Unconventional Leadership Enthusiast | Creator and propagator of the "5E's of Leadership" | Empowering Leaders to Transform & Thrive in the Age of Change

When leaders face tough situations — turnarounds, post-acquisition chaos, leadership breakdowns, toxic culture, execution failures — they don’t need advice or frameworks.
They need someone who can step in, take ownership, and deliver results.

That’s what I do.

I bring 20+ years of senior HR and organizational leadership experience across EMEA, with 10+ large-scale transformation assignments. I embed with executive teams, stabilize situations fast (3–6 months), and build sustainable leadership and organizational capability over 12–18 months.

I work at the intersection of leadership, decision-making, and organizational systems — where strong individuals often struggle to operate as a coherent whole under pressure.

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Selected impact:

→ German manufacturing business in crisis
Leadership vacuum, toxic culture, massive talent exodus.
Turned €10M annual losses into breakeven within 12 months.

→ Three Italian plants operating as warring factions
No alignment, no shared priorities.
Built cross-plant leadership alignment; European product sales increased by ~25%.

→ Young leadership team blocked by entrenched resistance
Coached and supported them through a full transformation.
Order execution speed improved by 30%; complete business model turnaround within one year.

→ Severe labor availability crisis across Eastern Europe
Attrition reduced from 25% to 8%; seasonal staffing stabilized through leadership and HR mobilization.

→ Quality function collapse after global product recall
Rebuilt the function from scratch, replaced half of leadership.
All critical issues resolved within 12 months; quality records broken year after year since.

→ Commercial organization with toxic culture and recurring losses
Transformed into the fastest-growing commercial team in Europe within 18 months.

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How I work

Beyond classic interim leadership, I increasingly use facilitated business simulations to make leadership and decision-making dynamics visible under pressure.
They help executive teams see — within hours — patterns that often remain hidden in meetings for years.

This is not training and not theory.
It’s a way to surface how decisions interact, where responsibility concentrates or disappears, and why strong teams sometimes underperform as a system.

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Where I typically engage

• Crisis stabilization
• Post-acquisition integration
• Leadership transitions
• Culture and execution transformation

Scope: EMEA.

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Available for Interim CHRO / HR Director assignments and executive-level transformation work.
High travel is not an issue.


Mikhail Lvovskii

I used to introduce myself as an HR Business Partner.

Then a plant manager told me: I don't need a partner. I need someone who tells me what I don't want to hear.

That stuck.

See, "partner" sounds strategic. It sounds like you're in the room, working together, nodding along.

But in the real world, when a business is in trouble,
agreement is the last thing that moves the needle.

Leaders don't need another person cosigning their decisions.
They need someone who points out what everyone else is quietly ignoring.
Someone who's willing to be unpopular.
Someone who calls out the elephant, every single time.

That's what makes you valuable.
Not sitting at the table.
Not your seat on the org chart.

The best HR people aren't just partners.
They're mirrors. The kind that shows the full, messy picture,no matter who's looking.

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Happy New 2006 Year to everyone!
Best wishes to you and your closed ones!

Certified Transformational Coach

Global Professional in Human Resources (GPHR)

Change Management. Level 4. Change Trainer.

Coaching for Performance. Train the Trainer

Continuous Improvement and Lean Management

EQ 360 degrees feed-back coach

Efficient methods of recruitment and headhunting

Electrolux Leader

Electrolux Next Level Leader

HR Academy

Job Evaluation: Mercer's methodology

People management skills

People management training. Train the trainer

Preparation to GPHR certification

Samsung Leadership program

StoreWars business simulation

Storytelling

Interim HR leadership and transformation execution for organizations facing crisis, transition, or underperformance.

Short- to mid-term Organizational interventions to the teams with dysfunctions, in order to build high the basis for high performance.

Selected projects:

Pharma (multinational, CEE) – Reset the top team, introduced ambitious visioning and planning cadence, strengthened collaboration → positioned business for accelerated market growth.

