LEADERSHIP TEAM HEALTH
There’s a people problem everyone can see, but nobody has been able to address.
We pair real executive experience with training in marriage and family therapy, so we can see how people and teams actually work, and find the pattern keeping the problem in place, including when the leader is part of it.
What it looks like from where you sit
Decisions wait. Bad news reaches the top late. Initiatives stall, and the fixes you’ve tried don’t stick. Leaders spend their time managing around it.
Everyone can see the problem. What’s harder to see is the whole pattern, and harder still to say out loud when the person involved has power over you.
Why it hasn’t gone away
The team has adapted. People build workarounds, filter information, form alliances, avoid certain conversations and change how they behave around the problem. Eventually those adaptations start reinforcing one another.
One person may be driving a large part of the problem. But fixing only the person everyone blames often leaves the pattern intact. When the leader is part of the pattern, training the people below will not fix it. When the team is reinforcing the pattern, coaching the leader alone will not fix it either.
We find out what people aren’t saying — and what everyone may be missing.
We do not arrive assuming the sponsor’s explanation is right, the team’s explanation is right, or the leader is the problem. We gather multiple perspectives, observe the team at work and look for the pattern people are creating together.
Then we give direct feedback about what is actually happening and recommend what should happen next. Sometimes the recommendation is that no further Kintsugi work is needed.
We call it the Leadership & Team Diagnostic. The goal is simple: stop working around the problem and start dealing with what is actually keeping it in place.
What changed at Waymo: quality, speed and collaboration.
“The audacious goals that we’re working towards at Waymo make for a very busy and dynamic day-to-day work life. It can be easy to get pulled into the energy and endless work task that our technology and job requires. We, like so many high-paced tech companies, hardly get a moment to pause, breathe, or meditate. Our default emotional state is often reactive, sometimes over reactive. Jared & Stacey gave us the tools to manage our emotional well being as leaders, individuals, and as a team. Our quality, speed, and collaboration have all benefited. Tech jobs are known to be competitive and intense but Jared & Stacey’s work provides a path to sustainability and collective resilience that make this tech industry work-life a joy to do and keep doing.”
Megan Neese, Head of UX/UI Research, Waymo
Why we do this
Too many companies overlook the mental health of their people, and they do it at their peril. We believe mental health, and mental fitness in particular, is the next frontier of competitive advantage inside companies.
It shows up in decisions, retention and execution long before it shows up in a benefits claim.
Every business runs on people, and people bring all of themselves to work: their history, their habits under pressure, the way they handle conflict. That human side shapes how decisions get made, how teams treat each other and whether good people stay. Most organizations try to fix it with skills training. Some of the work goes deeper than that.
Marriage and family therapists are trained to see the patterns between people that keep everyone stuck. We bring that lens into the business, alongside real executive experience. It isn’t therapy. It’s leadership and team work that takes the human side seriously, because healthier people make healthier, stronger organizations.
Who you’d be working with
Jared Haslam spent more than 18 years inside large organizations, including as Vice President of Product Strategy and Planning at Nissan North America. He knows how power, politics and performance pressure work at the executive level.
Stacey Haslam, MFTC, brings training in marriage and family therapy. She helps people see patterns that are hard to see from inside a relationship, and raises them in a way that invites insight rather than defensiveness.
If this is your team, talk with us.
Some moments make a problem harder to keep working around:
A key person leaves, and everyone knows why.
A new leader inherits a team that’s stuck.
A survey or 360 surfaces something nobody will discuss.
Two senior people are openly at odds.
The first conversation is free, and it’s with both of us. Tell us what you’re seeing. We’ll tell you whether we think the Diagnostic fits.