Executive Excellence Group was built on a straightforward observation: the leaders most likely to be overlooked are often the most capable ones in the room. Not because they lack skill. Because the conditions that produce credibility — visibility, sponsorship, the confidence that comes from never having been told you don't belong — are unevenly distributed. That gap has a name. And it has a solution.
EEG exists to close it.
The person behind the work
Cindy Schwartz has spent fifteen years at the intersection of leadership, technology, and transformation — as Director of Enterprise Strategy at Microsoft across Asia-Pacific and Japan, Senior Executive Partner at Gartner, General Manager at Citadel Group, and leading Digital Innovation and Customer Solutions at AWS across Australia and New Zealand.
That's the biography. What it doesn't capture is what those roles actually taught: how organisations really make decisions about people, which leaders get backed and which get bypassed, and the structural — not personal — reasons that gap persists.
The frameworks developed through that work are grounded in neuroscience and emotional intelligence research. They take seriously the difference between performing leadership and practising it. And they are built for leaders who are done with advice that asks them to change who they are in order to be taken seriously.
What we do
Executive Excellence Group offers transformation advisory, leadership development through the EXCEED program, and diagnostic tools built on the AC>P framework — Authenticity plus Competence, as the foundation of genuine credibility.
The newsletters — The Credibility Brief and Rewriting Leadership Norms — are where the thinking lives in public.
I started this work because I kept meeting leaders who were more capable than the room gave them credit for. They were believing the room, not their own experience. The frameworks exist because capability, on its own, is not enough. Credibility is structural. And structures can be changed.
— Cindy Schwartz, Founder