Sarah Parker

Your company has outgrown your early-stage team. Now what? Too many CEOs wait too long to act—hurting their business *and* the people who helped build it. In this piece for Lead Grow Develop, I explore how CEOs can lead through growth with clarity and compassion—recognizing when talent needs shift, and navigating transitions with dignity. 🔑 Key takeaways: - Create a short-term strategic roadmap to clarify the talent needed now - Make coaching your managers' #1 metric - Normalize role transitions as part of growth—not failure - Communicate early and often, especially when the company is changing faster than people can 🧭 At Hazan Consulting, we help growth-stage executives align talent to strategy—fast. 📖 Read the full article here → https://loom.ly/ekVmkqk 💬 Let’s talk if you're navigating a team or company stage evolution. #Leadership #CEOInsights #TalentStrategy #HazanConsulting #GrowthLeadership

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🤝 When Titans Clash: Navigating Executive-Level Conflict Without Losing the Mission It’s easy to think that at the executive level, we’ve mastered the art of collaboration. After all, we’ve sat in enough boardrooms, led enough change initiatives, and built enough strategies to fill a Harvard case study. But here’s the truth: Even the most seasoned leaders clash. Especially when stakes are high, perspectives are diverse, and egos—yes, even well-intentioned ones—enter the room. What distinguishes healthy organizations from fragile ones isn’t the absence of conflict. It’s the presence of trust, structure, and accountability to work through it. As leaders, our job isn’t to avoid tension. It’s to normalize it, navigate it, and transform it into momentum. A few reflections I’ve seen work: Align on the why before debating the how. Strategic misalignment is often rooted in competing goals, not bad intentions. Design intentional forums for courageous conversations—not just check-ins or "parking lot" moments. Leaders address the "elephant in the room" even if you don't have a solution just yet. Equip CHROs as facilitators of truth and trust, not just as HR referees. Culture is crafted in these moments. Model composure over control. The rest of the org is always watching. A strong culture isn’t tested during the all-hands meetings. It’s revealed in the 1:1s behind closed doors and how you address the conflict in the organization. CEOs and CHROs: How are you equipping your teams to embrace and evolve through conflict? I'd love to hear how you're building executive muscle for the long game.

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If your equity benchmarks and pricing exercises still assume a four-year vest, your targets could be off by ~25%. Average new hire grant duration at public tech companies according to Pave's latest data release: 3.0 years. Down from 3.6 years as recently as January 2022.

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Bringing teams together is often framed as a structural exercise. New reporting lines. New org charts. New operating models. But integration is rarely just structural. The harder work shows up in the day-to-day: How decisions get made. Who really owns what. How priorities get interpreted when teams see the work from different angles. Until those things become clear, integration tends to feel slower than expected. Not because people resist it. But because they’re still learning how to move forward together.

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As HR leaders, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to support employees when they need care. But the reality is that even the best benefits can feel overwhelming if people don’t know where to start. That’s why the combination of CirrusMD and Quantum Health is so exciting. Instant access to virtual care paired with a team that helps guide people through the healthcare system can make the experience much simpler for employees and their families. I appreciated hearing Dayne Williams, CEO of Quantum Health, and Jamie Hall, President of CirrusMD, talk about the opportunity ahead. Read more here: https://hubs.ly/Q045cWDl0

