The problem

They fail because nobody told the manager what to say Tuesday morning.

70% of change initiatives fail. The cause is not the technology or the strategy. The cause is resistance patterns that surface on the team, and a manager who has to handle them with no playbook for the conversation.

Resistance is normal. So is the failure to handle it. Change failure is not caused by bad managers or stubborn employees. It is caused by missing applied frameworks, missing knowledge, and missing time to diagnose what is happening on the team.

SteadMark closes that distance. Every morning, every manager gets one name, one ask, and one opener grounded in what is actually happening on their team right now.

70%

of change initiatives fail to meet their objectives.

Kotter, Leading Change, HBR 1995

95%

of GenAI pilots deliver no measurable business impact.

MIT, The GenAI Divide, 2025

What the product does

One email. One ask. One person. Every workday.

SteadMark reads everyday workplace communication, classifies resistance patterns, and delivers one recommendation to the manager who needs it most today.

01 · READS

Everyday workplace communication.

SteadMark connects to the communication tools your team already uses, starting with Slack. It reads the channels your team already connected, working from conversations already happening.

Slack live. Teams and email on roadmap.

02 · CLASSIFIES

Resistance patterns through three human needs.

Self-Determination Theory identifies three drivers of every resistance pattern: Competence, Autonomy, and Relatedness. Forty years of behavioral science, applied to one team conversation.

SDT. Kotter overlay.

03 · DELIVERS

One recommendation. One opener. 7:30 AM.

The output is a recommendation for the manager's next conversation, framed in the language that will land.

One manager. One ask. Every workday.

How it works

Three steps from team conversation to a 7:30 AM email.

We read the pattern to name the next conversation, not to score the person. Every recommendation references the conversation that produced it and the framework underneath.

01

Listen

Pull patterns already flowing.

We read the patterns in the everyday messages your team already sends.

Slack liveTeams on roadmapEmail on roadmap

02

Read

Classify through the three needs.

Self-Determination Theory tells us every resistance pattern maps to one of three drivers: competence, autonomy, or relatedness. Forty years of behavioral science, applied to one team conversation.

CompetenceAutonomyRelatednessKotter overlayMode-state framing

03

Send

One ask. One person. 7:30 AM.

One specific ask, for one specific person, framed in their language, with the line that opens the door. Delivered to the manager before the day starts.

7:30 AM emailOne ask per managerArrives in your inbox

The recommendation engine is grounded in Self-Determination Theory with a Kotter overlay. The intervention library updates as new behavioral research lands.

Behavioral foundation

Forty years of behavioral science. One recommendation engine.

Self-Determination Theory plus Kotter overlay. Every pattern resolves to one of three human needs.

C

C · COMPETENCE

“I can do this.”

The skill, the runway, the support to be good at the new way.

A

A · AUTONOMY

“I have a say.”

Not in whether, but in how. The freedom to make this mine.

R

R · RELATEDNESS

“I belong here still.”

The change does not sever me from the people I care about.

Kotter & Schlesinger, HBR 1979 · Deci & Ryan, 1985

Who it is for

One product. Three angles into the same conversation.

OCM teams and the managers they support. Executive sponsors who need to know how change is landing across their organization.

EXECUTIVE SPONSORRoadmap

Portfolio-level change visibility. In development.

Today, executive sponsors access SteadMark through their OCM lead and see the aggregate read across all initiatives and managers. A dedicated executive view covering portfolio status and timeline indicators is in active development.

See the role view

Portfolio

read across every initiative

Aggregate read across all initiatives today.
Visibility through your OCM lead.
Portfolio status view on the roadmap.
Your team keeps working where they already are.

CHANGE PRACTITIONER

Operationalize your methodology at the manager level.

You set the framework. SteadMark carries it to the 7:30 AM email your managers receive. The Change Practitioner sees an aggregate read across every manager and every initiative. Each manager gets one specific ask, one opener, one behavioral context.

See the role view

Aggregate

read across every manager

Methodology grounded in SDT and Kotter.
Aggregate read across all managers.
Pattern-level handling, no attribution.
Prosci-trained teams can apply their existing framework.