Global Electronics producer – Advised on HR operating model redesign, aligning service delivery with business strategy → increased ownership by line managers, freed HR from admin.

Industrial Plant (Germany/Poland border, 900 employees) – Installed accountability ladder and reset leadership culture → productivity lifted by 20% in 3 months.

Law Firm (Poland, 400 employees) – Partnered with new HR Director after failed engagement survey → leadership reset, trust rebuilt, attrition slowed within 6 months.

Founder and Principal Consultant

Helping companies overcome challenges in the area of people, leadership and culture.
Helping to run organizational transformation: design, implementation, change management.
Transforming HR organizations to be true business partners and move them towards business drivers.

Chief Transformational Officer

Built HR function from scratch for international logistics company: strategy through execution, all processes, leadership team across 15 countries.

Led three major turnaround initiatives:

German Entity Turnaround (2023-2024)
Situation: German manufacturing entity in crisis — leadership vacuum, toxic culture, talent exodus. Running consistent losses (-10M EUR annually) despite major technology investment.
Action: Led leadership and culture reset. Addressed talent crisis through targeted interventions. Aligned leadership team around performance recovery. Reviewed and streamlined key functional processes.
Result: From -10M EUR annual losses to breakeven within 1 year. Organization stabilized, leadership aligned, underperformers exited.

Italian Operations Integration (2023-2024)
Situation: Three Italian plants operating as warring factions — fighting internally and resisting collaboration with European operations.
Action: Drove cross-plant alignment initiatives. Broke down silos between Italian entities and broader European organization. Built collaborative leadership culture.
Result: Italian product sales in Europe increased ~25%. Unified operations, established productive collaboration. Refreshed Italian management at top 2 layers.

Lithuania Leadership Transition (2022-2024)
Situation: Young leadership team installed after leadership reset, struggling to drive change in entrenched old-guard organization.
Action: Coached and supported new leadership team through transformation. Helped build credibility and change capability. Addressed resistance, aligned organization around new direction.
Result: Orders execution speed improved 30%. Complete business model turnaround from imports to local production within 1 year. Annual growth 15%.

European operations sold to strategic buyer in 2024 following successful stabilization.

Chief Human Resources Officer

Progressive HR leadership across EMEA Industrial Operations, with four major turnaround/transformation cases:

Quality Function Crisis Recovery (2018-2019)
Situation: Global quality scandal — mass product recall (dishwashers) causing massive financial losses and reputational damage. Quality function neglected for years: incompetent team, weak culture, no credibility.
Action: Partnered with new Quality leader to rebuild from ground up. Replaced more than half of leadership team. Redefined function's mission. Recruited high-caliber talent. Coached leader through confidence gaps.
Result: All critical quality issues resolved within 12 months. Historical quality records broken every subsequent year. Function transformed from liability to competitive advantage.

East Europe Manufacturing Labor Crisis (2018-2019)
Situation: By season 2018: zero applications for seasonal workers, significant drop in permanent worker inflow. No one wanted to join Electrolux factories.
Action: Gathered EMEA Manufacturing leadership to develop comprehensive solution. Introduced migrant workers approach despite strong stakeholder resistance.
Result: Decreased workers' attrition from 25% to 8% within months. Employee engagement improved 22 percentage points in Eastern Europe. Season 2018 sdtafed fully. YoY productivity and OEE targets over-achieved for first time in Eastern Europe.

Supply Chain Centralization (2014-2016)
Situation: Major organizational restructuring — centralizing Supply Chain operations across EMEA. Experienced plant managers losing power. Strong resistance, lack of trust, leadership vacuum.
Action: Deployed as embedded change agent. Bridged gaps between central leadership and local plant management. Ensured functioning of new structure during transition.
Result: New centralized organization successfully established and operational. Achieved strategic targets for product delivery at improving cost. New SC organization gained trust and demonstrated advanced capabilities.

