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 21 · August 19, 2026 The financial services job market right now is loud. Layoffs. Noise. A hundred people applying to the same role. Here's what I keep telling clients: when the market is crowded, clarity is the advantage. Not more credentials. Not more polish. Clarity about what you actually solve and who needs it. I'm hosting a live session with the Financial Women's Association on exactly this, on September 24th from 6 to 8pm ET (virtual). This isn't a lecture....

The Elevare Edge · Issue 20 · August 6, 2026 This one is personal. I've been in financial services for over 40 years. I started in 1988 reconciling bonds at a small investment management firm in Pennsylvania. I ended up leading teams at some of the largest global institutions in the world. And somewhere in the middle, I watched the same problem show up over and over again, at firms of every size, with good people who were genuinely trying. Two teams. Same client. No real reason to talk to...

The Elevare Edge · Issue 19 · July 14, 2026 You built the business case. The data is airtight. You walk into the room ready. Slide two goes up. You start walking through the methodology. Slide four, you're explaining the assumptions behind the model. By slide six, you're deep in a variance you feel like you have to justify, and you can feel it happening. The MD across the table glances at their phone. Someone starts flipping ahead in the deck instead of listening to you. The energy that was...

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...