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Gridley: Shared mental models of leadership enable companies to move faster

Hilary Gridley · How to build a team that can “take a punch” | Hilary Gridley (Head of Core Product, Whoop) · Jun 15, 2025 · at 31:44

Hilary Gridley, Head of Core Product at Whoop, discusses the operational velocity gains of teaching teams how strategic executives evaluate problems.

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“When you get an entire organization working that way, where everyone's working from the same models of, like, how, what the CEO thinks matters what level of, like, risk tolerance the company has, things like that, then you can actually start to move much, much faster and communication becomes much, much, much less painful.”

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