HR Director Industrial Operations EMEA (from 2019 - Europe)

Commercial Organization Turnaround
Situation: Dysfunctional commercial organization with toxic culture, chronic underperformance, consistent losses. Managing Director terminated in week two of my arrival.
Action: Kept business running for 4 months while assessing team. Personally removed most toxic individuals. Rebuilt leadership culture around accountability. Supported onboarding of new MD and completed organizational reset.
Result: Transformed from loss-making unit to fastest-growing commercial team in Europe. Delivered significant sales growth and profit turnaround within 18 months. Built self-steering team capable of sustaining performance.

Regional HR Director (CIS counties + Baltics)

HR leadership for industrial gas operations including oversight of two M&A integration projects. Managed complex stakeholder environment, aligned cultures and systems across acquired entities while maintaining operational stability.
Assured stable business functioning along severe Financial crisis of 2008-2009, forcing mass redudancies and business restructuring. While making sure 2 entities acquired pre-crisis were integrating into the business wihtout performance loss.

HR Director

Regional HR leadership across CIS markets for consumer electronics business.
Establishing HR system from scratch along shaping new Global region in CIS.

CIS Region HR Manager

Post-merger integration of Business Consulting practice into IBM structure. Aligning processes, leadership practices and culture.

HR Manager. Business Consulting Services department (integration project)

Recruitment and development support for the pilot project for the emerging business model of dedicated software development centres.

Recruitment Manager

Interim HR Director/CHRO | Turnaround & Transformation Specialist | I stabilize broken organizations and rebuild dysfunctional teams

English

German

Polish

Russian

SHRM

Team effectiveness - from strategy to execution · Creator of QurumQ team behavior simulation · ex-Electrolux, Linde, Samsung, IBM, Luxoft

€50,000 blown on a leadership offsite.

Three months later, same problems.

Great facilitator. Gorgeous venue. Everyone left happy.

Nothing changed.

The offsite treated symptoms, not systems.
For a week, everyone played nice. Then reality snapped back.

One person still hogged decisions.
Old conflicts, still swept under the rug.
Alignment, still fake.

Feeling good together doesn't fix teams.
Seeing, then fixing, how a team actually works does. 

Most team building is a vacation from dysfunction.
Real development? Brutal. It's a mirror, not a retreat.

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A factory was bleeding money.

Everyone expected layoffs.

I started with something different.

I asked the shift supervisors what they'd do if they ran the place.

The answers were sharper than anything the leadership team had cooked up.

No management speak. No theory.

They named the broken machines, the wasted steps, and the dumb rules that slowed down every shift.

They didn't need a consultant or a strategy deck.

They needed someone to ask, listen, and act.

The people closest to the work had been watching the real problems for years. Nobody had bothered to ask.

The turnaround kicked off the day leadership stopped pretending they had all the answers.

You want a transformation? 

Before you start buying frameworks and hiring experts, try something radical.

Ask the people staring at the mess every day how they'd fix it.

Then actually listen.

She was one of our best.

On her last day, I asked why she was really leaving.

She said, "I've been leaving for two years. No one noticed."

That's the part no one wants to hear.

By the time someone resigns, the decision was made months ago.

You can track the trail if you bother to look.

First comes the silence in meetings. 
Then the suggestions that go nowhere.
After that, the missed promotion, or no feedback at all.

It's a slow fade.

Most companies don't see it, or pretend not to.

Then they schedule the exit interview, hoping for some honest insight.

But by then, it's just an autopsy.

The real work is upstream. If you want blunt truth, ask before people disengage. 

Stay interviews. Candid check-ins. Not the end, the middle.

Ask early. Ask often. Or get comfortable with good people silently slipping out the door.

You choose which kind of interview you prefer.

There are two types of team building.

