She Thought She Was Stuck Because She Was Overwhelmed

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Jennifer Leone, CPA — Nonprofit Executive

Executive Coaching

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SUMMARY

Jennifer, a C-level nonprofit executive, came to coaching feeling stuck and weighed down by absorbing responsibilities beyond her core role. Through coaching on personal, relational, and structural levels, Jennifer learned to manage her reactivity, navigate her dynamic with a challenging CEO, and advocate for herself and additional headcount. Within months, she transitioned from avoidance to 'clarity conversations' and traded a reflexive 'yes' for 'not yet,' successfully delegating work and helping the leadership team build a more durable structure.

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Jennifer, a C-level nonprofit executive,  came to coaching describing something a lot of senior operating leaders describe: she felt stuck. Not in crisis, just weighed down — obligated in a way that left no room to step back, and unsure whether the spark she used to feel about her work was still there to find.

On the surface, this looked like a personal capacity issue. Underneath it was something more specific.

Jennifer’s senior operating role at a mission-driven organization had her working closely with a CEO whose moods and pressures shaped the tone of many interactions. As we worked together, two patterns became clear: her CEO was a Visionary, thinking in big-picture terms and increasingly preoccupied with legacy as their long tenure moved toward a close. Jennifer was the Architect — the person who translated the CEO’s vision into structure while taking on more and more operating responsibilities. Jennifer had quietly become the place where everyone’s anxiety landed.

The second issue was an organizational design issue: As a senior operator, she was saying yes to absorbing work that was not hers. Her responsibilities had expanded from finance to include operations and HR, As she stated, “I feel like I’m always wearing a ‘lead vest’, given the amount of responsibility she carried..

The coaching work we did involved three levels. Personally, Jennifer learned to slow her own reactivity — pausing before responding, and asking whether saying "yes" actually served her, both in the ‘now’ or later on. Relationally, naming the Visionary/Architect dynamic helped her understand the friction she felt. She began bringing real precision to their conversations: what does success actually look like, what are we measuring, what's genuinely urgent versus what only feels that way? Structurally, she began voicing the need for additional headcount and began to feel she could delegate work rather than absorb it.

Over several months, Jennifer moved from avoidance to what she came to call "clarity conversations" — direct, specific, and focused on the business outcome rather than the emotional temperature in the room. She traded a reflexive “yes” for "not yet." She got more comfortable letting a 10-out-of-10 reaction cool to a 7 before acting on it.

In my work with organizations, when one senior leader quietly absorbs an organization's unresolved anxiety, it's rarely confined to them. It's a signal about how the whole leadership team is built to handle pressure — and it tends to show up again with the next person in that seat if the underlying design never changes.

That's the real opportunity in moments like this. The coaching conversation helps the individual regain their footing. But the more durable fix is at the team and structural level: naming how your leaders are actually wired to operate, building real clarity around decision rights and escalation, and making sure no single person is serving as the organization's shock absorber by default.

The people who feel stuck aren't usually the problem. They're often the ones most attuned to a structure that needs attention.

TESTIMONIAL

“Before coaching, I felt completely stuck and weighed down by the amount of responsibility I carried, feeling as if I was always wearing a 'lead vest'. Through our work together, I learned to slow my reactivity and move from avoidance to direct, outcome-focused 'clarity conversations'. I traded a reflexive 'yes' for 'not yet,' which helped me regain my footing, begin delegating effectively, and advocate for the structural support and headcount our leadership team needed."

— Jennifer

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From Problem-Solver to Managing Director

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Mark D. — Investment Management

Executive Coaching

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SUMMARY

For years, Mark had built a reputation as the person leadership turned to when something needed solving — reliable, capable, and always ready to execute someone else's plan. But that reputation came at a cost: he'd stopped pushing his own ideas forward, assuming they wouldn't land. The dynamic fed itself — the less he advocated for his own thinking, the more he was seen only as an executor, never a driver of vision. As a result, he was less excited about his work and came to coaching to explore how to regain his drive.

This is a common talent pattern, not a competence gap, and it's usually invisible until someone names it. The coaching work helped Mark see his role in the pattern and gave him a new perspective. It gave him the language and mindset to act and advocate differently on his own behalf. As he put it, it was "a kick in the pants" to finally have the conversations with firm leadership he'd been avoiding. That he wanted to expand beyond the role he was known for.

Those conversations led directly to Mark taking ownership of a major firm-wide initiative. The project succeeded — and he was promoted to Managing Director.

OUR CAPABILITY

I see this pattern often: a genuinely capable leader gets quietly typecast as "the person who executes" rather than "the person who sets direction" — and without realizing it, reinforces the label by holding back their own ideas. It's a talent pattern, not a competence gap, and it's usually invisible until someone names it.

In this engagement, breaking that pattern meant a leader finally advocated for his own thinking with firm leadership. He was given the opportunity to lead a firm-wide analytics upgrade initiative. He was promoted to Managing Director shortly after. The capability was always there. What changed was whether he was seen using it.

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From Founder Dependence to Organizational Resilience

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How interim leadership helped a nonprofit stabilize, hire its next Executive Director, and re-engage a Board to govern alongside them. 

HR Strategy  ·  Org Design  ·  Executive Coaching  ·  Interim Leadership

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SUMMARY

When the board of a family-founded nonprofit organization asked Lindsey Honari Advisors to step in, the organization had been run for years the way many founder-led nonprofits are - with all information flowing through one person. The Founder held the institutional memory, the donor relationships, many vendor relationships, and every financial and technology account were under her name. The board never had to operate the organization directly — and now it did, because a leadership transition was underway and there wasn't enough staff to carry it without direct operating leadership in place.

The transition carried an added layer of complexity. The Founder and the Board President — her own adult child — had co-founded the organization together. The dynamic at the board table had more in common with a family business changing hands than with a typical nonprofit leadership transition.

Lindsey Honari stepped into the role of interim Executive Director to lead that work directly — consolidating the organization's operational and financial information, managing a transition to a new accounting firm and an audit, and running a search for a permanent Executive Director that narrowed more than 200 applicants down to three finalists. Once the new Executive Director was in place, three months of hands-on onboarding support followed, alongside continued work to build the board's own capacity to operate.

