Lever Talent, Inc.

Head of Professional Services

At Lever Talent, our mission is to help leaders realize they are capable of more than they could ever imagine. We believe individuals make a business, not the other way around, and all business is personal.

The employee-employer relationship is broken. Thankfully, employees are gaining leverage, and the power dynamic with employers is shifting. We’re flipping the script by helping businesses lean into this shift - bringing humanity back to business.

We help leaders find leverage in themselves, their teams, and their strategies.

We help companies find leverage by identifying their superpowers and developing complementary processes to spur growth at scale.

We help with:

Talent Strategy: We help leaders align their people strategy to their business strategy and accelerate growth with talent optimization.

Career Development: We give people the training and coaching they need crush their current job and achieve their goals.

Leadership Communities: We bring growth-minded leaders together to share ideas, learn from each other, and grow.

Detailed Services Overview:
- Team Design & Strategy Alignment Consulting
- Hiring Process and Strategy Consulting
- Management Training
- Leadership Coaching
- Team Building Workshops
- Career Development Communities
- Employee Engagement / Performance 
- The Predictive Index Software sales and client service - we are a PI Certified Partner.

Talent Optimization Consultant

The Predictive Index

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Leverage Seeker. Talent Concierge. Executive Coach.

I am Head of Professional Services at Lever Talent, a talent strategy agency. We help people find their leverage so they can achieve more than they could have ever imagined for themselves.

Meg Patel

Matt Poepsel, PhD

I help leaders at every level realize their true potential | Author | Keynote Speaker | Podcast Host | Philosopher

I've identified something most leaders feel but struggle to name:

Invisible forces are pulling our people apart.

From my Marine Corps service to executive boardrooms to graduate classrooms, I kept witnessing the same pattern: stress and anxiety push us toward self-interest and away from collective success.

What was once a curiosity has now become a crisis.

We're living in the Entropy Economy—an age where technological advancement, generational shifts, and market disruptions are separating us faster than we can hold our human systems together. Organizations fragment. Teams drift. People disengage. Schools stagnate. Communities devolve.

Here's what I've also discovered:

There's a human energy that draws us back together.

I call it Commitment, and it's not what most people think.

Commitment isn't loyalty or grit or trying harder. It isn't a one-directional entitlement or something we can take for granted. It's a vital human energy that holds teams, families, and communities intact in a world pulling them apart.

That's where I come in:

I help leaders understand and cultivate this energy.

I created The Commitment Cycle™—a system that counteracts fragmentation, elevate performance, and build cultures where people thrive (not just survive).

I'm also the author of the book "Expand the Circle", VP and Godfather of Talent Optimization at The Predictive Index, a Commitment keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, and part-time faculty at Boston College where I teach leadership and human flourishing.

I also host "Lead the People", a podcast featuring guests like Kim Scott (Radical Candor), Jason Feifer (Entrepreneur magazine), and Kristie Pappal (VP HR, Philadelphia Eagles). I write the "Recharge" newsletter for 200,000 readers and host the "Perspectives" webinar series for 1,000+ HR professionals monthly.

My path:

U.S. Marine Corps veteran • Software product executive • PhD in Psychology • MBA • Executive education from Harvard Business School

I've worked with everyone from manufacturing executives to ER physicians to community and association leaders. I’m passionate about my work, and I love sharing my message.

Here's what I believe:

Commitment counteracts entropy and restores wholeness. Every leader can learn to cultivate it. In doing so, we become healers of separation; we amplify impact, elevate others, and realize our full collective potential.

Let's connect:

Drop me a note or check out "Lead the People" wherever you listen to podcasts.

Visit me at mattpoepsel.com.

Vice President & "The Godfather of Talent Optimization"

As Vice President of Professional Services, I:
✅  Serve our 1,000+ Talent Optimization Consultants around the world
✅  Empower our consultants with the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to serve their clients
✅  Develop highly scalable programs and tools that produce business results
✅  Shadow our consultants through virtual and field-based client engagements
✅  Design strategic talent optimization solutions for clients
✅  Support the transformative power of our new 1:1 Talent Strategy Session and Team Discovery solution
✅  Lead a team of amazing PIoneers and partner with others around our company to fulfill our mission of Better Work, Better World

As “The Godfather of Talent Optimization”, I'm also the chief evangelist of this new discipline that aligns talent strategy with business strategy to deliver optimal business results.

This involves:
🔥  Authoring the Ultimate Guide to Talent Optimization and the Talent Optimization Maturity Model (available at talentoptimization.org)
🔥  Serving as a subject matter expert for the PI Certified Talent Optimization Consultant and PI Certified Talent Optimization Leader programs
🔥  Evangelizing the benefits of talent optimization and its promise to produce superior business outcomes through improved people practices
🔥  Connecting with other amazing business and HR leaders to help them share their talent optimization best practices and stories with the world

I write and speak regularly on a variety of topics including talent strategy, talent management, team dynamics, leadership development, employee engagement, organizational culture, performance psychology, and productivity.

If you would like to work with me or one of our amazing PI Certified Partners, please connect with me!

These days, it seems we're all exhausted.

That means the system is working as designed.

~~

We've always told human stories through the lens of the prevailing economic engine. Victor Hugo captured the strain of factory life in "Les Misérables". Not just the dangerous conditions, but the spiritual deterioration, the loss of humanity. Artists have long documented the invisible cost: how economic systems place demands upon us, and what it costs to comply.

Recently, the TV series "Severance" offers a chilling metaphor for our moment. Workers surgically separate their work consciousness from their personal consciousness. Two completely fragmented selves. It sounds like science fiction until you recognize it as what many of us are already doing—compartmentalizing, fragmenting ourselves, becoming different people depending on which system we're operating in.

Now, if we're living in an economy where fragmentation is profitable and cohesion is scarce, what should we predict about human experience? We should expect isolation, burnout, and constant effort against an accelerating current. The exhaustion of trying to hold ourselves together while the system pulls us apart. That staying connected—to partners, families, communities, even to ourselves—will require energy that used to flow naturally.

We should predict that the invisible tax gets heavier.

And that's exactly what we're seeing. Engagement is down. Mental health metrics are declining. Loneliness is rampant. The predicted outcomes are undeniable. We're experiencing the exact consequences of an economic system designed to fragment us.

Here's what's changed: Yesterday's economies rewarded optimization within existing structures. Today's Entropy Economy rewards fragmentation itself. It profits from our separation. We can't solve a new problem with old solutions. We can't use yesterday's models to address today's economy.
~~

This is the work that gives our investigation meaning.

When we find shared understanding—when we recognize our exhaustion as structural, not personal—something shifts.

We find our WHY.

Right now, if we stay exhausted without understanding why, we remain helpless.

But understanding changes everything.

It moves us from victim to investigator.

From helpless to informed.

Now we can do something about this.

Tomorrow we look at the broken instruments we're using to measure all this.

And we’ll discover why mismeasurement is making things worse.

⚙️

Self-Coaching Questions:
> Where am I paying the invisible tax across my relationships, work, family, and sense of self?
> What part of myself am I fragmenting to survive in this system MattyP described?

The Entropy Economy is pulling teams apart · We need a counterforce | Advisor, Speaker, Professor & Researcher | Creator of Tight Loops

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Meg Patel

Matt Poepsel, PhD

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