One asks, "Do we like each other?"
That's escape rooms, cooking classes, drinks after work.
Easy to buy, easy to deliver.
Zero impact on Monday morning.

The other asks, "How do we function when it matters?"
Now you're talking resource constraints, time pressure, clashing priorities.
You put the team in the fire. Watch what surfaces.
It's messy. It's uncomfortable. Most companies run the other way.

After 25 years, I've seen the same pattern.
- Teams that choose comfort stay stuck.
- Teams that choose the mirror, the hard look at reality, break through every time.

You want transformation?
Skip the trust falls.
Choose the mirror.

Forget teaching.

The fastest way to develop a team isn't to lecture, train, or hand them a new model.

It's to throw them into a real situation that reveals their default patterns, good and bad.

No slides. No expert diagnosis. Just a mirror.

Let them see the gap for themselves.

After 25 years of running all the types of workshops and interventions, I don't believe in top-down development.

People don't shift because someone tells them how.

They shift when they see what they're actually doing, together, in real time.

That discomfort? That clarity? It does the heavy lifting.

The hard part: engineering that moment without artifice or theater.

That's the edge I've been focused on. More on the method soon.

Networking w swiecie przedsiębiorców jest niezbędny.
Ale jak być jeżeli nie jesteś "stąd"?

Przeprowadziłem się do Wrocławia, no i do Polski, ponad 12 łat temu, po 37 łatach spędzonych w rodzinnym kraju i miejście.

Tak się stało ze długie łata skupiłem się na karjerze korporacyjnej tego pracodawcy który mi tutaj przywiózł. I nie myśliałem że poza ramami tego pracodawcy też jest życie. Nie budowałem sieci.

Tak się wydarzyło że 5 łat temu stwierdziłem że chcę kontynuować swoją drogę samodzielnie, prowadzić własny biznes. 
Ale się okazało że network który miałem był słaby. Jakość sieci po moim ocenam bardzo niska. Większość wartościowych kontaktów to jedna firma - mój były pracodawca.

Probowałem rózne sposoby, ale włąsnie nic nie działa lepiej niż spotkanie tet-a-tet i dzielenie się wiedzą.

Dzięki Martyna Lempert, z której się poznaliśmy z połtora tygodni chyba, już po raz drugi biorę udział w spotkaniu kameralnym przedsiębiorców Wrocławia. I to własnie jest wartość ludzkich relacji - poradzić, skierować, pomóc. 
Dzięki Martyna jeszcze raz!

O wydarzeniu:
Serial networkers Meetup - Wrocław!✅ 

Data: 6 marca 2026
Miejsce: Ace of Space Renoma, Świdnicka 40, Wrocław.
Czas: 16:00-21:00

Bilety: https://lnkd.in/drptwwBB

HR keeps buying what's easy to explain.

Quiz night? That one sells itself. It's cheap. Everyone joins in. No heavy lifting.

But try selling a simulation that shows which leaders choke, stall, or step up in real decisions.

Suddenly, it's too hard to pitch. The CFO gives you a blank stare.

So HR grabs the thing with the simple story. Entertainment wins. Real change loses.

Then they wonder why nothing sticks. Why leaders keep repeating the same mistakes.

The real blocker in corporate learning isn't a lack of ideas. It's a fear of anything that can't be explained in a single line.

If your solution is neat and fun, it lives.
If it reveals hard truths, it dies in the meeting room.

Real transformation isn't simple. The pitch shouldn't be either.

The CHRO wanted a succession plan.

I only asked one question:
Who on your team would you actually bet on?

Silence.

Not because they didn't know.
Because saying it out loud means facing the reality.

Most succession planning is corporate theater.
- Map names to boxes.
- Run assessments.
- Draft development plans.
Nothing happens.

The real questions never make the agenda:
- Who's truly ready?
- Who never will be?
- Who's here just because it's easy to keep them?

HR builds frameworks.
Leadership dodges decisions.

