Experts & Advisors
Mark J. Cappellino
Senior Managing Director

2963 Sidco Drive, Suite 101
Nashville, TN 37204
+1.615.371.8612 Main
+1.615.525.5515 Mobile
Mark J. Cappellino is a Senior Managing Director at Ankura, based in Nashville, with multinational experience in executive leader and organizational development. An executive coach and consultant for more than 20 years, Mark combines his experience in executive roles and training in organizational psychology and behavior-based coaching to provide unique, highly effective approaches to even the most successful leaders. Mark has developed unique reframes for conflict, relationship, trust, and accountability that unlock trapped leadership capacity from within existing leadership teams.
Experience
While at Ankura, Mark has guided executives and teams to elevate their performance at the intersection of culture and strategy. He has been called upon to facilitate broken and highly dysfunctional relationships between C-level leaders. Retained by boards of directors as well as by individual executives, Mark has worked with big box retail, healthcare, manufacturing, distribution, software, investment, and professional services companies.
Before Ankura, he founded and led Primary Leadership, LLC, a leadership coaching and consulting practice, where he developed methods to accelerate performance among high-performing leaders and teams. Mark had previously served as worldwide director of organizational development for Franke Foodservice Systems, where he led a team of leadership consultants and coaches to deliver leadership development for individual leaders, operating presidents, and all corporate staff across operations in Asia, Europe, and the US.
Mark had earlier founded the Alignment Group, an organizational development consulting firm that specialized in management-culture change, team building, and performance-based incentive programs. Mark began his career in manufacturing where he held positions of VP marketing and sales and division leadership with P/L responsibility.
Mark’s professional experience includes:
- Facilitated/coached a newly formed (post-merger) executive team into a high performing team concurrent with operational integration and strategy rethink. Included individual, one-to-one, and team development.
- Retained by a board of directors to prepare heir apparent for CEO role and subsequently “on-board” the same newly promoted CEO into role. This involved assessment, role clarification (first-time in C-suite), and relationship development with all key stakeholders.
- Facilitated/coached a newly formed executive leadership team through executive team development. Clarified roles, strategic priorities, and what it means to be an enterprise leader.
- Assembled a team of leadership consultants/coaches to design and deliver a one-year program for C-suite and operating presidents (17 leaders) for a global manufacturing company. Included individual and team assessment/development, multiple facilitated team sessions, and multi-stream action learning projects. Resulted in ability to move whole enterprise from highly siloed to a matrix organization.
- Education
- MA, I/O Psychology, Middle Tennessee State University
- BS, Industrial Distribution, Clarkson University
- Affiliations
- International Coach Federation, former TN Chapter President
- Executive Coach, TED Fellows (TED Talks), SupporTED program