Leader | ✔️Goal Getter | 📦 Thinking outside the Box to achieve MORE | Passionate about helping other's realize their potential!

Most men don’t lose direction because they’re lazy.
They lose it because they’ve been leading from pressure, not peace.

They’ve built careers, companies, and lives that look successful…
But somewhere along the way, success stopped feeling satisfying.
The drive remained, but the meaning got lost.

I know that place well, because I’ve lived it.
From the military to corporate leadership to entrepreneurship, I climbed every ladder they said mattered… until I realized I was standing at the top of the wrong one.

That was my wake-up call:
Clarity isn’t found in achievement; it’s revealed through alignment.

🧭 What I Do

I help faith-driven men rebuild their leadership, faith, and purpose
so they can lead from alignment, not exhaustion.

Because leadership without alignment leads to burnout.
But leadership with faith creates peace, conviction, and influence that lasts.

💡 How I Can Help

🎯 The Profession to Purpose Cohort
A 90-day clarity experience for faith-driven men who want to realign their leadership, purpose, and peace, with brothers walking the same path.

🎓 The Masterclass: Faith-Driven Clarity
A free training to help you move from pressure to peace, understand the 6 Life/Career Zones that we all live in, and rebuild momentum through alignment and faith.

⚙️ Fractional Operations Consulting (For Business Owners)
Systems and structure for entrepreneurs who want to scale with order, not chaos.

🙌 Who I’m For

I work with men who are:

New leaders, carrying the pressure to prove themselves

Mid-career achievers, successful but quietly restless

Faith-driven founders, building businesses but losing balance

Seasoned leaders, ready to realign their next chapter with peace and purpose

If that’s you, this is your reminder:
You’re not lost. You’re being refined.

No fluff. No performance masks.
Just clarity, faith, and alignment that bring your leadership back to life.

“Be still, and let God lead your next move.”

Visit: professiontopurpose.com

or message me directly — I’d love to hear where you are in your journey.

John Martinez

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.

⸻

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.

⸻

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.

⸻

Where I typically engage

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

Scope: EMEA.

⸻

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


Mikhail Lvovskii

I've been pushed out of an organization before.

Not for underperforming.
But for being right, too loudly.

I called out the problems,uncomfortable truths about leadership and culture that everyone saw, but no one wanted to discuss out in the open.

Privately, every leader said, "You're right."
Publicly, they chose peace over progress.

A few months later, I was "reorganized out."

I was advised many times to learn how to "manage stakeholders".
The obvious lesson would be to stay quiet.

But that's not the lesson I learned.

Here's my real takeaway:
- Pick your battles, but never pretend the battle doesn't exist.
- Some organizations want to be fixed.
- Some just want to look like they're trying.

If you're the one who solves hard problems, learn to spot the difference early.
Your energy is too valuable to waste in places that only want the illusion of progress.

Interim HR Director/CHRO | Turnaround & Transformation Specialist | Helping leaders succeed when context is tough

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A CEO once said, "I need you to fix my HR team."

I spent a week inside.

After watching how things really ran, I went back to him and said:

"Your HR team isn't broken. Your leadership team is. HR is just the mirror."

He didn't love that answer.

But here's what I saw:

- Leaders sidestepped HR, then blamed them for being out of the loop.

- Leaders made hiring decisions, then blamed HR when those hires didn't work.

- Leaders avoided hard conversations, then blamed HR for "cultural issues."

HR was doing exactly what leadership allowed.

If you want better HR, look in the mirror first.

Fix your leadership, and HR will follow.

Something uncomfortable hit me over the past 5 years.

I spent two decades chasing the classic playbook.
Big companies. Regional roles. Clear track. Predictable future.

Then I stepped off.

Not because I failed.
But because I saw how the game changes at the top.

The higher I climbed, the more political it got.
It became less about fixing real problems.
More about protecting seats and managing optics.

Turns out, I'm wired for turnarounds, not politics.

I want the calls that start with:
"Help. This is broken. We need to fix it."

Not the ones that end with:
"Let's schedule another alignment meeting."

So I tried consulting, coaching, training.
They were fine, but short-term. 
You show up, give advice, then politics and old habits creep right back in.

2025 taught me this:
I'm done playing in other people's games.

2026 will be about impact, not titles.
Real problems. Real turnarounds. Real change.

What did 2025 teach you?

My first turnaround almost broke me.

I was just over 30, full of ambition, convinced that if I just worked harder, I could fix anything.

The job was huge. Transform a fast-growing country into an independent region. Build everything from scratch. Change old habits, set up new processes.

Here's what I ran into:

- There was no real team, just job titles
- Managers agreed in meetings, then did whatever they wanted
- The culture valued hierarchy over common sense

So I did what most do. I worked long hours. Built impressive plans. Laid out all the change on paper.

Nothing moved.

The breakthrough didn't come from another plan. It came when I stopped talking and started listening.

Not the "HR listening" where you nod along and take notes.

Real listening. The kind where you're silent long enough to hear what people are afraid to say out loud.

That's when things started to shift.

Turnarounds don't start with strategy. They start with trust.

Trust starts with listening.

Best HR advice I ever got? Came from a factory floor supervisor in Poland.

"You HR people love your processes. But my guys don't read your policies. They watch what happens when someone breaks them."

I was two weeks into a turnaround. I had a deck full of slides about culture transformation.

Nobody cared.