If your succession plan hasn't changed in six months,
 it's not a plan.
It's paperwork.

The best assessment I ever saw wasn't an assessment.

I used to roll my eyes at gamified anything. Always felt like a gimmick.

Then I watched a senior leadership team dive into a business simulation.

No assigned roles. No scripts. No "correct" answers.

Within an hour, everything flipped:

- The quiet one? Turned into the team's strategist. 
- The confident one? Tanked the business with reckless bets. 
- The supposed collaborator? Bulldozed every conversation.

They stopped performing. They just played.

That's when the real dynamics showed up.

You want to know how someone leads? 
Stop calling it an assessment.

Let them forget they're being watched. 
And see who actually shows up.

I watched 12 teams solve the same problem, with the same rules and the same time.

Not a single team did it the same way.

But some patterns stood out.

 Teams with one loud voice moved fast. They also got the worst results.

Teams that "wasted" time arguing every angle? They made fewer mistakes.

And when someone asked, "Wait, what are we optimizing for?", that team usually crushed the ones who just rolled up their sleeves and started working.

The kicker?
Teams that thought they nailed it weren't always the ones who actually did.

Especially under pressure, confidence and competence are two different signals.

If your team moves fast and sounds sure of themselves, you might want to check what they're actually delivering.

Sent hundreds of managers to leadership training.

Every feedback form was glowing.
"Eye-opening." "Very useful." "Will apply immediately."

But come Monday, nothing changed.

Took me years to see the gap.

Training tells you what good leadership looks like.
It never shows what your leadership actually is.

There's a world of difference between:
- Knowing you should listen more
- And watching yourself interrupt three people in a row when things get tight.

The first is advice.
The second is a mirror.

Most companies spend a fortune on advice.
Almost none bother with mirrors.

That's why so many "trained" managers never improve.

Most leadership teams think their collaboration is strong.

Surveys will back that up.

But watch them try to split a shrinking budget in real time.

That's where the truth shows up.

I once ran a survey for a leadership team. 90 percent rated their collaboration as strong or very strong.

Then I watched them actually work together.

It took 30 minutes for two people to bulldoze every decision. One person checked out completely. The rest held their ground but never moved the conversation forward.

Nobody lied on the survey. They honestly thought they were a high-performing team.

But self-perception is not data.

If you want to know how your team works, stop asking. Start watching.

Observed behavior is the only data that counts.

Everyone thinks they know how their team works.

They don't.

I've spent 25 years inside boardrooms, factory floors, crisis war rooms. Seen the same thing play out, everywhere.

What people say in surveys, workshops, performance reviews , irrelevant.

When the clock's ticking and stakes are real, most teams have no idea how they behave.

So I built something that shows them.

It's called QurumQ.

Not a training. Not a game.

A two-hour simulation that drags team behavior into the open. Real decisions, real pressure. No scripts, no right answers, no place to hide.

10 simulated years in 2 hours.
Physical cards. Digital engine. Electronic dice.
Crises, dilemmas, career moves, deals, betrayals. All of it.

Leadership appears or vanishes.
Risk-takers and risk-dodgers reveal themselves.
You see who actually listens, and who's just waiting to talk.

It's a mirror. Brutal, clear, unfiltered.

Suitable for offsite setting, fully online version for remote teams, multi-days marathon with short daily intervention and deepest level reflection.

I'm running beta sessions now. Looking for 10-15 companies in Europe ready to find out how their team really works under pressure.
Nice discounts guaranteed!

If you own team dynamics, decision-making, or leadership development, Id love to show you exactly what this simulation looks like. 
Scheduling link in a first comment. Or just DM me to agree for a demo.

A CFO once told me, "HR talks about people like they're a religion, not a business."

I was offended. For about ten seconds.

Then it clicked. He was right.

We say "talent is our greatest asset" but can't put a number on it.

We say "culture drives performance" but can't measure it.

We say "engagement matters" but never connect it to revenue.

