Kern & PartnersLeadership. Collaboration.

Executive Team Alignment Coaching

Kern and Partners / Los Angeles

Executive leadership alignment turns agreements into action. Fast.

We work with your senior team on how it makes decisions, solves problems together and gets those decisions carried out across the company.

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The problem

Agreement at the top is only the start.

A senior team can agree on the strategy and still differ on priorities, trade-offs or who makes the final call. Coaching helps the team work through those differences and make commitments the rest of the business can act on.

Is this you?

When leaders call us

  • Your leadership team agrees in the meeting and does something different afterward.

  • The same decisions come back to the table again and again.

  • Members of the team protect their own function first.

  • There’s tension, or open conflict, and nobody’s addressing it.

  • Strategic initiatives keep stalling below the senior team.

  • You’re new to the team, or the team is new to you.

What we work on

Four things a leadership team has to do well

  • Make decisions that stay made.

    Who decides what, how fast, and what happens when two functions disagree. Fewer repeat decisions, less delay.

  • Work together, not just side by side.

    Trust, open disagreement and shared goals that outrank any one department’s goals.

  • Solve problems as one team.

    A shared way of working through problems that cross functions, so the answer isn’t decided by whoever argues hardest.

  • Get it carried out.

    Clear owners, clear handoffs, and a simple rhythm for checking progress, all the way down through the managers who do the work.

How it runs

Coaching on the real work.

We coach your team on its actual decisions and meetings, with support for each leader’s part. Then your leaders use the same ways of working with their own teams, so the change reaches the people carrying out the decisions.

What changes

What changes

  • Clearer decisions, with agreed reasons for revisiting them.

  • Initiatives land closer to the date they were promised.

  • Fewer conflicts between functions reach the CEO.

  • A leadership team that’s accountable to each other, not only to the boss.

Russell Kern presenting a slide on trust behaviors
Russell coaching on trust behaviors

In their words

What leaders say

The most important upgrade you can make in the way that others see you as a leader is to change the way you see yourself as a leader. Russell Kern knows his stuff, but more importantly, he knows your stuff. He knows what’s holding you back and how to move you forward. Of course, Russell has that history of building great leaders and building great companies, but the thing that he has that makes him truly special is the heart and desire to pass that knowledge onto you.

Rob GoldenbergChief Creative Officer · Jewish Federation Los Angeles

Having seen Russell grow his business from a start up to a thriving multi-million dollar company, the secret sauce that Russell always brings to leaders is unabated honesty about what he sees, good or bad, in their business. Whether it relates to his own services or not, leaders from the many Fortune 500 clients he works with have trusted Russell’s counsel for years. That kind of ego-free, drama-free, agenda-free advice is why his clients stay with him no matter how big or small their business or their challenge.

Camilla Grozian-LorentzenFounder & CEO · Lorentzen MarketingOn working with Russell

Having worked with and coached dozens of Mid-Market CEOs as a Vistage Chair, Russell is the go-to expert on collaboration development for high-performance teams. This book, Transform or Die, captures the step-by-step methodology he’s refined through decades of real-world experience and building a $100MM company. His Human+AI framework will help leaders avoid collaboration development blind spots while reducing the risk from costly AI pilot failures. The key point Russell makes, which I fully support, is that business growth, profits, and success are not about the tech; it’s always about leadership, trust, and effective collaboration.

Sandeep KheraCEO Peer Group Chair & Executive Coach · Vistage and TIGER 21On Transform or Die

Questions

Questions

My leadership team isn’t aligned. How do I fix it?

Start by finding where the misalignment shows up in the work: which decisions get reopened, which handoffs fail, which goals pull against each other. Then agree on decision rights and one set of shared priorities, and practice working through disagreements in the room instead of after the meeting.

My leadership team is in-fighting. What do I do?

Don’t wait for it to settle on its own. Start by exploring competing goals, unclear decision rights and the relationships involved. Name the specific disagreement, get it into the meeting and agree how the team will decide when it can’t agree.

How do you build better accountability within a leadership team?

Make commitments visible, give each one a single owner and a date, and review them together every week or two. The shift happens when peers hold each other to account, not only the CEO.

Is this team building?

Yes, when team building means developing trust, shared priorities and accountability. Our focus is how your team decides, solves problems and follows through on real work.

Next step

Find out where your team is stalling.

Talk to Russell
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Kern and Partners / Let’s talk

The first step is a conversation.

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.

Your note goes directly to Russell.

Or call 877-323-5376 (KERN)
Free assessment

Assessment

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