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THE CLIENT

Our client is a nonprofit organization providing housing for patients undergoing cancer treatment. Co-founded and run for over a decade by an individual who built the organization from the ground up, the organization that once flourished found itself with some operational vulnerabilities. There was significant leadership turnover over the past few years, and the board that governed alongside the Co-founder functioned mainly as supportive, not operational. That was no longer sustainable. The organization was heading into a period of facility expansion, larger capital decisions, and a leadership transition all at once, and its governance needed to mature quickly to meet the moment.

THE CHALLENGE

The core problem was structural before it was personal: the organization's operational and financial information lived with one person due to staffing changes. Thus, the organization lacked a stable system for collecting and sharing information, with processes that had shifted repeatedly over time. That is a serious vulnerability for any organization — if the one person holding the institutional knowledge is unavailable or incapacitated, the organization is compromised. With a leadership transition already underway, that risk had become urgent rather than theoretical.

The board, meanwhile, was not built for the moment it was being asked to meet. Major decisions and capital allocations needed board judgment, but the board had rarely had to exercise that kind of judgment directly, and most of its committees had gone quiet. Two members of the Executive Committee were doing the active work; the rest of the board's committee structure was inactive. This was starting to wear on these two members.

The Board President, who was both co-founder and a family member, carried the authority to lead the board as well as the weight of the relationship at the center of the transition. Stretched by a demanding full-time job outside the organization and by the family dynamics the transition inevitably surfaced, the board was left without the engaged leadership a transition like this required, right when it needed it most.

The leadership transition itself — from the Founder to interim leadership to a permanent new Executive Director — did not move smoothly. Each handoff carried its own version of the same underlying problem: information, authority, and relationships that had lived with one person for years had to be redistributed to people and captured in systems.

THE APPROACH

Lindsey Honari Advisors stepped into the interim Executive Director role itself — an operating seat, not an advisory one — because the organization did not have the staff bandwidth to carry a transition of this size without someone holding direct operating responsibility. Building the board's own capacity to operate ran alongside that work, but it was not the primary vehicle for it.

The first priority was to break down the information and activity silos that had built up around the Founder over the past decade. That meant surfacing, gathering, and analyzing operational and financial information wherever it lived — across different computers, shared drives, and physical paperwork — and organizing it into something the board and future leadership could use and act on. The goal throughout was to move the organization from individual to institutional knowledge and into systems that future staff could easily access.

In parallel, the work focused on building up the board's own capacity to operate. With only two Executive Committee members consistently engaged, that meant relying on them heavily in the near term while working — deliberately, and repeatedly — to re-engage the board's inactive members. Rebuilding an operating board mid-transition is slower than building one from scratch; it means asking people who joined the board for one kind of role to take on another.

On the financial side, Lindsey Honari Advisors led the organization through a change in accounting firms, managing the transition and onboarding of the new firm, and supported the organization through an audit — a necessary step in establishing financial information the board and future leadership could rely on independent of any one individual.

With the operational foundation more stable, the engagement turned to the Executive Director search: running the process directly, sourcing and evaluating a candidate pool of more than 200 applicants and narrowing it to three finalists for the board's final selection. Once the new Executive Director was hired, the work did not stop at the offer letter. Three months of intensive, hands-on onboarding support followed, because appointing a new leader does not, by itself, resolve the deeper operational and relational work of transition.

WHAT WE BUILT

Operational & Financial Information Consolidation

Operational and financial information that had been scattered was surfaced, gathered, and organized into systems accessible to the board and staff — directly addressing the organization's key-person risk. For the first time, the board had relevant financial and operating information in a usable format from which to make decisions.

Accounting Transition & Audit Support

Lindsey Honari Advisors managed the transition to a new accounting firm, oversaw its onboarding, and supported the organization through an audit, establishing a financial function the board could rely on independent of any one individual.

Board Operating Capacity

Alongside the interim Executive Director role, work began on building the board's own capacity to operate — necessary given how thin the organization's staffing was and how significant the decisions ahead were. With most committees inactive and the Board President largely unavailable, that work centered on the two active Executive Committee members in the near term, with repeated efforts to re-engage the broader board. This is the piece of the transition still in progress.

Executive Director Search

The search generated more than 200 applicants, narrowed through a structured process to three finalists, with the board making the final selection. The new Executive Director has experience running a similar organization and a personal connection to the mission.

New Executive Director Onboarding

Lindsey then provided three months of intensive, hands-on onboarding support as she transferred interim Executive Director responsibilities, helping the new Executive Director step into a role that had previously taken more than six months to gather and organize critical information.

THE OUTCOME

The organization now holds its own operational and financial information instead of relying on one individual. The issue was not intentional wrongdoing, but an organizational pattern created by constant turnover and financial accounts that remained connected to the Founder. This change impacts what the organization can withstand. A departure or illness would no longer put the organization’s institutional knowledge or day-to-day operations at risk. The accounting transition and the audit gave the board reliable and relevant financial information it could act on directly. 

The Executive Director search gave the organization something a rushed or internal-only process could not have: a genuine choice among strong candidates, and three months of real support translating that choice into a working relationship with the board. By leaning into prior executive recruiting experience, Lindsey Honari Advisors also saved the board significant fees instead of engaging an outside firm.

The board-capacity work of this engagement remains unfinished. Two Executive Committee members carried the operating load through the hardest part of the transition, and the effort to bring the rest of the board's committees back to life — so that the organization is not dependent on a single interim leader any more than it was on its Founder — remains ongoing. A board built for oversight does not become an operating board on a fixed timeline, particularly when the transition it is managing involves family history as much as governance structure.

WHAT THIS ENGAGEMENT DEMONSTRATES

Founder-led nonprofits carry similar risks to some founder-led businesses: the same person who built the organization is used to making the decisions and having all information flow through them. When that founder is also related to board leadership, the work stops being purely organizational. It runs directly through family dynamics that no org chart resolves on its own.

