Peter Barron Stark Companies

There is a moment early in almost every coaching engagement that tells me a great deal about where things are headed. The leader across from me begins describing the situation that brought them there, and somewhere in that description, the language shifts. It becomes about the team that isn’t performing, the economy that isn’t cooperating, or the company that isn’t providing ...

 A CEO stopped mid-sentence during one of our consulting sessions. “I don’t understand,” she said. “We’ve explained the changes. We’ve shown them the data. We’ve answered their questions. Why are they still resisting?”

We hear some version of this from leaders in nearly every organization. They have done everything the playbook says: communicated ...

We worked with a CEO who was convinced his team trusted him. How did he know? Because they never pushed back. No one challenged his decisions. No one questioned his direction. He read their silence as confidence.

Then came a 360-degree assessment. The results were not what he expected. His team wasn’t silent because they agreed. They were silent because they had learne...

Every leader I work with has a decision they’re sitting on. They know what it is. They know what needs to happen. And they’re not doing it.

Sometimes it’s a personnel decision that’s been overdue for months. Sometimes it’s a strategic pivot that the data is clearly pointing toward. Sometimes it’s a conversation with a senior leader who has been underperforming while ev...

We were brought in to coach a director who had been with his organization for most of his career. He had grown up there, knew the systems inside and out, and had built a department that ran predictably and without much friction. His leader described him as resistant to change. When we sat down with him, we understood why.

His accounting department was a hub of the orga...