They didn't listen to my speeches. They watched what I did when the first line manager screamed at an employee.

They watched what happened when someone missed their targets.

They watched who got promoted. Who got sidelined.

And they watched if poor behavior was ignored, or if it had consequences.

Here's the truth: Culture isn't what you write down, or what you present.

It's what you tolerate.

The hardest job I ever had wasn't the turnaround.

It was what came after.

Manufacturing business, deep in trouble. It needed a reset, and we gave it one. Turned things around. Brought the company back to life.

Then the parent company dropped the next task: "Now keep it running."

I lasted 8 months. Not because I failed, but because I was bored out of my mind.

Building is one thing. Maintaining is another.

Some people are wired for steady-state. For stable operations. For the rhythms of routine.

That's not me.

You have to know what you're built for. Not just to prove you can hang on, but to focus where you make the most impact.

I'm built for the mess. Not the maintenance.

Most team diagnostics are a waste of time.

Personality assessments. 360 feedback. Engagement surveys.

I've deployed all of them. Different countries. Different sectors. Results were always the same.

People answer based on who they wish they were. Not who they are.

The only accurate diagnostic I've ever run didn't involve paperwork.

It was a simulation. I watched a leadership team fight over a fake budget.

Ninety minutes of pressure told me everything: 
Who dominates. Who shuts down. Who gambles. Who freezes.

No test or survey ever comes close.

If you want to know how your team really works, stop handing out forms.

Put them in a real situation. Watch what happens.

Stop measuring what's easy. Start measuring what matters.

HR professionals love to say people are our greatest asset.

Then budget season hits.

Suddenly, people become our biggest cost.

I once sat in a meeting where we spent two hours analyzing travel expenses line by line. 

Then, in ten minutes, the team decided to cut the entire L&D budget.

Someone said, We'll bring it back next year.

We didn't.

Here's the truth. The best leaders I've worked with never repeated empty slogans about people.

Instead, they said, Show me your org chart and your budget. I'll tell you what you actually value.

What you fund is what matters.

If you want leaders who build high-performing teams, start by checking where the money goes.

Because a budget is a strategy with numbers attached.

And people see the difference.

The fastest turnaround I ever led? It took just 90 days.

Not because I had a smarter plan. 
Not because I was a genius.

It was fast because the hard part was already done. The previous leader had diagnosed everything that was broken. He spelled out exactly what needed to change.

But he couldn't pull the trigger.

When I showed up, his summary was right there: 
A file on his desk called, "What we need to do but won't."

He knew. His team knew. They all knew. 

My job wasn't insight. It was permission.

Organizations don't always need a new strategy. 
Sometimes, they just need someone who's ready to do the obvious work.

Execution, not ideas, is often what's missing.

A factory supervisor once cornered me with a simple question.

"Why do you HR people always start with the org chart?"

I didn't have a good answer.

He looked me dead in the eye.

"I've worked here 18 years. I've seen 6 org charts. Same problems every time. Different boxes."

He was right.

Org charts are HR's favorite way to look busy. We shuffle boxes. We invent new department names. We promise "synergies."

But we avoid the hard conversation.

The only question that matters:
Do you have the right people in these seats? Yes or no.

If yes, the org chart barely matters.
If no, no chart in the world will save you.

Stop fussing with the boxes. Start fixing the team.

A plant director once asked me to "fix" his underperformers.

I asked one question: When did you last give them honest feedback?

Silence.

Here's the real problem.

Most "performance issues" aren't about skills or attitude. They're about leaders dodging hard conversations. They avoid feedback for years, then expect HR to clean up the mess. 

Nobody's surprised when the whole system starts to creak.

The employee isn't suddenly useless. They've just never been told the truth.

If you haven't had the conversation yourself, don't call it a performance issue.

Call it what it is: avoidance.

Unpopular opinion: Most HR best practices make crisis worse, not better.

Here's why.

Annual performance reviews? They move at the speed of molasses. In a turnaround, you need real feedback in days, not in a year.
Competency frameworks? Too slow. I'm looking for people who can deliver right now, not check boxes.
Engagement surveys? Forget it. People want action, not another survey.

Every time I enter a company in trouble, my first question is simple,
Which HR processes are you running because someone told you to, not because they work?

We cut half of them on day one.

Suddenly, leaders have energy again. Teams focus on what matters.

What actually gets results in a crisis?
- Right people in the right roles
- Clear expectations
- Fast decisions

Everything else is just window dressing.

If you're stuck in chaos, try removing instead of adding.

Ever had to reset a team almost from scratch?

I once walked into a unit with 8 managers. Within months, 6 were gone.

Not because they were bad people. Just wrong for what the business needed next.

But here's the moment everyone underestimates... 
The real test wasn't letting people go.

It was looking the 2 who stayed in the eye and saying, 
"I need you to trust me. This will get better."

They had just watched most of their peers leave. 
They had every reason to update their resumes.

But they stayed.

Two years later, the same team broke every performance record.

People think turnarounds are about who you cut. 
They're really about finding who you can build around, and believing in them when it's uncomfortable.

That's how you turn chaos into momentum.

Ona totally not a serious note. 
What do you play with on the weekend?
I’m playing with AI :)
From a relatively innocent photo with sax, this funny silly video which everyone makes now :)
I bet if the traction will be high or not.

taplio

The Battle

John Martinez

Mikhail Lvovskii

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