This engagement was not a single restructuring engagement; it was a sustained transition effort. It required stepping into direct operating leadership, moving critical information from silos into organizational systems, hiring and supporting new executive leadership, and gradually building the board capacity needed to carry the organization forward — all while acknowledging the personal complexity embedded in the work.

If your organization is navigating a founder transition, organizing critical information, or building the governance capacity to lead through a leadership gap, Lindsey Honari Advisors can help you move from individual dependence to organizational resilience.

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Your HR Function is Good at Operations. That's Your Problem.

You run a company, a division, or a senior leadership team. You’ve worked in organizations where HR was a real strategic partner — people who understood the business, knew the players, and helped you think through the hard calls. You don’t have that where you are now. Instead, you have a team that handles compliance, benefits, and hiring logistics. All useful. None of it is what you actually need right now.

The Gap Fractional HR Can Fill

The situations that I see and work with are varied. A performance issue that’s been quietly dragging on for too long. A team dynamic that’s costing you more than you want to admit. An organizational change that needs to go right, not just go. Even if you have an HR business partner, they are stretched thin or simply don't have the bottom-line business context to deliver the help you need. So the leader keeps getting bogged down in the details when they should be focusing on higher-value work. So they get frustrated that the issue lingers, sometimes for years. 

You have the judgment. You know what needs to happen. What you need is someone who can take it from idea to implementation. Who speaks the language of business first and HR second. Who understands how organizations work and can get things done so you can focus on the strategic work only you can do.

Clients come to me when something important is on the line but no one to own it. As a Fractional HR partner, I sit by the leader’s side. I don’t come in with a framework or binder of best practices. Instead, I listen deeply and scope out what is truly needed.  Since I straddle the world of business and human capital, I understand the P&L, the board dynamics, the org chart that doesn’t tell the whole story, and the stakeholder politics that does. Then I design and execute a solution that fits your organization, systems, and culture. So you can finally move from stalled to strategic.

If something on this page landed, that’s not a coincidence. The leaders I work with know the feeling — they’ve just been waiting for someone to name it.

Reach out directly. No intake form, no discovery call scheduled three weeks out. Just a conversation to see if this makes sense for your organization.

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Why Middle-Market Leaders Need an HR Business Partner

If you're running a middle-market company, you've probably felt this tension: you've outgrown the "everyone wears ten hats" stage, but you're not big enough to have the layers of HR infrastructure that a Fortune 500 company takes for granted. That gap is exactly where an HR Business Partner, or HRBP, earns their keep.

I've seen this play out again and again with clients. In a startup, the CEO or a generalist handles people issues alongside everything else. In a large, matrixed organization, HR gets siloed into specialized functions and loses its seat at the table. Middle-market companies sit in the sweet spot in between — and that's where a strategic HRBP makes the biggest difference. And here's the good news: you don't necessarily need a full-time hire to get there. A Fractional HR Business Partner — someone who works with you on a part-time or project basis — can bring that same strategic value without the overhead of a full-time executive salary.

What does an HRBP actually do? 

In practice, it looks like this:

• Sitting in on leadership meetings so HR priorities stay connected to business goals, not bolted on afterward

• Meeting one-on-one with department heads to work through people challenges before they become crises

• Digging into HR data to spot trends and opportunities you'd otherwise miss

• Building talent strategies that match where you're actually headed, not where you were a year ago

• Handling employee relations issues that need judgment, not just a policy lookup

• Sitting alongside you on the bigger strategic moves — a new market, a digital transformation, a major change effort

HRBP vs. HR Generalist — what's the real difference?

This is a question I get a lot. The short answer: an HRBP is there to help you execute your business strategy, not run your HR operations. They're not the ones processing payroll, managing benefits enrollment, or handling onboarding logistics — all essential work, but not what moves a middle-market company forward.

The HRBPs I've seen make the biggest impact tend to share a few things in common:

• They manage stakeholders well and balance what different departments and leaders need without losing the thread

• They think critically and bring insight, not just information

• They have broad HR fluency across the full range of people functions

• They plan ahead of the need, not in reaction to it

• They know how to be a real thought partner — someone who gives you the space to think out loud

Getting the most out of an HRBP

If you already have one, or you're thinking about bringing one in, here's what I would advise:

Don't wait until a decision is made. Bring them in early by inviting them into the onversation while you're still thinking it through. Ask what they've seen work and what hasn't in similar situations.

Make it safe to raise the hard stuff. Workforce challenges rarely surface as the real underlying issue. Give your HRBP the authority and time to get underneath it.

Use them to pressure-test your options. Timelines, resourcing, and what the plan actually looks like in practice are where a good HRBP can add real value.

Let them help you spend smarter. A strong HRBP knows how to build training and development that doesn't require a big budget. They usually know which vendors and tools are worth the money and which aren't.

Build your culture with intention. What do you want to protect as you grow? What's already starting to strain? What worked at 100 people rarely works the same way at 500 — and your HRBP can help you see that shift coming instead of reacting to it after the fact.

Use them to develop your leaders. Coaching, stakeholder interviews, leadership development — this is where you retain your best people and grow the next layer of leadership from within, instead of always looking (and paying up for) outside talent.

The bottom line: a strong partnership with your HRBP means your people strategy and your business strategy are finally pulling in the same direction. And if you're not ready for a full-time hire, a Fractional HR Business Partner is worth serious consideration — you get the strategic partnership without the long-term commitment, and it's often the right first step before scaling into a full-time role. For middle market companies at an inflection point, that alignment is worth investing in.

If you're wondering whether your organization is ready for an HRBP — fractional or full-time — I'd love to talk it through with you.

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Early Career Patience

We just had a young staff member resign. Honestly, it was a sigh of relief. We call it ‘Positive Attrition' in HR world.

They just were not ‘getting it’, despite feedback and ultimately a performance improvement plan. They resigned before we needed to fire them.

And yet…….

It is too easy to dump on the new generation in the workforce. I cringe when I think back to myself at the start of my career, those first couple of internships and jobs.

• I had no clue what I was doing (because I hadn’t done it before - duh).

