Molly Graham is the epitome of the type of person whom is very nice to collaborate with. She spent decades working closely with some of the most successful leaders in tech, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Bret Taylor, and more recently (through her Glue Club community), she’s guided hundreds of leaders through the chaotic, lonely, and overwhelming journey inside early-stage and fast-growing companies. Drawing from these experiences, she is able to find patterns in what works and doesn’t and, more than anyone else I’ve met, is able to translate these lessons into powerful and memorable metaphors.

In her piece below, which will probably become as iconic as “Give Away Your Legos,” she builds on the Lenny newsletter recent podcast conversation to unpack a management framework that will change how you tackle team challenges : the Waterline Model.

There’s a moment most leaders recognize. You’ve set a clear goal (or so you think), your team’s bought in (or so they say), yet timelines keep slipping, execution is messy, and you’re having the same conversations over and over. When that happens, it’s tempting to jump straight to people-based explanations : “This team just doesn’t work well together.” “That person isn’t strong enough.” “We need better execution.”

Sometimes that’s true. But after two decades of working inside companies like Google, Facebook, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and supporting leaders at companies like Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Gamma, I’ve come to believe that blaming people for problems that are actually structural is one of the biggest leadership traps there is.

I’ve learned to slow down in these moments and use a simple diagnostic tool I picked up early in my career : the Waterline Model.

I first learned how to use this tool when I was leading 75-day wilderness expeditions in Patagonia and Alaska for the National Outdoor Leadership School at age 22. Out there, when a team isn’t working, things fall apart fast. People get cold, hungry, tired, scared. There’s no hiding behind process or politeness, and there’s definitely no time for vague diagnoses like “the vibe is off.” You have to identify the source of what’s disrupting the team—not just the symptoms—and fix it quickly.

We learned the Waterline Model¹ as instructors and taught it as part of the curriculum to students. Since then, I’ve used it anytime a team is underperforming, missing goals, or struggling more than they should be. More than anything, it has helped me avoid misdiagnosing problems, cycling through people unnecessarily, and wasting time fixing the wrong thing. At its core, the Waterline Model is a way to diagnose where a problem is actually coming from before you decide what to do about it.

How the Waterline Model works

Here’s the basic picture. Imagine a boat moving across the water—that boat is your team. The boat’s destination is your goal : hitting a KPI, winning a major new customer, shipping a product. Sometimes the water is calm and the boat is moving forward smoothly. Other times, it feels like you’re rowing through a hurricane and no one can quite explain why.

When I use this model, I’m able to move beyond the natural human instinct to automatically blame the people. The Waterline Model helps me investigate one question : What’s going on below the surface that’s making things harder than they should be ?

This model gives you four places to look, in order, and it comes with a memorable rule of thumb : snorkel before you scuba. Start at the top, always. Snorkeling means checking the shared systems first—goals, roles, and decision-making—before you start diagnosing personalities.

At the top, just below the surface, is structure. This is the stuff that helps people know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how success is defined : vision, goals, context, expectations, role clarity, and org design. In my experience, this is where a huge percentage of issues on teams actually shows up.

The next layer is dynamics—how the team works together day-to-day. This is where I look at how decisions get made, how conflict shows up and gets resolved, and how information flows (or doesn’t). Even with clear goals and roles, teams can struggle here. Structure and dynamics are systems shared by everyone on the team, so you can most directly affect the collective team performance at these levels.

Below that is interpersonal—tension between two people, lack of trust, unresolved conflict, style clashes. These issues are real, but they’re often caused or amplified by problems higher up.

And at the very bottom is individual—what’s happening inside a single person : skill gaps, stress, confidence, values, life stuff.

All four layers matter. Any one of them can make the water choppy.

But the Waterline Model and “snorkel before you scuba” remind me to start with the issues that impact the most people—closest to the surface—and only go deeper once I’ve ruled things out. Before you decide someone is the issue, you need to know that structure and dynamics aren’t pushing them toward exactly the behavior you’re frustrated by.

In conclusion we can say that the waterline model is a very efficient management tool. I will continue to delve deeper more about it.