A practice built on the health of the leadership team.

Why the practice exists

Most consulting sold to CEOs is built around the strategy, the market, the org chart, or the technology. Those matter. But underneath all of them sits the small group of people at the top of the company, and whether that group can behave like a single team when it matters. When the leadership team is functioning, ordinary strategies deliver extraordinary results. When it is not, brilliant strategies stall inside two quarters because every decision has to be renegotiated three times before anything moves.

Carbide exists to work on that group directly. Not on the individuals in it, one at a time. Not on the training curriculum a talent function has purchased. On the leadership team itself as a unit, and on the CEO whose job it is to run it.

What leadership health means, specifically

Leadership health is a working idea, not an abstract one. In our practice it comes down to five observable behaviors of the top team.

• Decisions stick. A decision made in the leadership team room is honored outside of it, even by the members who disagreed. It is not relitigated in side channels, one-on-ones, or the next standing meeting.
• Decision rights are named. For any recurring class of decision, the team knows who decides, who is consulted, and who is informed. There is no default of "it goes to the CEO" for decisions that should not.
• Meetings produce action. The standing meeting cadence is designed. Different meetings do different work: operating review, strategic decision, one-on-one, informal talk. They do not all become the same meeting where nothing gets decided.
• Functions trust each other. Function leaders can raise a problem with each other directly without it becoming a political event or an escalation to the CEO. The horizontal relationships are as strong as the vertical ones.
• Follow-through is visible. What was agreed shows up next week without the CEO chasing it. The team polices its own commitments because the structure lets them.

When those five hold, the leadership team is healthy. When one or two are missing, the CEO carries the load personally. When three or more are missing, the company runs at a fraction of its capability regardless of what the market is doing.

How the practice is delivered

Every engagement is led personally by a senior consultant with over twenty years of experience running or advising leadership teams. There is no junior army, no partner-plus-analyst pyramid, no delivery model where you meet the person you hired at the kickoff and then work with somebody else for six months. If you retain Carbide, you work with the consultant who signed the contract.

The work is US-based and nationwide, remote-first, with on-site working sessions at the moments that call for them. Most of the ongoing rhythm happens where your leadership team already meets. Diagnostics are done live where possible and by structured video interview where distance requires it. Install work is timed to the operating rhythm of the leadership team itself.

What Carbide deliberately does not do

The practice is intentionally narrow. There are several adjacent things we do not do, and we say so up front to save everyone the meeting.

• No personality inventories. We do not administer psychometric tools as the diagnostic. Personality types do not explain why a leadership team cannot make a decision stick. Behaviors and structure do.
• No generic leadership training. We are not a training vendor. We do not sell a curriculum. The intervention is specific to your team and what the diagnostic finds, not a program purchased off a shelf.
• No offsite theater. We do not run two-day facilitated retreats with no follow-through. Offsites without an install engagement produce warmth in the room and no change in the operating week. We only run the offsite if the engagement includes what happens the Monday after.
• No functional strategy work. We are not a growth consultancy, an operations firm, or a search practice. When you need those, we will recommend one. Our work is the team behind them.

Who Carbide works with

The clearest fit is a US-based growing company with a leadership team of six to twelve members, most often in the 100 to 2,000 employee band. Many are post-Series-B or PE-backed. Some are family-owned or founder-run. The industry does not matter as much as the situation. What matters is that the CEO recognizes the leadership team as the actual thing in the way, and is prepared to work on it.

If that is you, the next step is a thirty-minute conversation. It is not a sales call. It is a direct read on what you are seeing, and an honest answer on whether the diagnostic is the right next step.