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I heard someone at the Gartner CHRO Inner Circle Dinner this week say they've added an AI agent to their board. Let’s let that sentence exist for a second …. I'm still processing. The conversation at this dinner broke my brain in the best possible way – because that's what happens when a room full of people leaders stops performing certainty and starts getting real. Tchernavia Rocker of Revlon hilariously summed up what it’s like being a people leader in the age of AI: "I'm now a therapist to a sentient toaster that thinks it's Socrates." That’s a paraphrase, but it paints a vivid picture of the absurdity of the moment. The work of people leadership has always been: • Center the human • Protect the business • Develop the talent • Hold the culture And now it's all of that, plus figure out whether you're supposed to thank your AI agent, or whether you're wasting a gallon of water every time you do. An AI agent on a board seat is – let's just say it – a little unhinged. But it’s also clarifying. Because boards are where information politics are most expensive. The prep, the positioning, the managing of how something will land, who gets to present it, and in what order. If that's where AI is showing up first, it's telling us something about where the real inefficiency actually lives. And yet the conversation about AI efficiency keeps landing at headcount. Boards are being pushed by shareholders to get leaner. CEOs are being asked to show returns. The fastest visible number to move is people. That gap – between where AI is actually creating leverage and where organizations are pointing it – is worth sitting with. My take from this dinner: we're in a moment where the most important thing isn't having the answer. It's staying in the room, asking the actual question, and not pretending the toaster thing is fine just because everyone else seems calm. No one has this stuff figured out. Not the companies making announcements. Not the consultants with the frameworks. Not even me. But these types of conversations are where the real work is happening. So. Therapist to a sentient toaster. Board seat for an agent. What does it REALLY feel like for you to be leading people in the age of AI? Gartner C-level Communities

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The CPO seat is the loneliest role in product. You've spent years learning how to manage teams, build roadmaps, and ship products. But nothing prepares you for the unique challenges of the Chief Product Officer role: board dynamics, organizational design at scale, and making strategic bets that can make or break the company. Most leadership training doesn't cut it. Generic executive programs don't understand the intersection of product strategy and business outcomes that defines our work. And your peers? They're often competitors now, not collaborators. I built the CPO Accelerator to focus on navigating the messy realities of executive product leadership with people who've been there. The conversations happen at a level you can't get anywhere else: How do you redesign your product org when the company triples in size? How do you present product strategy to a board that doesn't understand why discovery takes time? How do you maintain product vision while managing competing executive priorities? Applications close tomorrow. If you're ready to stop feeling isolated in the CPO seat, this is your chance to be surrounded by peers who actually get it. Are you ready to lead with confidence at the executive table?

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Grateful to HrTech Cube for the opportunity to share this perspective on the “big small firm.” It’s not a tagline. It’s a business model — and a way of being. How we scale — and what we protect in the process — ultimately drives long-term value. Scale and soul can coexist. But only by deliberate design. #BigSmallFirm #ScaleWithSoul #FirmStrategy #ValueCreation #Leadership

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Leaders who fake confidence create teams that fake alignment. The humanity practice: make it safe to say I don’t know. Share one uncertainty, then ask what you’re not seeing and who is closer to the work. This opens honest talk and real problem-solving, turning hierarchy into collaboration. #LeadershipDevelopment #HumanCenteredWorkplaces #TheHumanityPractice #PsychologicalSafety #InclusiveLeadership

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Your global comp strategy is leaving 50%+ performance gains on the table. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business research reveals what most tech leaders miss: the incentive frameworks that drive engineering teams in SF fall flat in Bangalore, Mexico City, and Shanghai. The data: *Monetary incentives: 100%+ effort increase (US/UK engineering orgs) *Same comp model: <50% lift (APAC/LATAM teams) *50% attrition at minimum vesting (US) vs <10% (Mexico) The strategic miss: We build one-size-fits-all performance systems, but recognizing regional differences can empower you to tailor approaches that truly motivate your teams. According to the research, what high-performing orgs do differently: **APAC teams: Social recognition + team impact > individual bonuses **LATAM teams: Mission alignment + collective success > equity alone **US teams: Clear financial upside + individual attribution This isn't just about comp philosophy. It's about unlocking productivity at scale when you're operating distributed engineering, product, and go-to-market teams across regions. If your team performance varies dramatically by geography despite identical incentive structures, this highlights the opportunity to optimize and unlock hidden potential across regions. Research link: https://lnkd.in/ggTT4w99 #ExecutiveLeadership #TeamPerformance #GlobalOperations #TechStrategy

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