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Most leadership teams spend their time together on what they're working on. The best ones also make time for how they work together. A leadership team retreat is dedicated time away from day-to-day work. With facilitation, the team slows down to address how they work together, not just what they're working on. It gives a team the time and structure to diagnose real issues, align on priorities, and strengthen the working relationships that shape how well they collaborate. Why

Leadership development works best when nobody has to carry it alone. If you lead HR at a growing company, leadership development probably lands on your desk by default. You plan it, run it, and often get asked why it isn't working yet. Meanwhile your CEO wants results but isn't sure where they fit in. And outside help, if there is any, shows up for a workshop and leaves. Here's the short answer. Leadership development works best as a three-way partnership. The CEO sets the di

Your CEO doesn't need to be sold on leadership development. They need to see the math. If you lead HR at a growing company, you've probably had this conversation. You know your managers need support. You can see where leadership gaps are slowing the company down. But when you bring it to your CEO, it lands as a "nice to have." Here's the short answer. Stop pitching leadership development as a perk. Frame it as a business decision about capacity, retention, and speed. Then bri

Before you coach, retrain, or replace someone, check what they're standing on. It usually starts with a name. "I'm not sure our head of sales is the right fit." Or, "Our ops lead used to be great. Now everything feels harder." If you lead HR at a growing company, you hear these conversations all the time. And it's natural to start with the person. But at companies that are growing fast, many people problems turn out to be foundation problems wearing a person's name tag. Here'

The HR role that fit your company at 50 people won't fit at 150. Here's what changes, and what to let go of. If you lead HR at a growing company, you've probably noticed something. The job you were hired to do isn't quite the job the company needs now. The work hasn't gotten easier. It's gotten different. Here's the short answer. As a company grows, the HR role has to evolve from running people processes to shaping how leaders lead. That shift rarely happens on its own. It ha

Most people running a company today never got real leadership development themselves. Here's why that's a solvable problem, not a permanent one. Most people running a company have never had access to formal leadership development: the executive coaching, the structured training, the tools that help you actually understand how you and your team are wired to lead, rather than guessing based on vibes and whoever talked loudest in yesterday's meeting. It's not because they didn't

Most leadership advice doesn't fail because it's wrong. It fails because nobody stuck around to help you actually use it. Think about the last piece of leadership advice you took seriously. Maybe it was a book everyone on your board recommended, a workshop your company paid real money for, or a consultant's report that sat in a very nicely formatted PDF. For a week or two afterward, something genuinely shifted. You tried the new approach. It felt promising. And then, slowly a

Most "people problems" at growth-stage companies aren't people problems at all. They're foundation problems wearing a person's name tag. Here's a conversation I have on a loop with founders and CEOs. It usually starts with a specific person: "I think my head of sales might not be the right fit," or "our ops lead used to be great and now everything feels harder." We start talking, and within about ten minutes, the conversation almost never stays about that one person. It drift

The instincts that built your company are quietly becoming the ceiling on it. Here's how to see the gap before it turns into a crisis. Somewhere in your first year or two, you became very good at something specific: making fast calls with incomplete information, being the person every client, hire, and small fire routed through, and holding the whole company's context in your head at once. That skill set is the reason your company exists. It got you here. It is also, quietly

If most of your week goes to putting out fires, working harder isn't the fix. Working differently is. Every founder I've ever coached has, at some point, described their week using the word "firefighting" without a hint of irony. It's such a common metaphor that we've stopped noticing how strange it is. You didn't start a company to spend your days rushing from one emergency to the next with a metaphorical hose. You started it to build something. And yet here you are, extingu

A simple framework (and one hard truth about your invite list) that turns meetings into decisions. Every executive I work with has some version of the same complaint: too many meetings, not enough movement. People leave the room with a vague sense that "something was discussed," but nobody could tell you what was decided, who owns it, or when it's due. Three weeks later, the same issue is back on the agenda, wearing a slightly different hat. It's tempting to blame the calenda

In 1965, Harvard Business Review published an article with a title that was meant to provoke: "Are Women Executives People?" It's a jarring headline six decades later, and the good news is that the outright hostility it captured has largely faded. The bad news, according to new research published this month, is more complicated — and more useful for leaders trying to actually fix things. Researchers Dwayne Whitten, Wendy R. Boswell, and Susan Oldroyd revisited the same questi

Michael Scott thought he was the world's best boss. He had the mug to prove it. Meanwhile, the staff at Dunder Mifflin spent nine seasons counting the minutes until they could leave. The joke landed because it was recognizable: nearly every viewer had worked for someone who believed they were leading well, while the people they led experienced something entirely different. That gap isn't just a sitcom premise anymore. As The Conversation recently reported, a recent Gallup sur

(What a new HBR survey gets right about the talent question underneath the AI question) A CEO and her head of people asked me to sit in on a planning session last quarter. The company's about 140 employees, growing fast, and AI had landed on the agenda the way it does at every company that size — somewhere between exciting and faintly threatening. The CEO opened with the question she'd clearly been carrying for weeks:"Do we need to go hire AI people? Everyone keeps telling me

A CEO and I were on a call with her HR director last fall. The HR director is excellent — she'd built the company's whole compliance and benefits operation from scratch, and the company had doubled in size on her watch. About thirty minutes in, the CEO said something I hear more often than you might think: "I love working with you. And I keep asking you to fix things that don't have HR answers. I don't even know what to call them. I just know they aren't getting better." The

A Quick Read for Leaders Who Want Real Results "I don't know what else to do with this person."I hear this from executives monthly. A senior manager isn't performing. You've given feedback, set clear expectations, maybe even put them on a development plan. Nothing's working. Here's the uncomfortable question: Have you already decided they can't succeed? Your Mindset Is Showing (And It's Tanking Performance) Research proves what many leaders don't want to hear: your beliefs ab

When I work with CEOs of growing companies, I often hear a familiar frustration: "I have brilliant people on my executive team, but when we get together, nothing seems to work." Sound familiar? A recent Harvard Business Review article by Ron Carucci and Jarrod Shappell, "Set Up Your C-Suite to Execute Your Strategy," perfectly captures what I see happening in small to midsize organizations every day. The problem isn't that you have the wrong people—it's that you're treating y

Building a high-performing team is not just a checkbox on your leadership to-do list. It’s the heartbeat of your company’s growth and...

An Expensive Paradox: Companies spend millions recruiting top talent, yet many high-performing teams underdeliver due to friction that...

Leadership is not a static skill. It evolves, adapts, and grows with experience and intention. If you’re steering a company through...