• I was executing tasks with limited context for my intended audience or client (I wasn't curious enough to ask).

• The actual work was incredibly boring and had nothing to do with my schoolwork.

Even though I identified with the mission and enjoyed the people I worked with, I sucked as an employee.

Honestly, Today Me would have fired Then Me.

It took a full seven years after college before I felt I had enough understanding, nuance, and confidence to add any value. Why? Time on the track, some good mentors, and enough curiosity to ask for context (and for help). Observing who got promoted and what they did to get that recognition. Learning how to work, not just to study. Iterating over time to get to the finished product, not just the ‘right answer’.

So before you throw your hands up, remember: they are just as bored/frustrated/clueless as you probably were when you started out.

Ask yourself:

• Who mentored me? What did they say or do that stuck?

• What was explicit and what was implicit? 

• It is the implicit that takes time and is hardest to ‘see’ when you are just starting out. Surface that for your young employees.

• Do they actually know what excellence looks like?

• Have you had a clarity conversation that explains what done well on time looks like?

Understand that some will thrive, many will learn and grow, and a few will think you are a dork/mean/the worst boss ever and quit.

But at least give them a fighting chance to change.

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Beyond the Balance Sheet: Why HR Is Your CFO's Best Strategic Partner

Reframing an Old Divide

In most organizations I work with, there's a quiet tension between the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO). The CFO is seen as the steward of capital — the person who watches margins, controls costs, and protects the bottom line. HR, meanwhile, often gets boxed into a narrow, transactional role: payroll, benefits, compliance, recruiting.

When budget season rolls around, the question I hear most often is some version of, "How much is HR going to cost us this year?"

I think that question has it backward. The real question leadership should be asking is: What does a weak people strategy cost this business?

Every dollar invested thoughtfully in your people prevents multiple dollars lost to turnover, litigation, stalled productivity, failed technology rollouts, and cultural drift. In high-stakes moments like a merger or acquisition, this isn't theoretical — people-related factors routinely account for more than half of the value a deal is supposed to capture. The organizations that best protect their balance sheets are those where the CFO and CHRO have moved beyond a transactional relationship and built a real strategic alliance.

PART 1:

The Hidden Balance Sheet: Where HR Actually Moves the Numbers

Here are five places where strategic HR work shows up directly in financial performance.

1. The Real Cost of Turnover

A CFO typically sees turnover show up as a line item for recruiting fees. The real cost runs much deeper — replacing an employee can cost anywhere from 50% to 200% of that person's annual salary once you account for lost institutional knowledge, disrupted teams, and the ramp-up time for a new hire. Strategic HR gets ahead of this by watching for early warning signs and building retention programs that pay for themselves within 12 to 18 months.

2. Productivity Left on the Table

A disengaged or underperforming employee typically costs an organization 15% to 20% of their salary in lost output. When performance expectations are clear and development conversations are real rather than perfunctory, organizations tend to see a 20% to 25% lift in productivity — which flows straight to operating income.

3. Reducing Legal and Compliance Exposure

Employment claims are expensive. The average ones run well over $100,000 once you add up settlements and legal defense. Add in the complexity of multi-state and international labor law, and the exposure grows quickly. Good HR risk management functions like an insurance policy the company barely notices it's paying for — until the year it saves them from a costly claim.

4. Protecting the Value of the Deal

A striking number of mergers and acquisitions fail to hit their projected synergies, and roughly 30% of those failures trace back to cultural integration and people issues. When HR is brought in early — during diligence, not after close — they can surface hidden liabilities, such as misaligned pay structures or flight-risk talent, before the deal closes. Deals where HR leads integration planning tend to see 20% to 30% more of their projected value actually realized.

5. Planning Ahead Instead of Reacting

Reactive HR fills vacancies as they open. Strategic HR forecasts what the organization will need — and helps leadership decide whether to build, buy, or borrow that talent. That same forward-looking discipline is what allows a company to right-size ahead of a downturn instead of scrambling through a round of layoffs, and it's what protects institutional knowledge through solid succession planning.

PART 2:

Speaking the CFO's Language

If HR wants a seat at the strategic table, it has to bring the same financial rigor a CFO expects from any other function. A few principles I come back to often with clients:

People data is financial data. Cost-per-hire matters less on its own than when paired with quality of hire, time-to-productivity, and turnover costs by department. Training and development spend should have a measurable return, just like any other investment.

HR drives revenue, not just cost. High turnover on a sales team shows up immediately in pipeline health and top-line revenue. Employee engagement correlates directly with customer service quality and retention.

The total cost of the workforce is greater than base pay. CFOs often anchor on salary and benefits. The fuller picture includes onboarding costs, the cost of a vacant role, and the hours managers spend fixing performance problems rather than doing strategic work.

Culture is a financial lever, not a soft concept. High-trust organizations have been shown to outperform their peers by up to 2.5 times on revenue growth. Toxic cultures show up on the P&L (profit and loss statement) through absenteeism, low output, and high rates of voluntary turnover.

Where CFOs Tend to Have Blind Spots

Financial statements are, by design, backward-looking — they tell you what already happened. HR data tends to be forward-looking, which is exactly why it's worth a CFO's attention.

Employee sentiment and engagement trends can flag a coming wave of turnover six to nine months before it hits. Skills gap analysis can flag operational constraints before they slow down a product launch. And the cost of inaction compounds quietly: one toxic manager left in place can drive out your best people, and a bad hiring decision can create ripple effects that take years to unwind.

Accounting rules won't let a company list its people as an asset on the balance sheet, but that doesn't make the risk any less real. Key-person dependencies, succession gaps, and compliance vulnerabilities are enterprise risks that deserve the same active management as any financial exposure.

PART 3:

Deciding What to Outsource and What to Keep In-House

One of the most useful conversations a CFO and CHRO can have is about the operating model for HR itself. In my experience, the organizations that get the most value from their HR spend use a hybrid approach.

