When Feedback Stops Working:
The Coaching Challenge that Keeps You Awake at Night
A live, in-person leadership experience featuring a real-life leadership case study with a Chief Financial Officer
Overview
Every organization has high-achieving leaders who are smart, committed, and successful by every external measure. They receive clear feedback.
They agree with it. They genuinely want to change. And yet—they don’t.
For VP Talent and HR leaders, this is the moment where leadership development quietly breaks down—and where talent risk begins to accumulate.
This session follows a Chief Financial Officer as he gets unstuck and navigates his way beyond this plateau and into the next stage of his leadership.
Through the real, unscripted story of James Thompson, a highly respected CFO, VP Talent and HR leaders are invited into a rare, inside view of what happens when leadership development hits a plateau—and why traditional tools like feedback, insight, and behavior change are no longer enough.
For VP Talent and HR leaders, this session is designed to sharpen judgment before investment—helping distinguish between leadership challenges that require more development and those that require a fundamentally different kind of development.
The focus is not on selling a solution,
but on seeing the problem more clearly.
If you’ve ever thought:
“We’ve given them the feedback—why aren’t they changing?”
“They know what they should do, they just aren’t doing it.”
“We’re investing heavily, but something is missing.”
This case will feel uncomfortably familiar—in the best possible way.
This session is designed for:
• VP Talent, VP HR, and VP Leadership Development
• Senior talent sponsors responsible for leadership pipelines
• Executives who fund, design, or evaluate leadership development initiatives
WHY THIS MATTERS
Senior leaders don’t derail overnight. They stall. They strain relationships. They disengage quietly. Or they leave—often just when the organization needs them most.
In today’s environment—where pressure is higher, complexity is relentless, and leadership benches are thin—when these moments are misdiagnosed, organizations don’t just lose momentum—they misallocate development dollars, stall succession pipelines, and risk losing leaders they’ve already invested heavily in.
This session makes visible a challenge many talent leaders recognize
instinctively but find difficult to name:
When feedback stops working, the issue is no longer skill or motivation—it’s identity.
This distinction changes how leadership development is designed, sponsored, and scaled. It is truly a game-changer.
This enables you to reduce guesswork and sponsor the right kind of development—at the right depth, for the right leaders, at the right time.
Most leadership stories focus on what a leader did differently.
This case study reveals why change was impossible—until it wasn’t.
You will see:
how identity-level wiring drives reactivity under pressure
why clear feedback and advice often fail with high performers
what kind of development work is required when leaders should know better—but still can’t do better
In this 60-minute session, you will experience:
A focused leadership case study of CFO James Thompson, allowing you to witness:
• how well-intended feedback collided with identity
• why repeated attempts at behavior change led to disengagement
• what shifted when the work went deep enough to address the real constraint
A live, time-bound Q&A with James Thompson, offering direct insight into:
• what actually needed to change
• what made this experience different from prior development efforts
• what this unlocked—for him and for the organization
The session is professionally facilitated and grounded in real organizational context and focused on learning, not self-disclosure.
What This Session Enables Talent Leaders to Do
After this session, VP Talent and HR leaders will be better equipped to:
• recognize when feedback failure signals an adaptive (not technical) challenge
• assess whether existing leadership programs are sufficient—or misaligned
• sponsor deeper work with greater clarity, confidence, and credibility
Monday June 22, 2026
9 AM PST / 12 PM EST / 6 PM CET