Emergent Performance Solutions

Emergent Performance Solutions: Building Trust-Driven Organizations

Emergent Performance Solutions is a change management and organizational development consulting firm focused on helping teams build trust to accelerate change. The company was founded in 2010 by CEO Jennifer Stanford, a trust coach and human capital and change management expert with more than 25 years of high-level consulting experience (Emergent Performance Solutions "About Us," 2026). Stanford recently published a book, "De-Stressed: Proven Strategies for Leaders to Lower Stress and Boost Performance," drawing on what the company calls her De-Stressed Method for reducing burnout and building psychological safety. Emergent operates out of Northern Virginia and Huntsville, Alabama.

What Emergent Performance Solutions does

Emergent's core premise, cited on its own site, is that 75 percent of change efforts fail due to misaligned expectations and teams' inability to build trust, connect, and collaborate quickly (Emergent, 2026, citing the company's own framing). The firm's services span change management consulting, executive facilitation, and trust-building workshops, applying concepts around emotional intelligence to help organizations of any size move through transformation faster. Consultants and facilitators on the Emergent team bring backgrounds in executive leadership, M&A, organizational psychology, and cultural anthropology.

Where it fits

Emergent works with organizations and government agencies undergoing significant transformation, where misalignment between leadership expectations and team execution is stalling progress. It's a fit for leaders managing a major change initiative, restructuring, or merger who need outside facilitation to build trust and alignment quickly, rather than a firm that provides ongoing operational HR support.

Why this matters for people leaders

Most change initiatives fail not because the plan was wrong, but because people didn't trust each other enough to move quickly together once the plan was announced. Emergent's focus on emotional intelligence and trust as the actual mechanism of successful change, rather than better project management or communication alone, points at something people leaders often underestimate: change moves at the speed of trust, not the speed of the org chart. For organizations focused on Culture, Performance, and Retention, that framing matters especially during M&A integrations or major restructurings, when the difference between a change effort that sticks and one that quietly fails often comes down to whether people felt safe enough to engage with it honestly.

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