It takes two kinds of skill to see a pattern clearly — and name it without making one person the whole problem.
Kintsugi pairs real executive experience with training in marriage and family therapy, so we can address both the business consequences and the human dynamics keeping them in place.
Our point of view
Persistent people problems are sustained by patterns the organization has learned to accommodate rather than confront. Everyone adjusts, and those adjustments begin to reinforce one another.
Teams naturally look for a simple explanation and often settle on one person: the boss, a difficult peer, HR, or one resistant employee. One person may carry substantial responsibility, but treating that person as the entire problem can leave the cycle untouched.
Psychological safety is co-created, not installed. A leader cannot simply provide it, and the people around them cannot build it alone. When the leader is part of the pattern, training the people below will not fix it. When the team is reinforcing the pattern, coaching the leader alone will not fix it either.
That is why we look at the leader, the team and the relationships between them. We do not take sides before we understand the system.
And it is why we do this work at all. The mental health of the people inside a company is not a side benefit. It is part of how the business performs. We believe the organizations that take it seriously will be the ones that keep their best people and do their best work.
Meet the Co-Founders
Jared Haslam spent more than 18 years inside large organizations and is the former Vice President of Product Strategy and Planning at Nissan North America. He knows how power, accountability, politics, performance pressure and executive decisions actually work. He puts hard observations into language leaders treat as business-relevant, and don’t dismiss as interpersonal theory.
Stacey Haslam, MFTC, brings training in marriage and family therapy to the work of leaders and teams. She is a Marriage and Family Therapist Candidate, and that training is what lets her see the patterns between people that are hard to see from the inside, and raise them in a way that invites insight rather than defensiveness. At Kintsugi, her work is assessment, advising and facilitation, not therapy. She also works with individuals through her separate practice, Healing Is Golden.
Why “Kintsugi”
We first encountered kintsugi while living in Japan on an overseas corporate assignment. It is the ancient Japanese art of mending broken pottery and highlighting the repaired breaks with gold. The break isn’t hidden. It becomes part of the piece.
That is how we think about teams. The break is already visible to everyone. Repair starts when it is dealt with directly and no longer worked around.
