Notes from the practice
Most leadership competency models are too long to recall and too vague to apply. Build one from your own incidents, in observable behavior, wired into three decisions.
New executives rarely fail on capability. They fail on context, peer relationships and an unwritten mandate. A 90 day plan that addresses all three.
An engagement survey measures how people feel about working here. Culture is what gets rewarded, tolerated and punished. Here is how to measure company culture in behavior terms.
Change management moves a population to a known future state on a schedule. Culture change alters the consequences attached to everyday behavior. Picking the wrong one costs a year.
The 9 box grid started life as a capital allocation tool. Used well it forces a real argument about a small number of people. Used badly it is an annual sorting exercise nobody acts on.
Promoting your best performer is the most common way to lose two good people at once. What separates performance from potential, and how to assess it.
Nobody is promoted for being difficult. They are promoted for being decisive, and then the role grows. How derailers form, how to see them, what changes them.
One has an author and a permanent file. The other is anonymous and belongs to the person rated. What each measures, and what happens when you merge them.
Hogan and DISC are different kinds of instrument, not rivals. Which one fits a hiring decision, which fits a team session, and why the difference matters.
Turnover climbs after a deal closes, and the leaders you most want to keep move first. How to name a combined leadership team quickly and make it work.
Two capable executives, both performing, who have stopped collaborating. How to tell which of three conflicts you have and run the conversation that fixes it.
An offsite is the most expensive meeting you run. Build the agenda backwards from three to five decisions, and design the fourteen days that follow it.
Alignment is not a pleasant meeting. It is four answers every executive should give identically, cold. Here is the test and the layer most teams fail.
Executive team dysfunction is quiet, not loud. Eight observable signs, what causes each one, and why the chief executive is usually the last to see it.
Presence is a judgment other people form, not a trait a leader owns. What coaching can change in six months, what it cannot, and how to tell it worked.
Build an internal coaching bench or buy external coaches? A sourcing decision for heads of talent, with market fee data and the governance each model needs.
Three quarters of senior managers say their learning function disappoints them, and the shortlist never explains why. Six tests that tell a partner from a supplier.
A randomized trial found individual coaching better for goal attainment and group work better for knowledge. The choice is about the problem, not the price.
US companies spent $102.8 billion on training in 2025. Here is where a leadership development budget actually goes, using published market prices rather than a quote.
Companies spent close to $356 billion on training globally in 2015 and kept getting the same result. The failure is rarely the classroom. It is what the leader walks back into.
Readiness is not a mood. Seven observable signals that tell a chief executive or a sponsor the moment has arrived, and three that look like signals and are not.
The median engagement in the published research is six sessions over twelve weeks. Here is what sets the calendar, and how to tell at ninety days whether it is working.
The employer pays, the leader talks. Here is exactly what a sponsor is entitled to hear, what the ethics code does and does not protect, and where it goes wrong.
Most hiring lists give you the questions and never tell you what a good answer sounds like. These twelve come with the red flags attached.
Most coaches field mental health requests and many refer out. Here is where the boundary genuinely sits, what changes when an employer pays, and what is on the record.
The difference is not style, it is who owns the answer. How to tell which one your leader needs, how each is acquired, and what happens when you use both.
The headline coaching ROI figures come from two self-reported studies published in 2001. Here is what the controlled evidence shows and how to measure your own.
Almost every published price for executive coaching is a vendor number. Here is what the independent data covers, what moves the fee, and how to compare bids.