Outsource the transactional work — payroll, benefits administration, background checks, multi-state compliance monitoring, and high-volume entry-level recruiting (often called Recruitment Process Outsourcing, or RPO). Specialized providers do this at a scale and cost that's hard to match internally, freeing your HR leadership to focus on higher-value work.

Keep the strategic work in-house — workforce planning, culture, executive talent management, M&A integration, and complex employee relations. These require deep context that an outside vendor simply won't have. When a company doesn't have the bandwidth for a full-time strategic HR leader, a fractional HR partner — someone working part-time or on a project basis — can deliver the same strategic value without the cost of a full executive hire.

PART 4:

What This Looks Like in Practice

Chronic Turnover

A 200-person organization has been living with 35% annual turnover — 70 people walking out the door every year — and the CFO has treated it as an unavoidable cost of doing business. When HR lays out the full economic picture, the number is stark: $5.66 million a year, or roughly $28,300 per departure, once you count recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, ramp-up time, team disruption, and lost institutional knowledge. A targeted $400,000 intervention — a redesigned onboarding experience, corrected compensation bands, manager training, and clearer career paths — cuts turnover from 35% to 18%. Result: $1.85 million saved in year one, a 4.6x return, growing to $3 million in ongoing annual savings.

Merger Integration

Two mid-sized companies are merging, and the CFO is under board pressure to hit aggressive synergy targets. Rather than waiting until after close, HR gets involved 60 to 90 days before the deal closes. During diligence, they uncover a $3 million gap in compensation structures and $1.5 million in pending labor claims — and design a $500,000 retention plan to protect key talent. Total investment: roughly $700,000. Result: 15 key executives retained, a projected productivity drop avoided, and $8 to $10 million in enterprise value protected — a 10x to 15x return.

Post-Acquisition Synergies

A company acquires a smaller, fast-growing tech firm and wants to hit its "100-day synergy" targets without disrupting the business. A quick talent and operational audit finds redundant administrative roles paying 20% above market and outdated benefits costing 30% more than they should. Moving the acquired team onto the parent company's benefits and payroll platform captures $250,000 in annual savings. Total investment: $150,000. Result: $325,000 in annual savings, full retention of key talent, and a faster product timeline — a 5x to 7x return in year one.

Technology Rollout

A company is midway through a multi-million-dollar ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) implementation, and the CFO is watching consulting costs and productivity climb and dip. The real risk isn't the software — it's adoption. A structured change management program, built around training, leadership alignment, and ongoing feedback, keeps adoption high. Total investment: $250,000. Result: the timeline shortened by three months, productivity held at 90% instead of the typical dip, and key talent retained — an 8x to 10x return.

The Takeaway

Human capital isn't a cost to manage down. It's a strategic asset to be optimized — and when the CFO and CHRO genuinely partner, they create one of the most powerful engines a company has for protecting profitability and building long-term value.

If you lead an organization without that partnership in place today, the simplest place to start is a recurring "People & Finance" conversation — a quarterly session where the CFO and CHRO look past budget variances together and review the people metrics that actually move the business, the return on current talent investments, and the people-related risks — succession gaps, key-person dependencies — that could get in the way of the strategic plan.

Treat people strategy with the same rigor you'd apply to any capital decision, and you don't just build a better place to work. You build a more resilient, more profitable organization.

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Building Leadership Capacity in a High-Stakes Enrollment Environment

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Top 20 University

HR Strategy  ·  Learning & Development  ·  Executive Coaching  ·  9-Month Engagement

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SUMMARY

When the Vice President of Enrollment at a Top 20 Private University decided to invest in her senior leadership team to execute the university's new strategic plan, she sought far more than a training program. She needed a partner willing to do the work most institutions skip: understanding what her leaders actually needed, building rigorous development infrastructure around those needs, and coaching individual leaders through the growth the work ahead required.

Over nine months, Lindsey Honari Advisors partnered with the university's Undergraduate Enrollment Division to conduct a comprehensive stakeholder listening process, suggest and administer leadership assessments for the senior leadership team, facilitate six leadership development workshops, and provide ongoing one-on-one executive coaching for the division's leaders. The result was a sequenced leadership development ecosystem — built around the division's actual culture and calibrated to endure well beyond the engagement itself.

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THE CLIENT

The Talent Was Already There

The client is a nationally recognized top 20 private university and research institution with a highly competitive admissions process, a complex operational footprint, and significant external visibility. The Vice President of Enrollment leads a team of over 70 people responsible for undergraduate recruitment, admissions, financial aid, and enrollment operations. Senior leadership, comprising Directors and Deputy Directors, was the focus of this engagement.

The Vice President came to the role with deep expertise in highly selective university enrollment and a clear vision for what her division could become. Having worked with high-performing leadership teams for 20+ years in higher education, she recognized both the talent and the untapped potential already within her team. What her division lacked was not ambition, talent, or commitment. Rather, COVID, the asynchronous hybrid schedule that followed, and key staff departures led to silo formation, lost institutional knowledge, and—most importantly—eroded the connective tissue that was the glue for the team's high performance. The need was a development infrastructure to turn those positive qualities into consistently excellent leadership.

The university's central HR function, while capable, did not have the bandwidth or focus to design a program tailored to the enrollment division's specific culture, pressures, and growth stage. Nor was the VP looking for a generic training vendor with off-the-rack workshops. What she sought was a partner who could bring institutional-quality people expertise to a team under real operational pressure while earning the trust of senior leaders accustomed to high standards and tight deadlines.

THE CHALLENGE

Development on a Fixed Calendar

Building a leadership development program inside a university enrollment division is not a straightforward undertaking. The work sits at the intersection of several forces that make it difficult to focus on the right issues at the right time.

Enrollment teams operate in intensely cyclical environments. The rhythms of admissions seasons, financial aid cycles, and yield campaigns create real constraints on when development work can happen and how much energy leaders have left to give it. A program that ignores those rhythms — that pulls leaders away from urgent operational demands at the wrong moment — loses effectiveness and longevity before it begins.

At the same time, the senior leaders in a division like this one tend to be highly educated, analytically rigorous, and professionally accomplished. These are not leaders who need to be convinced that development matters. They need development that meets them at their level of sophistication: Specific enough to be useful, grounded in their reality, and challenging enough to help them grow.

