. They weren’t born from theory; they were forged from experience, built to keep a company alive while growing people and profit together.
The Investor empathizes with Simon, Seth, and John because they were right. They just didn’t have the system. The Challenger finishes their work. Through the Challenger behavior, the Flywheel of Execution gains its third layer: systematized why, or value reconciliation, the elevated rationalization of value. In most companies, reconciliation happens after the work, after the money is spent, and the time is gone. In the 120VC system, Value Reconciliation happens first. It’s how leaders prove that the work deserves to exist before it earns the team’s effort.
The Investor uses the Challenger behavior to turn “why” into something measurable and repeatable. They teach the team to stop rationalizing activity and start rationalizing value. Every initiative, every dollar, and every hour must have a clear “why” that measurably improves life for the company’s three stakeholders: customers, team members, and shareholders. Customers want to feel loved. Team members want to feel successful and like they are growing. Shareholders want to see stock value growth. That’s it.
People don’t want quarter-inch drill bits; they want quarter-inch holes. Yet most teams still pitch the drill. The Challenger forces the conversation to a higher altitude. They make people define the hole, the measurable outcome for customers, team members, and shareholders, before they touch the drill. They rewire teams to sell results, not tools; growth, not process; value, not vanity.
When people start defining value in those human terms, rationalization becomes leadership. It transforms from the behavior that breaks companies into the discipline that builds unstoppable ones. The Challenger operationalizes what thinkers like Sinek, Godin, and Mackey started. It turns the “why” from a philosophy into a leadership system, a visible, measurable process that ensures every idea, every initiative, and every spark of effort measurably improves the lives of real people, drives growth for the company, and develops leaders in the work.
4. The Debate Maker — Where Opinion Evolves Into Optimal Solutions
The Debate Maker behavior is where opinion evolves into the clarity of optimal solutions, not through argument, but through disciplined listening, evidence, and structured curiosity.
By the time the Investor reaches the Debate Maker behavior, the Flywheel is already running. The team knows how to deliver, rationalize, create demand, and coach. The Debate Maker keeps those behaviors sharp by turning tension into alignment and alignment into action. This behavior supports the Liberator and Challenger: it keeps coaching factual instead of emotional and keeps rationalization grounded in evidence instead of assumption.
The Debate Maker replaces debate, which is a competition, with Active Listening. It’s structured curiosity designed to leverage the collective IQ of the team to surface the best possible solution, not the easiest or fastest one. The Investor uses this approach in every 1-3-1, Challenge | Opportunity, or problem-solving meeting to ensure stalled objectives are advanced as quickly as possible.
Using the five steps of Active Listening: Questioning, Reflecting, Empathizing, Clarifying, and Summarizing, the Debate Maker leads the team through a disciplined process:
Surface opinions so every voice and perspective is visible.
Separate facts from assumptions to reveal truth and eliminate bias.
Synthesize collective reasoning into an optimal solution aligned to the Three Pillars.
Once the optimal path is clear, the Debate Maker reinforces alignment through commitment. When full agreement is not possible, they ask the team to disagree and commit, to take one small, evidence-gathering step forward and let the results speak for themselves. Progress beats paralysis. Assumptions are tested through action, not argument.
This turns argument into analysis, disagreement into discovery, and tension into clarity. It ensures discussion leads to decisions, not drift, and that alignment replaces approval. Disagree and commit is how the Debate Maker keeps the Flywheel in motion when consensus cannot be reached. It is the discipline of progress over perfection. The Debate Maker’s promise is simple: we will succeed together, or fail and learn together, but we will always move forward as one team.
When this behavior matures, the Liberator’s safety and the Challenger’s discipline combine into a rhythm of collective reasoning, belief, and commitment. Every 1-3-1 and C|O becomes a proving ground for alignment; progress replaces paralysis. The Debate Maker ensures that the team’s collective IQ and collective belief are behind every decision.
