Accelus Insights:
The Leadership Narrative

By Barbara Stewart, PCC, ACTC | Accelus Partners  We were about to run the first session of a new leadership development program, and the room was going to be full of people who may or may not have known each other but definitely didn’t know us.  That mattered more than the agenda...

Recently, I worked with a senior leader whose next promotion had stalled.  Two years earlier, she had accepted her current role because it was framed as the bridge to something bigger: a larger leadership position that had been outlined, discussed, and all but promised. She had done the work since,...

In a team development session, two people in attendance had each decided the other was difficult to work with. Over time, they had found ways to avoid each other. They scheduled around each other, routed work through other people, and divided projects in ways that looked like thoughtful delegation but...

When a Fortune 250 organization recognized that strong technical talent alone would not sustain future growth, it invested in developing the next generation of finance leaders. Through a structured leadership development program for managers across Accounting, Audit, and Tax, the organization strengthened leadership capability, improved cross-functional collaboration, and began building...

During a recent succession planning session, I asked the room a simple question: what are you actually trying to build, a replacement, or leadership capacity?  No one answered right away. Not because the question was hard, but because most organizations have never actually separated those two ideas.  The Trap  Most succession planning...

In a recent engagement with a large enterprise organization, an engineer on the leadership team had a moment of real clarity about himself.  He realized that every time a colleague brought something into the conversation that wasn’t a hard fact, a hunch, a wider view, a sense of where things might be...