The division was also at an inflection point. The VP was driving a new strategic plan while simultaneously trying to build the leadership capacity required to execute it. The challenge was not just to design a program that builds the leadership capability required to successfully execute the strategic plan. How do you introduce a formal development process into a team that has run for years on informal trust and habit? How do you honor a team's calendar and bandwidth while still delivering insight instead of administrative burden?

These were not abstract questions. They were the concerns of a leader who cared deeply about her people and understood that development, handled badly, could cost her team and her budget more than it gave back.

THE APPROACH

Sequenced to Build, Not to Impose

As the first step in any engagement we take on, this one began with listening. Before any workshop was designed or any assessment administered, significant time was spent with the VP scoping out what was needed and what would truly move the needle. Then the focus turned to her team; understanding the division's history, its internal dynamics, the strategic moment it was navigating, and what each leader actually needed to grow.

A structured stakeholder interview process was designed and conducted across the division's Director and Deputy Director population. These were not perfunctory check-ins. They were substantive, confidential conversations built to surface themes, tensions, and development needs that would never emerge in a group setting. The insights informed both the strategic planning process and the design of the development program that followed.

Rather than launching a full program immediately, the work unfolded in phases, each one building on the last and allowing trust to develop alongside it. The next phase was to design and create bespoke workshops spaced throughout the engagement that addressed issues and growth areas unique to the team. The third phase used assessment tools chosen not because they were popular, but because they addressed this team's specific development needs, time, and budget. In the next phase, the directors explored, defined, and aligned on the capabilities their deputies needed not only to excel in their current roles, but to grow into senior leadership themselves. Throughout the engagement, executive coaching helped staff to process the ideas and issues that surfaced.

That sequencing had two important effects. It meant the workshops and assessments that followed were grounded in real data about this team, rather than assumptions about each other and the team. And it meant trust was already established by the time the harder conversations began — which matters enormously when the coaching involves a leader's own management style, or a team's own dysfunction. Bi-weekly executive coaching ran underneath the entire engagement for the VP, while coaching for the senior leadership team focused on internalizing all areas of the development program.

WHAT WE BUILT

From Listening to Leadership

The engagement produced a sequenced, integrated set of deliverables across five phases.

Stakeholder Listening & Strategic Planning Support

Thirteen structured stakeholder interviews were designed and conducted with Director and Deputy Director-level staff, generating a rich qualitative dataset that informed both the VP's strategic planning process and the development program design. Separate interview instruments were developed for leadership and staff populations. Interview findings were synthesized into a themes-and-storyline presentation used to shape the division's strategic direction.

Six Leadership Development Workshops

A six-workshop leadership development curriculum was designed and facilitated for Deputy Director-level staff, building progressively across the arc of the engagement. Workshop topics were drawn from the VPs' goals, observations, and the themes that surfaced in the stakeholder interviews. This ensured the curriculum addressed the leadership challenges this team actually faced rather than a generic set of management topics. Each workshop included structured application exercises and coaching designed to bridge the gap between learning and practice.

Leadership Assessment Administration & Debriefs

Everything DiSC® Management assessments were administered to all Director and Deputy Director-level participants, with individual profile reports generated for each leader. One-on-one debrief sessions helped each participant understand their DiSC style, its implications for how they managed and motivated others, and the development opportunities it surfaced. The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team® assessment was administered and debriefed at the team level, giving the group a data-grounded view of where they functioned well collectively and where the most significant growth opportunities lay.

Custom Competency Framework

A competency framework was developed in partnership with the Directors to define the core capabilities expected of Director and Deputy Director-level staff. This provided a shared vocabulary and common understanding for development conversations and promotion metrics. The framework was designed to be practical and useful: Specific enough to be actionable and flexible enough to apply across roles with different functional responsibilities.

Six Months of Executive Coaching

All senior leaders received coaching grounded in their DiSC profiles and the specific leadership challenges each one faced. Deputy Director-level staff received parallel coaching to support the application of workshop learning. The VP of Enrollment received sustained coaching support throughout the entire engagement — a confidential thought partnership for the leadership and organizational decisions the strategic plan required.

THE OUTCOME

What Becomes Possible

When leadership development is designed with care — grounded in listening, sequenced with intention, and calibrated to the specific culture and moment of the organization it serves — something important happens. Leaders stop operating on instinct alone and start leading with self-awareness. Teams stop functioning as a collection of silos and start functioning as a cohesive unit.

Each leader gains a precise, data-grounded picture of how they show up: how their management style lands with the people they lead, what they naturally bring to difficult conversations, and where their instincts are likely to serve or limit them. That kind of self-awareness is not something a single workshop or a one-time feedback conversation can produce. It requires validated assessment data, skilled debriefing, and sustained coaching over time.

The team gains a shared language and a common model for functioning at a higher level together. The Five Behaviors framework gives the team something specific to work on collectively—not in the abstract, but grounded in its own data and patterns. When an enrollment division is navigating the pressures of a competitive admissions environment, the stakes of team dysfunction are real and visible. A shared model for building trust, engaging in productive conflict, and holding each other accountable makes that navigation less dependent on luck, an individual, or informal chemistry.

The organization gains something it cannot easily replicate without deliberate investment: a leadership bench developed together, using consistent frameworks, around a common picture of excellence. That alignment matters when decisions need to be made quickly, when a VP needs to delegate with confidence, and when an institution's leadership pipeline requires capable internal candidates for roles that open up or do not yet exist.

And structure does not have to come at the expense of culture. A leadership development program designed with genuine respect for the people it serves can introduce rigor without becoming bureaucratic, create accountability without creating anxiety, and build capability without diminishing the intrinsic motivation that brought excellent people to the work in the first place.

WHAT THIS ENGAGEMENT DEMONSTRATES

The Work Beneath the Work

Not every university division needs a dedicated HR business partner. But every organization serious about its mission needs what a great people leader does: the listening that surfaces what is actually true, the frameworks that give teams a shared language, and the sustained coaching that turns insight into changed behavior.

