Peter Barron Stark Companies

We were brought in to help a company prepare for what its CEO described as a leadership transition. Several members of the senior team were within two or three years of retirement. The expectation was that we would help them document processes, develop successors, and hand things off in good order. What we found instead was something the CEO had not quite put into words yet: ...

A financial services company we worked with had every reason to feel good about its mentorship program. Senior executives were paired with high-potential managers. Meetings were scheduled. Progress was tracked. On paper, it looked exactly like what a serious organization committed to developing its next generation of leaders should look like.

Then we dug deeper. Mentee...

We get called in for team-building work fairly regularly. But when we dig into what’s actually happening, it’s rarely about team building at all. It’s about a team that has stopped trusting each other, and a leader who hasn’t addressed the behavior driving the divide.

One situation stands out. A company brought us in because their team had fractured into two distinct c...