Your strategy is rarely the constraint.
Your organization's ability to execute it is.
Michael Sabbag helps CEOs build organizations that execute: an aligned executive team, decision rights that are actually defined, accountability that runs peer to peer, and a people system designed for the company you are becoming.
Thirty years of making the people side of the business pay off, on the record.
The company grew.
The organization underneath it did not.
Harvard researchers studied 120 senior leadership teams across 11 countries. Only about one in five performed at a high level. The rest were not broken people. They were sound people operating inside conditions that were never designed for the company they now run. That is the difference between a people problem and an effectiveness problem, and it is usually when Michael gets the call.
- Signal 01Your leadership team agrees in the room and drifts during the week.
- Signal 02Decisions get made, then quietly relitigated. Nothing stays decided.
- Signal 03Good people keep leaving, and the exit interviews all sound polite.
- Signal 04Performance reviews happen. Performance does not change.
- Signal 05You are the bottleneck and you know it, but every alternative feels risky.
Most CEOs do not have a people problem. They have an organizational effectiveness problem wearing people's faces.
The team looks misaligned because expectations were never fully defined. The executive looks unmotivated because the environment is fighting her. The manager looks like the issue because the system punishes the exact behavior you asked for. Send any of them to training and you will be having the same conversation in six months.
Michael's work starts with an honest diagnosis. He will not open with an offsite, a values rewrite, or a recommendation to fire anyone. He will help you see which conditions are actually constraining the organization, then design the smallest, strongest change that moves them.
The result is an executive team that stops relitigating the same arguments, an operating system that makes accountability normal instead of heroic, and a company that runs on more than your personal force of will. Your job as the CEO gets quieter. The numbers get louder.
His ability to link business drivers to HR initiatives was evident in the work he has done for us. Prior to this, the value of HR was undervalued. Now they see how and where we add value.
Three doors in. One discipline underneath.
Every engagement runs on the same discipline: diagnose the real constraint before prescribing anything. The right door depends on where the organization is stuck and how fast you need movement. Most engagements start small and earn their way into the next.
Executive Team Effectiveness
For the CEO whose leadership team is capable on paper and misfiring in practice. Michael assesses the team against the eight research-grounded drivers of executive team effectiveness, surfaces where trust, decision rights, and accountability actually break, and rebuilds the team's operating rhythm so decisions get made once and executed everywhere.
Organizational Effectiveness & Culture Redesign
For the founder who knows the organization has not kept pace with the company's ambition. A full assessment against Michael's proprietary 33-area People and Culture framework, a multi-year people roadmap tied to business strategy, and hands-on implementation with your HR or operations lead until the new system holds without him.
Executive +
Team Coaching
For the high-potential leader who needs a quiet, capable sounding board. Michael has taken 24 coaching assignments across his career. 22 of those people were promoted within six months. He does not coach by instinct. He coaches by model, measured against promotion and performance goals.
Having his perspective on creating the HR strategy and help in creating a five year roadmap allowed HR to have a seat at the executive table.
The Seven Factors that actually drive performance.
When someone is not performing, most leaders jump to one of two conclusions: more training or the wrong hire. Both are usually wrong. Michael's model, developed over three decades and published by ATD Press, identifies the seven places the real answer usually lives, for an individual, a team, or an entire organization.
Most leaders skip straight to factor six. That is why their fixes do not hold.
When a team member struggles, the instinct is to send them to training. Sometimes skills really are the gap. Often they are not. Often the person has the skill, but the environment is wrong, the tools are inadequate, the expectations are fuzzy, or the system punishes the behavior the leader says they want.
Michael's diagnostic walks the seven factors in order and ends with an honest answer to one question: what is the smallest intervention that will actually change this? That answer is almost never "another workshop." And it is almost never "fire them."
Before you book anything, measure your team.
The Executive Team Effectiveness Diagnostic is a ten-minute self-assessment built on the strongest research in the field: Harvard's senior leadership team studies, Google's Project Aristotle, McKinsey's top-team effectiveness data, and Michael's Seven Factors model.
Thirty-three statements. Eight drivers scored. You leave with a profile of your team, a ranked view of every driver, and the two levers most likely to move performance. No email gate. No sales sequence. The same honest starting point Michael uses with clients, offered before the first conversation instead of after it.
In a study of 120 senior leadership teams across 11 countries, only about one in five performed at a high level. Roughly two in five were actively underserving their organizations. Most CEOs did not know which group they were in.
Start where the cost of waiting is highest.
Every engagement is tailored. These are the three shapes it most often takes. Michael will tell you honestly if one of these is not the right door for where you are right now, and if he is not the right person, he will usually know who is.
Executive Team
Diagnostic
A focused assessment to map where your leadership team can be optimized, and the two or three moves that will help them level up.
- Structured interviews with each executive
- Review the eight drivers of team effectiveness
- Team effectiveness scored across eight drivers
- Written findings with options
Organizational Effectiveness Redesign
For leaders who know the people side of the company has not kept pace with the growth. A 6 to 12 month engagement to rebuild the foundation.
- Full assessment against the 33 area framework
- Journey to excellence roadmap tied to business strategy
- Infrastructure development as needed/li>
- Hands-on implementation with your HR or ops lead
Executive & Team Coaching + Development
One-on-one or group coaching and development activities for specific leaders or teams.
- Assessment of strengths and challenges
- Customized development plan
- Bi-weekly coaching over a defined horizon
- Measured against promotion or performance goals
He is an engaging speaker, and attendees at his workshop appreciated his interactive and personable style. Michael delivers what he says he is going to deliver.
He spent six years inside one of the nation's largest health systems. Then he came back for you.
Most advisors talk about organizational effectiveness from the outside. Michael just spent six years accountable for it inside the nation's tenth largest public health system: roughly 10,000 employees, four hospitals, and a board watching the numbers.
At Broward Health, one of the ten largest public healthcare systems in the country, he led enterprise culture transformation, advised the board and hospital administration across every corporate function, and built the leadership systems behind measurable gains in performance review completion and patient experience scores. Before that: VP-level and director roles through PwC, Oracle's Learn.com, and Sixt, where his leadership program returned an independently verified 874% ROI.
Michael holds a Master of Arts in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, is a certified executive coach, and authored Developing Exemplary Performance One Person at a Time (ATD Press), the book behind the Seven Factors framework. He is also partnering with the Columbia Leadership Group on original research into how artificial intelligence is reshaping leadership itself.
Today, Michael is researching the impact of AI on leaders with Columbia Leadership. He is a past member of the National Advisor for Chapters Team at ATD, and a 2010 recipient of the South Florida Business Journal Excellence in Human Resources award. He is also an Eagle Scout.
Plainspoken work, measurable results.
He has the ability to drive the strategic plans of a business while also ensuring tactical things are not overlooked.
Michael is a solid contributor to the training space. He is likable and delivers what he says he is going to do. He will add value to any team he works with.
His presentation of Developing Exemplary Performance was excellent. Attendees at his workshop appreciated his interactive and personable style.
Thirty minutes. Honest conversation. No pitch.
If you are a CEO or founder and something about your organization has been quietly off, the first step is a conversation. Michael will ask a few sharp questions, tell you what he is hearing, and be direct about whether he is the right person to help. If he is not, he will usually know who is.