This engagement is what that work looks like when it is done thoughtfully, sequentially, and with genuine respect for what already exists. Lindsey Honari Advisors does not arrive with a program. We arrive with a process — one that begins with listening, earns trust before making recommendations, designs and implements a solution that is right for the organization at a specific point in time, and ends with something the organization can own and build on long after we're gone.

If your organization is navigating a similar moment — building leadership capacity in a high-performing team, supporting a senior leader through a significant transition, or simply recognizing that your people deserve more structured development and coaching than they currently have — we would welcome the conversation.

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Are You Training Your Team or Avoiding a Conversation?

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Have you ever paid for development work for the whole team but really designed to deliver a message to a specific person? You might be engaging in Trojan Horse Training.

Does one person’s development needs result in an entire team initiative? That’s the Dilution Effect.

Are you designing programs that, at their core, serve as an organizational avoidance strategy for difficult decisions? That’s the Workshop Workaround.

If you have done any of these, you may be paying for programs that, at their core, serve as an organizational avoidance strategy for difficult decisions.

What does this look like in the workplace? Here’s a pattern I see often in my work as a fractional HR consultant and executive coach.

A leader calls me in. They want help with professional development. The team needs to be “more collaborative.” Communication issues are causing things to “fall through the cracks.” People aren’t “innovative enough.” The ask is usually a workshop or facilitation. Something that gives the whole team a common language and shared expectations of what excellence and performance look like.

Sounds reasonable. And it is. Until you start scoping the project.

Because what I almost always discover within the first few conversations is that the performance gap isn’t a team problem. It’s a one- or two-person problem. There are specific individuals whose behavior, communication style, or resistance to change is ricocheting through the entire group. Everyone else is working around them. And the leader knows exactly who they are.

The Strategy Behind The Training Ask

With the training request, the leader is making a calculated choice on two hoped-for outcomes:

• Hoped-for Outcome 1: Maybe the person will absorb the message. If the whole team hears it together, maybe the individual recognizes themselves in it. It could land differently when it’s framed as a shared standard rather than individual criticism.

• Hoped-for Outcome 2: Even if the individual doesn’t change, the rest of the team now has a common vocabulary. They have a framework. Hopefully they have permission to name the behavior. The hope is that peer accountability will do the work the leader hasn’t done or can't do directly.

Now, I want to be fair to the leaders who do this. Most of them aren’t avoiding the issue out of weakness or ignorance. Their leadership team is small and cannot afford a departure. The individual has deep institutional knowledge no one else has. Or, they don’t have a strong case for letting this person go (lack of specific and verifiable data - that’s a whole other story). Instead, the individual is moved to another part of the company, where they become another team’s ‘problem’. 

I respect the intent behind the Trojan Horse. Sometimes, the cost of the hard conversation is not worth the heat the leader will take. But there are real reasons it rarely works the way leaders hope.

Why the Indirect Approach Falls Short

The rest of the team already knows. They know who the training is really for. They’ve been navigating around this person for months or years. When they sit in a workshop on “collaborative communication,” and the person next to them is the reason everyone learned to work around the issue, the training doesn’t feel developmental. It feels like theater. I know it because of the palpable resignation of ‘I have so much work to do, and I have to be here,now?’ The effectiveness is diluted across the entire team because…….

….. the individuals who most need to hear the message are often the least likely to absorb it in a group setting. Long-tenured employees with deep institutional knowledge frequently have a strong self-concept tied to their expertise and their history with the organization. A workshop on communication isn’t going to crack that open. If anything, they may sit in the room thinking, “This is exactly what everyone else needs to hear.”

And then there’s the cost — not just in dollars, but in credibility. Every time an organization rolls out a team-wide initiative to address what everyone knows is an individual or a systems problem, it erodes trust in development programs. High performers start to wonder: Is this a real investment in my growth, or is this about managing someone else?

What’s Really Going On

Let’s name the deeper dynamic. The individuals at the center of this pattern are often people the organization feels it cannot confront directly. Sometimes it’s because they hold critical institutional knowledge that feels irreplaceable. Sometimes it’s tenure — they’ve been there so long that the leader feels a genuine sense of loyalty or obligation. Sometimes there’s an unspoken awareness that this person, at their age and career stage, would struggle to find comparable work and income elsewhere.

These are real, human considerations. Leaders who weigh them aren’t cowards — they’re compassionate. But compassion without candor isn’t kindness. It’s a slow erosion of standards, team morale, and ultimately, the individual’s own dignity. Because that person deserves the respect of being told the truth about what’s expected of them — and given a genuine chance to meet it.

What I Tell Leaders

When I identify this pattern in a scoping conversation, I say something that usually lands:

"You are about to spend tens of thousands of dollars to address a one- or two-person issue."

That gets attention. Not because training never has value — it often does. But because it reframes the investment for what it actually is: an expensive workaround.

From there, I ask the leader a simple question: Does the rest of your team actually need this development, or is this really about one or two people?

If the honest answer is that the team would genuinely benefit from shared frameworks and a common language — great. Invest in that. But don't expect it to fix the individual problem. Pair it with a direct conversation and an individual coaching engagement for the person at the center of the issue.

If the honest answer is that this training exists because of one or two people? Then skip the team-wide program altogether. A targeted coaching engagement — paired with clear, behavioral feedback from their leader — is a true investment that actually addresses the root cause.

Either way, the conversation the leader hasn't had is the conversation that matters most.

The Real Question

If you’re a leader reading this and feeling a flicker of recognition, ask yourself:

Am I designing this program for my team’s growth — or around someone I haven’t been willing to talk to directly about what isn’t working? What does ‘better’ look like and how do I hold them accountable?

The answer doesn’t make you a bad leader. It makes you a human one. But the next step separates the leaders who build high-performing teams from the ones who keep designing programs around problems they already know how to name.

The most expensive training in the world is the one that replaces a conversation that was never had.

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Clients come to me when something important is at stake. If that's where you are, the next step is a conversation.

