Rene Madden

The Elevare Edge · Issue 17 · June 9, 2026 Developing Your People I worked with a woman many years ago who had been with a major financial services firm for over 20 years. She was knowledgeable, she spoke well, and she was exceptional at training others. But she couldn't get promoted past VP. So she made a move. She transferred to another team, thinking a fresh start would change things. Same result. Passed over again. When she asked why, they told her there weren't enough spots. She didn't...

The Elevare Edge · Issue 18 · June 24, 2026 You got promoted to lead a broken team. No resources. No support structure. Just a mandate to turn it around. A VP asked me last month: "Rene, do I fire people? Do I wait it out?" Neither. I've coached dozens of leaders stepping into broken teams. The ones who turn it around in months, not years, don't start with performance reviews or terminations. They don't reorganize. They start with a playbook. Here's what I mean by that. A playbook is the...

Hi Reader - I wanted to reach out personally to invite you to something I've been building for a while. On Tuesday, June 2 at 10am ET, I'm hosting a free live webinar called Stop Guessing About Headcount. Here's why I built this: Most leaders see burnout and assume they need more headcount. But the real problem is usually invisible. It's how work is distributed across the team, how complexity gets ignored in assignments, and how staffing decisions get made on feeling instead of data. I know...

The Elevare Edge · Issue 16 · May 19, 2026 The Headcount Trap Your team is burned out. Morale is sliding. People are working late. So your instinct kicks in: We need more headcount. It's the obvious answer. It feels like the right answer. But here's what I learned as a manager, and what I've seen play out dozens of times since: headcount is almost never the first answer. It's usually the comfortable answer, the one that feels like action without requiring you to look under the hood. The...

The Elevare Edge · Issue 15 · May 4, 2026 Your team is watching you right now. Not because anything dramatic has happened yet. But because they have seen what is happening across the industry. The headlines are everywhere. More than 52,000 jobs cut in financial services so far in 2026. And every person still sitting at their desk is doing the same quiet calculation: if it comes here, what will my leader do? That question is already shaping how much your team trusts you. Before you have done a...

The Elevare Edge · Issue 14 · April 14, 2026 Culture change announcements are easy. I've made them. I've sat in rooms where they were made. I've watched leaders stand up in front of their teams, lay out the vision, and mean every word of it. And then watched nothing change. Not because the leaders were insincere. Not because the team didn't want things to be different. But because the announcement was never the hard part. What comes after it is. Why it stays stuck In my experience leading...

The Elevare Edge · Issue 13 · April 1, 2026 The alignment you think you have is not the alignment you actually have Your leadership team is not as aligned as you think. I learned the difference the hard way. I got approval to hire five senior client service managers. Two senior leaders. Both on board. Both in the room. Both sold the vision. Until it started working. The new hires began building client relationships. Sales panicked about territory. One leader backtracked on the original...

𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 18, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 | The Elevare Edge Most operational problems are not process problems. They are leadership problems wearing a process costume. I know that sounds provocative. But stay with me. I worked with a team that was drowning in chaos. Fire drills every week. The same escalations, same rework, same Saturday calls. We had documented every process. We had a weekly operations review. The process was not the problem. The problem was that the people closest to the work had no authority to fix...

𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝟭𝟬, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 | 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗢𝗻𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 --- 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵 A leader told me recently, "I know I should give her more direct feedback. But she's one of my best people and I don't want to risk losing her." So they stayed quiet. And six months later, she left anyway. Not because of the feedback she got. Because of the feedback she didn't. This is the paradox I see constantly in financial services leadership: The thing leaders avoid to protect trust is the exact thing that destroys it. --- 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆...