Kairos helps CEOs and their teams outpace the complexity of their business. This is what they say about us:

Becoming a CEO was the easy part. The hard part was navigating the hard decisions thereafter. The Kairos team brought powerful, reflective practices that helped our team build trust and candor. They were less focused on ‘fast wins,’ and more on long-term growth.

Navigating the hard decisions has required coaching, observation, and reflection. The Kairos team helped me not only grow as a leader, but provided perspective on how to manage and grow a team that is mission-driven. The hard conversations are usually the best conversations–no one wants to admit when things need improvement. The Kairos team has excelled in preparing me to admit the weaknesses and to acknowledge that feedback is a gift.

Don Wettrick | President + Founder

When we engaged Kairos, we weren’t in the middle of a crisis. Their work helped us deepen our trust as a leadership team, so when a tidal wave like a pandemic hit, we were able to row stronger together.

With five partners and a fast-paced environment, it was often easy to bypass tension—ignore it and move on. In 2019, we specifically wanted to build a strong foundation for trust and to grow in our ability to give feedback to one another. Through our work with Kairos, we were introduced to tools that helped us invite feedback and emboldened us to give it, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Kairos uses a personality tool that gave us deep insight into ourselves and greater compassion and understanding for each other. It allowed us to see one another in a way that we just hadn’t before. It gave us a valuable shared vocabulary for growth ...

Kairos doesn’t accept fixed and knee-jerk reactions. Other consultants and coaches have said to me, “Maybe I can help you with this, Mike.” I say, “No, I think I’m good.” They then demure and move on. My Kairos coach, however, said, “I don’t think you’re ok. I’m not buying it.” He forced a moment or reflection, because he saw something important that I couldn’t.

This kind of coaching is valuable for any CEO who isn’t wide awake to the pain that they’re feeling. The way Kairos comes alongside and holds up the mirror causes me to dig deeper and deal with what’s real. As Managing Partner, I’ve always felt ultimately accountable for DeveloperTown. My Kairos coach guided me to the conclusion that I need a well-functioning leadership team to be able to execute against our vision. Historically, I thought I could succeed in spite of my partners, and now we ...

As a young leader, one of the most challenging issues I encountered was team cohesion and “buy-in” into the company’s mission. Everyone on the senior leadership team was talented and qualified for the positions they held, but they were not a true team. As a collection of individuals, we were prone to pointing the finger at others on our own team when business challenges developed.

Within that context, our HR leader encouraged meetings with several external consultants to resolve or at least improve the interpersonal dynamics. But each consultant had a gap in their proposal that they never realized: they were trying to address behaviors, routines, or personality types, not underlying motivations and fears. That’s to say that they were focused on the superficial, even if they were claiming to be addressing deeper issues.

Thankfully, I met Chip at a random business development mixer and immediately knew he was not ...

I came into my current role as CEO of Intelligent Fiber Network in the middle of 2017. We had recently signed the largest commercial contract in our company’s history with a very large healthcare provider.

Failure was not an option.

We’d grown to a point where we were starting to work more across functions. We had added new people and started to define our values. I knew that one of the first things we had to do was to develop leaders, including myself. We had people who were extraordinarily talented in their individual field, but didn’t have much experience with how to get teams working well together.

I realized we had a lot of work to do, first and foremost, to grow this team. We engaged Kairos to coach our executives. Kairos works with a really interesting combination of blunt force and empathy, and it’s remarkable. It is very much ...

To be a good fit to work with Kairos, you must have will, grit, and the fortitude to stick with it. It’s not an easy path to go down. But it can be a life-changing path for not only the CEO or President, but also for your executives and the entire company.

Don’t work with Kairos if you’re a CEO who thinks you’ve got it all figured out, or are resistant to a different way of looking at leading your company. If you’re a CEO who’s armored up and not open to being vulnerable, this work would be challenging for you.

Working with Kairos can be a little scary– you learn some things about yourself that can scare you. It’s like stepping off a cliff. But if you’re open to really digging into what scares you, the opportunities are boundless.

Kairos has helped me better understand who I am. We’ve ...

What’s different about Kairos? CEO-driven, capacity-building, transformative change. That’s different.

Working with Kairos, I learned that real change starts with the CEO. But it’s not for just any CEO. It’s too easy to say, “Not my problem. Hey, professionals, go fix these people.” And that could create the kinds of tactical improvement that executives could learn in a classroom or from a TED talk. But Kairos convinced me: real capacity-building and transformative change starts with the CEO.

Through this work, I have built more capacity. That was the value proposition that intrigued me all along. I was skeptical at first, but I am in a much better place today than a year ago. There were cultural or process changes that I resisted that were long overdue, but I resisted. Now I am doing more of the things I should be doing (values-clarification, relationship-building, forward-thinking, planning) and less of what I ...

We acquired another engineering company in 2017, and we instantly added 20 people to our ranks going into 2018. We were essentially a new company with two locations and people who didn’t know each other. We also started a Products group in addition to our existing Services line. Everyone had new roles, I was leading a larger team, and we needed to build a strong executive team.

Our work with Kairos was like basketball. A coach’s role is commenting on practice, commenting on live-fire situations, taking it offline when appropriate, providing feedback in the line of fire, and not letting the players off the hook. The coach can’t witness everything though. So Kairos encouraged us to give and get feedback from our peers. We now have an environment that allows for even deeper and more effective feedback than previous to our engagement with Kairos. This is not normal. Good companies ...