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Building a Performance Culture from the Ground Up

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United Salt Corporation

HR Strategy  ·  Org Design  ·  Executive Coaching  ·  18-Month Engagement

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SUMMARY

When the President of a 300-person, family-owned salt production company recognized that her people deserved more structure than they had — and that her growth plans required it — she needed a partner who could build what was missing without disrupting what was working. Over 18 months, Lindsey Honari Advisors designed and implemented a complete performance infrastructure: a custom competency framework, a twice-yearly performance and bonus program, redesigned job descriptions for every salaried role, and a manager training program built for this workforce — not a generic one. The result was a system the organization could own, sustain, and build on for years to come.

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THE CLIENT

A Culture Worth Protecting

The client is a salt production company with approximately 300 employees, operating as part of a family-owned holding company with more than 70 years of history. HR is a shared service at the parent company level, meaning leaders did not have dedicated HR business partners to address the full range of strategic people needs.

The President came from a world leader in chemical processing, where dedicated HR infrastructure and rigorous people systems were simply part of how the company ran. Three years into her tenure, she had driven meaningful operational and financial results. She also saw clearly what was missing — and what it would cost the organization if it went unaddressed much longer.

She was not looking for someone to impose a system from the outside. She was looking for a partner who could bring the rigor of a large-company HR function to a family enterprise that had built something genuinely worth protecting.

THE CHALLENGE

The Gap Between Instinct and Infrastructure

Building a performance system from scratch in a manufacturing environment is not a theoretical exercise. It is deeply human, deeply political, and deeply practical — all at once.

The workforce spanned multiple plant locations across different states, each with its own culture and rhythms, alongside a corporate team managing commercial, sales, and administrative functions. For some employees who had been with the company for decades, a structured performance conversation was an entirely new concept. Most managers had risen through the business rather than through formal management training. Giving structured, documented feedback — especially feedback tied to compensation — was not part of the established culture.

At the center of the work was a tension that had to be held carefully: how do you introduce systems and standards without sacrificing the family culture and personal trust that had always been the company’s competitive advantage? How do you create accountability without becoming cold — rigorous without becoming corporate?

These were not abstract questions. They were the concerns of real leaders who cared deeply about their people and understood that a performance system, handled badly, could damage something irreplaceable.

THE APPROACH

Built With, Not For

The engagement began with listening. Before any framework was drafted, Lindsey Honari Advisors spent significant time with the leadership team — understanding the culture, mapping the organization, and identifying what was working and needed to be preserved. The goal was never to import a system and ask the organization to conform to it. The goal was to build something that felt native.

Managers, HR staff, and employees were brought into the design process, not handed a finished product. Competencies were developed through dialogue rather than dictated from above. A pilot launched before full rollout, with structured feedback gathered from every participant and specific changes made in response. Training was designed for how performance conversations would actually unfold in a plant manager’s office in rural Virginia or New Mexico — not a hypothetical corporate setting.

That co-creative approach had two important effects. It produced a better result — one that fit the organization’s actual needs rather than a consultant’s assumptions about them. And it produced genuine buy-in. When people feel a system was built with them rather than imposed on them, they use it, sustain it, and advocate for it. In a culture that spans three generations, that distinction is the difference between a program that takes root and one that quietly fades.

WHAT WE BUILT

From Blank Page to PERKS

The centerpiece of the engagement was PERKS — the Performance Employee Reward System — a twice-yearly, competency-based performance and bonus program deployed through the company’s existing HR platform.

PERKS was built around a custom competency framework developed specifically for this organization. Eight core competencies — including Accountability, Big-Picture Thinking, Communicates Effectively, and Customer Focus — were defined with enough specificity to be meaningful and enough flexibility to apply across a workforce that ranged from plant operators to vice presidents. Each competency was anchored by a five-point behavioral rating scale that made the difference between meeting and exceeding expectations concrete and documentable, removing the subjectivity that so often undermines performance conversations.

The system ran twice per year. The first cycle served as an informational baseline — giving employees and managers a starting point for development conversations without the pressure of immediate compensation implications. The second tied to the annual review and bonus decisions. Between cycles, both parties had access to a shared Competency Notes feature: a running record of accomplishments and observations that addressed the recency bias inherent in traditional annual reviews.

Alongside PERKS, job descriptions were redesigned for every salaried role in the organization — from assistant plant managers to senior vice presidents — developed in close collaboration with the relevant manager and employee, creating a consistent, defensible standard across all locations. Manager training, a feedback skills workshop, and a step-by-step Employee Guide rounded out the implementation.

THE OUTCOME

What Becomes Possible

When a performance system is designed with care — built around an organization’s actual culture rather than imposed from outside — something shifts. Employees stop wondering where they stand and start focusing on where they’re going.

High performers gain a roadmap. A well-designed competency framework gives top talent something specific to work toward, and gives managers a consistent, documentable way to recognize strong performance and communicate it upward — visibility that becomes essential as an organization plans for growth.

Succession planning becomes possible. With standardized performance data across locations and functions, an organization can begin identifying its strongest contributors systematically — building the bench it will need before leadership gaps become urgent.

And structure does not have to come at the expense of culture. A performance system designed with genuine respect for what makes an organization work can introduce rigor without becoming cold, create accountability without becoming transactional, and bring consistency without erasing the warmth that family-owned companies spend decades building. The goal is never to corporatize a culture. It is to give that culture the infrastructure it needs to endure.

WHAT THIS ENGAGEMENT DEMONSTRATES

The Work Beneath the Work

Not every organization needs a Chief People Officer on staff. But every organization serious about growth needs what a great people leader does: systems that make performance visible, infrastructure that makes development possible, and a culture that makes great people want to stay.

This engagement is what that work looks like when it is done collaboratively, with genuine respect for what already exists. Lindsey Honari Advisors does not arrive with a template. We arrive with a process — one that begins with listening, earns trust before making recommendations, and ends with something the organization can own and build on long after we’re gone.

If your organization is outgrowing informal systems, preparing for significant growth, or simply recognizing that your people deserve more structure and clarity than they currently have, we would welcome the conversation.

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