Angela Cusack, Founder & CEO of Igniting Success®, is understated and patient. She moves quickly as she partners with executive leaders in shaping cultures that produce deeper connections, higher engagement, and overall well-being and prosperity for all involved. Angela is an impact player. Someone whom many refer to as their “organization’s secret weapon.”

Her presence is felt throughout an organization, even if she can only be found coaching and consulting within the C-suite. The new insights, actions, and results from working with Angela undeniably impact more than just one’s professional life. She has an innate ability to create a safe and trusting space where life-altering perspectives are revealed and she has the power to shift the course of how one leads and participates in life, learning, work, and play.

Angela wholeheartedly believes that “who you are is how you lead.”

Furthermore, Angela shares in her debut book, Discover the Matrix, Integrity: The True Mark of Leadership, “that our integrity is the single most important quality that we, as leaders, must possess for a sustainable future together. If we fail to align ourselves first, we simply cannot align our teams, organizations, and brand.”

Angela’s success in leading her own company and her work with others comes down to her expert insights arising from what psychologist Howard Gardner calls “searchlight intelligence: the ability to discern connections across spheres and see opportunities for cross-pollination.”

It is through her work she has mastered the science of leadership-brand-culture integration. When leaders operate in a zone where their professional principles align with what fulfills them, they can honor their true selves and lead prosperous lives. Angela refers to this as “leading and living in integrity.”

Collaboratively Designing the Future

Angela conceptualized Igniting Success® in 2005 after responding to questions from colleagues and community leaders, “How do you do what you do?” with “I am the spark that helps leaders ignite their own success by discovering their true selves.” She says, “Choosing to live in and lead with integrity isn’t easy. It takes courage and bravery to be honest and vulnerable with oneself and with those we are privileged to lead. As I often say, Igniting Success® begins and ends with you.”

As a Generative Leader, Angela is motivated by supporting people and organizations in achieving prosperity. For Angela, prosperity is more than financial gain. Prosperity is the condition of thriving and being successful by reducing the unnecessary suffering many experiences in the workplace or their lives arising from the persistent need to pretend and engage in the never-ending, exhausting game of power and politics.

“When we give up on ourselves, we not only lose our integrity, we lose our voice and unconsciously feel suppressed. We become a bystander in the game of life,” adds Angela. “You may be wondering how I discovered this truth. Just before leaving behind my very successful big corporate job, I awoke from what I call my ‘Rip Van Winkle’ 25-year slumber.  I immediately asked myself, ‘What happened to the 20-year-old girl that had big dreams and believed anything was possible?’”I carried this inspiration with me as I launched Igniting Success® full-time in 2011.” And it is this feeling that continues to motivate Angela to be and bring her best every day to every client she is privileged to work with—be it a CEO, entrepreneur, family business owner, or coach.

Igniting Success® is a people-focused, global advisory firm leveraging human potential to collaboratively design futures of success for change-ready CEOs, entrepreneurs, boards, and business leaders. Angela and her team partner with executives and emerging leaders worldwide to create forward-looking organizations that flourish and endure through the success of their people.

Using collective experience and stakeholder insight, they actualize the full potential of the enterprise for the individuals who sustain it, developing integrated strategies and specialized solutions that address critical challenges and opportunities while building alignment across the organization. They do this by collaboratively teaming with their clients to sow the seeds of future success in today’s people, processes, and structures for a more agile tomorrow.

A Pioneering Leader

With such a brilliant mind, one must also learn to stay grounded and care for oneself. For Angela, it is all about being mindful and present with who she is and what she is doing at the moment. This allows her to make more purposeful choices of where to focus her energies versus falling into society’s pervasive thinking that puts multitasking on a pedestal.

For Angela and her organization, the most significant achievement has been gaining implicit trust from CEOs from various organizations across the globe. “Trust isn’t always easy to come by, especially when working with CEOs and executive teams,” she explains. “It first requires a high level of integrity within oneself that then bleeds into the relationship, and this creates a path forward for leaders to do their own work to lead with integrity.”

Igniting Success® is built on this very premise.

As Angela describes in her debut book Discover the Matrix, integrity is the true mark of leadership.

“When we live and lead with integrity, we raise our collective organizational intelligence by seeing what is often invisible. It is the intangibles within us and organizational culture that is easily overlooked or worse yet ignored. Yet, if we dare to discover what lies within the spaces between what we know, we find the magic that allows us to create an organization where there is strong leadership-culture-brand alignment,” she elucidates.

Integrity breeds trust.

Angela’s book, Discover the Matrix, Integrity: The True Mark of Leadership, is arriving on bookshelves in April 2023. For the road ahead, her second book is underway. In this book, she continues pulling the red thread of integrity through an organization’s teams and culture, connecting it to its brand and promise. With the support of her publisher, Austin Macauley, Angela expects to release Discover the Matrix, Amplify Your Teams, Culture, and Brand and the accompanying Discover the Matrix Field Guide sometime in late 2024 or early 2025. “The possibilities are endless to expand Igniting Success®’s reach and global impact. I am excited and curious to see what unexpected doors open,” she asserts.