Workforce leadership development
Kern and Partners / Los AngelesWe develop managers, supervisors, sales leaders, and executive teams to develop leaders who develop leaders.
Leaders who guide and grow their people to work effectively across every department.
Welcome
What Kern and Partners does for leaders and teams, and how the work starts.
Meet RussellExperience with
Company names reflect professional experience, not endorsements of this offering.01 / Problems we solve
We help you understand what is getting in the way of a desired behavior change or the inculcation of a given set of leadership principles. The answers are generally complex and have various causes, which is why we listen and conduct diagnostic investigations before recommending a solution process.
Explore free assessmentsYour leadership team agrees to the strategy in the room. Then each department goes off and executes something different.
Handoffs between departments lack clarity, accuracy or completeness. Nobody owns fixing the issue. Work sits.
The same issue and decision gets discussed and made again and again in every meeting.
Problems land on your desk that should’ve been settled two levels down.
Top performers got promoted to team leader yet weren’t fully trained on how to lead a team, and now there’s turnover and complaints are rising.
Your new managers don’t know how to have hard, important growth and behavior guidance conversations, so they skip the discussion and let accountability slip.
Your culture for one-to-ones generally skips over honest career growth and talent development discussions and plans.
You’ve bought and implemented many types of leadership training before, but it doesn’t become part of the organization’s culture.
02 / What we do
Start with a complimentary assessment or a conversation about your issues.
Gain the Magnificent Manager advantage.
Create effective next generation sales leaders.
Transform cross-functional collaboration cultures.
Increase executive team alignment and execution velocity.
03 / Testimonials
I feel Russell’s training should be mandatory for all leaders and teams. It optimized the way our people work together and our workflow ... all leaders should consider how much team members feel more valued when we show we care by investing in their development.
Charlene MinxFounder, President · Minx Law
Russell brought us his wealth of knowledge and expertise in the areas where my team needed support. He has a fantastic track record of delivering training sessions that are not only informative but engaging and impactful. His session empowered my team to excel in their roles and achieve outstanding results.
Zarnaz ArilaChief Marketing Officer · Emplify
Russell has the ability to break things down into their lowest common denominator, so it is easy for people to understand his key concepts. There’s a warm, friendly, easy to understand manner to his presentation.
Jeff BiesmanChief Marketing Officer · National Debt Relief
Having the ideas of challenges around purpose, understanding behavior of organizations and really focusing on the concept of magnificence was incredibly helpful. To keep that focus on what it is we’re trying to accomplish and to think differently about not only the staff that we have in place but how to onboard new staff and how to engage in a way that provide encouragement to people that are new, but also people who have been around for quite some time that helps us really achieve our missions. This was a great experience, and I would encourage anybody to do this.
Ron BrownCEO · Children’s Bureau
04 / Why Kern
We coach your leaders to use their skills and newly gained knowledge not just in their own work but to consistently teach them to their teams. This builds long-term capability development as a culture inside your company, removing your dependency on outside facilitators.
We listen to the people involved; seek to understand what the goals are not only of the organization but of them personally and professionally. We seek to identify where skills or ways of working need to change before we recommend an intervention or change solution to meet your goals.
We agree what progress should look like, using measures that matter to you, such as fewer escalations, clearer handoffs or authentic coaching. Where the data supports it, we estimate the business impact and build your solutions from the desired outcomes forward.
We use the same assessment and diagnostics at the start of an engagement and at agreed-upon points in time, alongside business metrics, so everyone can see what changed and where more work is needed.
Unlike others, who send in sages to talk from stages or facilitators who are trained to deliver pre-set courses, Russell Kern, a four-decade CEO who’s been there, had many a success and many a failure, is your strategic partner from discovery through implementation and continuing to ongoing change result measurement.
05 / How we work
Each step in developing a relationship with KERN is a separate decision. We use the first conversation to understand your goals and whether a simple assessment or a deeper diagnostic would be of most value to you.
Take the best-fit assessment. See your results in under five minutes. Or talk directly with Russell about your issues, challenges, and vision.
We talk with the leaders and teams involved, identify what is getting in the way and estimate the business impact where the data allows. Russell walks you through the findings and a proposed plan for the first 90 days.
Together, we choose a change priority for a 90-day intensive sprint. Your leaders practice new skills on the work involved, with coaching, and then are provided the support required to teach forward concepts and principles to their teams. We compare the starting point with progress at day 90 and agree what should come next.
06 / Assessments
Choose the assessment that best matches what you want to know more about.
You’ll see your result, gain a full report, be able to share your results and the assessment with peers.
07 / Meet Russell
Russell Kern founded a national marketing agency and ran it as President and CEO for over four decades, serving clients including AT&T, DirecTV, AMEX, AAA, Blue Cross and Canon. He sold his company to Omnicom, then, over the next decade, doubled the business while developing the senior leadership team to grow it further after his transition.
He knows what it costs when departments don’t talk to each other, because he paid that cost himself. As a student of neuroscience, communication, behavior change, marketing, and leadership, he brings a non-traditional approach to the critical topics of manager-to-leader development. He’s also the author of Transform or Die: How to Build Teams that Outthink, Outpace, and Outprofit the Competition in the AI Age, an Amazon bestseller.
Published in AMA Quarterly, 2026: The Neuroscience Risks of Using AI to Think for Us
More about RussellCredentials
Also: Harvard, Omnicom U at Babson · Wiley, Change Leadership · Wiley, L360 Evaluations · Vistage Speaker
08 / Resources
Executive reports, guides and handbooks from Kern and Partners.
Senior leader’s guide
90-day quick-start program
Executive briefing
Talent development professional’s handbook
OD professional’s handbook
We develop managers, supervisors, sales leaders and executive teams, and help people work more effectively across departments. Development is built around real work, supported by AI coaching and practice, and measured before and after.
We help sales leaders use one-to-ones for strategic thinking, career growth and preparation for greater responsibility, not just pipeline updates. Leaders practice coaching conversations and learn to use AI for preparation, rehearsal and follow-through, then teach their teams practical ways to simplify routine sales work.
See Sales Leadership DevelopmentThe assessments and the first call are complimentary. A diagnostic is $4,500. A 90-Day Change Sprint comes with a satisfaction guarantee, an agreed-to scope and a fixed fee before it starts.
Training is harder to apply when it is disconnected from real work, offers little practice or has no follow-through. We build development around your challenges, with practice, support from your leaders and progress checks.
The change sprint runs 90 days. We measure at the start and again at the end, so by day 90 you’ll know what moved and what didn’t.
Often both. We scope the work around an operating problem, like slow handoffs, repeat decisions, or escalations, so your COO and CHRO are looking at the same result.
Russell, directly. There’s no junior team.
Let’s talk about your team
Thirty minutes with Russell to discuss the result you need, what may be getting in the way and whether we can help. No obligation to go further.