MIDDLE MANAGER

Today's ask. Before standup.

Five to fifty direct reports, a major change underway, and a full day of other work. SteadMark names one person, gives you the opener, and tells you why it will land. The entire ask fits in a 90-second conversation.

See the role view

07:30

delivered before standup

Today's ask. One person who needs a conversation.
Why this person, why today.
The opener that lands.
No performance scores. The daily plan comes to you.

What we believe

Five values. One direction.

These govern every feature, every email, and every model output. Read them in full on the Foundation page.

01
Dignity is the product.
Every feature is judged by whether it treats the person being described as a person.
02
Say what the product does, and what it does not do.
We name our data sources, methods, and limits in plain language to customers, to employees, and to ourselves.
03
Earn the read before you give the prescription.
A recommendation without evidence of understanding is a guess. We do not tell a manager what to say until we can show them what we noticed and why it matters.
04
The customer is the change leader. The user is everyone in the org.
We design for both. When their interests pull apart, we side with the people who did not buy the product, and we tell the buyer that is what we are doing.
05
Default to small, daily, repairable actions.
Big-bang change programs fail people. We ship in small pieces, measure how they land, and stay willing to roll back.

Jim Sullivan

Founder, SteadMark

Why SteadMark exists

Built by someone who spent years reading rooms.

Jim Sullivan spent years as a paramedic preceptor in Palm Springs and San Diego. He learned to walk into a room, read it in seconds, and act on what he saw. The skill came from repetition. From recognizing the same patterns again and again until the read was automatic.

Earlier in his career, as an undergraduate researcher at Northeastern University’s IASlab with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and at UCSD’s Dr. Winkielman Affect and Cognition Lab, he studied the behavioral science that became the foundation for it.

The question SteadMark answers is the one that stayed with him: what does a manager do with a team in a resistance pattern when they have 90 seconds before the next standup?

Read the full story →

Privacy

Named, and treated with dignity.

Every output aims at the manager’s next conversation, never at evaluating the person.

Aimed at the next conversation.

Every recommendation is built for the manager's next conversation, not to rate or rank the person it is about.

Mode-recovery, not fault.

Recommendations frame as what helps someone re-engage, never as fixing a resistor.

The read-aloud test.

Every output is written to hold up if read aloud to the person it describes. If it would embarrass them, it does not ship.

You control the data.

Customer pattern data stays in customer scope. Disconnect the connected channels any time from settings. Pattern data deletion on request.

Customer-managed LLM keysCustomer-managed LLM keys are live today via per-user API key architecture. SOC 2 Type II and regional data residency are commitments we make against the first Enterprise contract.

Where we sit

A new kind of change software.

Methodology vendors sell training. Software analytics platforms track adoption clicks. Listening tools measure aggregate sentiment.

SteadMark reads team conversations, names the per-person resistance pattern, and delivers it to the manager in the morning.

Design partner conversations with Jim. Contact: jim@steadmark.app

CATEGORY MAP

Methodology vendorsTrainingL&D

Software analyticsAdoption click dataIT

Listening toolsAggregate sentimentPeople Ops

SteadMarkPer-person resistance patternsOCM

Lead change without wearing people down.

They fail because nobody told the manager what to say Tuesday morning.

One email. One ask. One person. Every workday.

Everyday workplace communication.

Resistance patterns through three human needs.

One recommendation. One opener. 7:30 AM.

Three steps from team conversation to a 7:30 AM email.

Pull patterns already flowing.

Classify through the three needs.

One ask. One person. 7:30 AM.

Forty years of behavioral science. One recommendation engine.

One product. Three angles into the same conversation.

Portfolio-level change visibility. In development.

Operationalize your methodology at the manager level.

Today's ask. Before standup.

Five values. One direction.

Dignity is the product.

Say what the product does, and what it does not do.

Earn the read before you give the prescription.

The customer is the change leader. The user is everyone in the org.

Default to small, daily, repairable actions.

Built by someone who spent years reading rooms.

Named, and treated with dignity.

Aimed at the next conversation.

Mode-recovery, not fault.

The read-aloud test.

You control the data.

A new kind of change software.