The Investor Delivers a Return
When the Investor behavior matures, leadership stops being a role and becomes an investment strategy. The Investor invests every ounce of energy, every dollar of company capital, and every hour of team effort into generating measurable returns for the Three Pillars: customer satisfaction, team member satisfaction, and profitability.
Every behavior in the Multiplier system is an investment vehicle. The Talent Magnet invests in belief and clarity, ensuring that every hire brings aligned conviction, not just capability. The Liberator invests in capability through coaching, turning experience into confidence and safety into speed. The Challenger invests in leadership development by coaching thinking to clarity and discipline to value reconciliation. It ensures that every initiative earns its right to exist before effort is spent and builds leadership capability in the team with every rep. The Debate Maker protects those investments by converting opinion into optimal solutions, keeping the system efficient, aligned, and frictionless.
The Investor is not just leading the team; they are continually investing in it. Every coaching moment, every rationalization, every meeting, and every deliverable is capital, deployed with the expectation of measurable improvement to the Three Pillars. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is done because “we always do it.” The Investor treats leadership as a portfolio of decisions, each expected to return growth, trust, and performance.
And here is the truth most people miss: the goal is not to create independence from leadership. Every team needs a leader. But leadership is not about hierarchy; it is about value in motion. The moment a team member brings forward a Challenge | Opportunity and the team decides to follow, they are leading. The Investor shifts seamlessly into coaching and facilitation, because in that moment, leadership has passed. The official leader has not lost control; they have multiplied it.
This is the difference between a team that performs and a team that is unstoppable. Every person is a Multiplier. Every decision, every investment, every effort is tied to measurable improvement for customers, team members, and shareholders. That is how belief becomes growth. That is how leadership compounds.
The Investor does not just manage capital; they multiply it. They do not just grow teams; they create leaders who lead each other. That is the measurable return on investment and the legacy of a true Multiplier.
Your Next Move
The Investor’s job is never done. The Flywheel keeps spinning because the Investor keeps investing. Every meeting, every decision, and every deliverable is a chance to deploy capital, your energy, your team’s time, and the company’s money, for measurable improvement in the Three Pillars: customer satisfaction, team member satisfaction, and profitability.
This is your next move: stop managing effort and start investing for return.
If you are inspired by the Investor and want to learn how to invest in the other behaviors, go back and study the series.
If you want to Unleash the Irreplaceable, download the entire Multipliers Series and get the playbooks for how Multipliers elevate teams.
The Talent Magnet, The Liberator, The Challenger, and The Debate Maker each spell out exactly how to build these practices into your daily leadership. Read them. Apply them. Teach them to your team.
Your next move is simple: invest with intention, measure the return, and never stop multiplying.
Now, ask yourself and your team these “Shift Questions” and try shifting the way you are leading today:
Where are you managing effort instead of investing for measurable return?
Which of your team’s current initiatives have earned their right to exist through value reconciliation, and which are still just effort?
What would happen to your business if every team member became a Multiplier who invested their time, energy, and judgment like an Investor?
Series Note
This is the close of the Multipliers Series, but it is not the end of the work.
The Investor behavior is the capstone, the moment leadership becomes a system of measurable return.
The Talent Magnet curates belief and clarity.
The Liberator builds capability through safety and coaching.
The Challenger builds leadership capability by teaching discipline, clarity, and value reconciliation.
The Debate Maker ensures alignment by turning opinion into optimal solutions.
And the Investor uses all of them to build teams that deliver a return on investment and develop leaders of unstoppable teams.
The Flywheel of Execution is not theory. It is the daily practice of leadership that drives measurable improvement across the Three Pillars: customer satisfaction, team member satisfaction, and profitability.
When every behavior is in motion, the system sustains itself.
This is how the Multiplier concept becomes growth. That is how leadership compounds.
If you are ready to build a team of Multipliers who deliver measurable return on investment, start now.
Unleash the Irreplaceable.
