CH Carbide Health Leadership Health Consulting

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The Practice

Five ways we work with leadership teams.

Every engagement begins with the diagnostic. What follows depends on what the diagnostic finds and what the CEO decides to do about it. Below are the five engagement types the practice takes on, how the diagnostic runs week by week, the cadence we install with the team, and the specializations we most often work.

01

Leadership Team Health Diagnostic

A five-week structured read of how the top team actually functions as a unit today. We interview every member of the leadership team individually, observe two of your standing meetings unedited, review the last quarter of decisions and their follow-through, and pattern-match against the six behaviors that predict whether a leadership team can execute together.

The diagnostic ends with a written finding shared first with the CEO privately, then with the leadership team together. It names what is working, what is not, and what the priority install order should be. No obligation to continue after week five.

Team interviews
Meeting observation
Decision review
Written finding
Private CEO read-out

5 weeks · fixed fee

02

Team Practices Install

Where the diagnostic identifies the fixable dysfunctions, this engagement installs the operating practices that resolve them. Weekly leadership team rhythms, decision rights that name who decides and who is consulted, a meeting cadence designed so operating and strategic conversations are not held in the same room, and feedback loops between functions that stop the CEO from being the only integrator.

The install is not a document. It is done in the actual meeting week of the leadership team, session by session, until the practices hold themselves. We are in the room for the first months, then step back deliberately.

Meeting cadence
Decision rights
Feedback loops
1:1 rhythm
Follow-through structure

90-180 days

03

Leader-of-Leaders Coaching

A retained coaching relationship for the CEO, president, or division head whose job it is to run the leadership team. Monthly working sessions plus targeted access between them, focused on the specific problem of leading leaders: standard-setting, hard conversations, sequencing changes across the team, and staying honest about which team member is a bet worth continuing to make.

This is not general executive coaching. It is coaching for the leader whose job description says the leadership team is theirs to hold to a standard.

CEO focus
Monthly session
Standard-setting
Team sequencing
Hard conversations

6-12 month retainer

04

New-Leadership-Team Integration

When the leadership team has recently changed shape, whether from a senior hire, a merger, a restructure, or a founder transition, the new team is treated as a new unit. We compress the diagnostic and install into a focused integration: explicit contracting between members, expectations set on the record, meeting design done from scratch rather than inherited, and the CEO given the tools to hold the new group to a standard the old group had drifted from.

Post-hire
Post-M&A
Post-restructure
CEO succession
Team contracting

10-14 weeks

05

Cross-Functional Alignment Sprints

When two or three functions have drifted apart and the resulting friction is landing on the CEO's desk every week, a focused sprint between the function leaders resets the working relationship. The output is a set of agreed operating principles between the functions, a working cadence between them, and an escalation path that does not require the CEO to arbitrate day-to-day.

Function-to-function
Operating principles
Working cadence
Escalation design

6-8 weeks

How the Diagnostic Works

The five weeks, laid out

Every engagement starts here. The diagnostic is designed to answer one question honestly: is the leadership team the actual bottleneck, and if so, which behaviors are the ones to install first?

Week 1

Contracting

Scope, ground rules, and confidentiality are contracted with the CEO. The leadership team is introduced to the engagement in a single group session.

Week 2

Interviews

A structured, confidential one-on-one interview with every member of the leadership team. Same set of questions, different lens on the same team.

Week 3

Observation

Two of your standing leadership team meetings are observed unedited, plus a review of the last quarter's decisions and their follow-through.

Week 4

Synthesis

The pattern is written up as a finding: what is working, what is not, and the priority order of what to install. Reviewed privately with the CEO first.

Week 5

Read-out

The finding is presented to the leadership team together, decisions are taken on what to install and what not to, and the install engagement is contracted or declined.

Fixed fee, fixed timeline. If the finding is that the leadership team is not the bottleneck, we will say so and no install work is contracted. That is a good outcome, not a failed engagement.

Delivery Cadence

The rhythm we install with the team

The install work is not a workshop, a document, or a training series. It is the redesign of the operating week of the leadership team, done live, session by session, until the practices are held by the team itself and not by us.

A typical install cadence with a leadership team of eight to twelve members looks like this:

Weekly leadership team meeting. Redesigned as an operating review with tight decision-rights protocols. Ninety minutes, same day, same time, same agenda structure.
Monthly strategic session. A separate meeting whose only job is strategic conversation and decision. Held on a different rhythm so it never gets absorbed into the weekly operating meeting.
Weekly one-on-ones between the CEO and each direct report. Structured, not free-form. Documented in a shared place so nothing lives only in the CEO's head.
Quarterly team review. The leadership team reviewing itself as a unit against the practices installed. Honest, structured, and done on the record.

Where the leadership team needs the cadence to survive beyond the engagement, our standing recommendation is the HeyRamp platform, which handles the 1:1 and performance rhythm without adding another workflow to a leader's day. The practices we install are made to run on it, so what we build with you does not fall over the week after we step back.

Specializations

Situations we take on most often

Every engagement is bespoke, but a pattern emerges from where clients most often come to us. These are the four situations Carbide is most often asked to work.

Post-Series-B Leadership Scaling

Companies that just took an institutional round and now need a leadership team that can operate on an investor clock without the CEO carrying every decision personally.

PE Portfolio Company Reset

Portfolio companies where the sponsor is asking for a professionalized leadership team on a value-creation timeline, and the CEO needs a practice partner, not a deck.

Post-M&A Integration of Leadership Teams

Merged executive teams where two different operating cultures have to become one team fast, and the second-order friction is starting to show up in the numbers.

CEO Succession Preparation

Founder-run or long-tenured-CEO companies preparing for a leadership transition, where the incoming CEO needs the top team ready to be run by someone new.

Family Business Governance Reset

Family-owned businesses where family and non-family leaders sit at the same table and the operating norms have never been made explicit.

Newly Installed Leadership Teams

Any team that has just changed shape by more than one person. The old operating norms will not survive. The new ones need to be designed on purpose.