Then we act shocked when we're left out of real decisions.

HR has a language problem. We preach. The business does math.

The answer isn't to ditch the human element. It's to translate it.

If you can't prove your work moves a number your CFO checks, you're not strategic. 
 You're just decoration.

A leadership team spent three months debating a senior hire.

In the end, they picked the safest candidate, someone exactly like them.

Here's what most leaders won't admit, even to themselves.

Hiring decisions expose what you actually value, not what you claim to value.

Every time someone gets labeled a "culture fit," take a closer look. Sometimes it's alignment. More often, it's just comfort.

You can paste values on the wall and talk about innovation, but the real test is in the room when a decision needs to be made.

Your hires are your culture.

Look at your last five. What did you really optimize for?

Be honest. That's the only way things change.

The worst team conflict is silent.

I've seen leadership teams who brag about "alignment." No debates. Quick decisions. Lots of nodding.

Looks smooth. Until you see the mess underneath.

Three strategies pulling in opposite directions. Secret alliances. One person overloaded while the rest jockey for status.

The show of harmony was just that, a show.

Healthy teams fight in the room, then walk out aligned. 
Dysfunctional teams nod in the room and undercut each other later.

If your meetings never get heated, don't kid yourself. That's not alignment.
 
That's avoidance.

Every meeting was polite. Every decision was unanimous.

And the company was slowly dying.

Here's the hard truth. If your leadership team never argues, you don't have trust. You have silence.

Real teams fight. They call out bad ideas before they turn into layoffs. They push each other, because they care more about the business than about looking agreeable.

When you see nothing but smiles and nods, it doesn't mean you've built a great team. It means the real issues are hiding in the hallway, whispered behind closed doors, or ignored until it's too late.

It's not complicated. People avoid conflict when they don't believe it's safe. That's how bad decisions get made, quarter after quarter, until there's nothing left to save.

If your leadership meetings feel comfortable, something important isn't being discussed.

I've sat in on dozens of teams tackling the same problem.

The outcome is set in the first three minutes.

Not by strategy. Not by intelligence. By something simpler.

Who asks a question before proposing a solution?

Teams that start with "What are we actually dealing with?" beat teams that start with "Here's what we should do." Every time.

The uncomfortable part? The teams that rush to solutions feel better. They look decisive. They act confident.

They just end up being wrong, more often than not.

Speed of decision is not quality of decision.

But put any team under pressure, and almost all of them confuse the two.

Retrospectives are everywhere.

But most are a waste of time.

People obsess over what went wrong, what could be improved, what the team should do next time.

Nobody asks the only question that matters: How did we actually make that decision in the first place?

Everyone remembers missing the deadline.
So they say, plan better next time.

But nobody rewinds to the meeting where someone flagged the risk, got ignored, and the group charged ahead.

The real mistake? The way the room made decisions. Not the plan itself.

By the time you get to the retrospective, everyone's already changed the story in their head.

You can't fix a process you never saw.

Stop asking what went wrong.

Start asking: what happened in the room when it mattered, and why did nobody stop a bad call in real time?

That's where the real answers are.

Dr. Christian Passlick

The MindLeader Secrets

The MindLeader Secrets is a newsletter that teaches systems to live a smarter, healthier, happier life and crush it in business.

Writer

Personal Development / Executive Coaching / Brand Building

Founder

Auer Lighting GmbH

Senior Director Sales

Senior Manager Business Development

Developer Optics / Lighting Technology

Centre for Innovation Competence SiLi-nanoⓇ

Scientist

Hesse GmbH

Student Assistant

Universität Paderborn

Gruppe Nanostructure Optoelectronics - Programming and realization of an automatic, optical microstructure lithography system

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Mikhail Lvovskii

Dr. Christian Passlick⌚

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The Battle

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Dr. Christian Passlick⌚

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Mikhail Lvovskii's LinkedIn Performance

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