Ed Batista

Executive Coaching

How to Facilitate a Conflict on Your Team

January 28, 2026

A common theme in my practice is the leader who has two or more team members embroiled in a conflict. I’m typically working with CEOs leading executives, but the concepts I discuss here can be applied at any level in an organization. My comments assume that you have managerial authority over the individuals involved, so you’ll need to modify your approach when dealing with peers or dotted-line reports.

Why Conflict Is Good

Conflict is a daily occurrence in organizational life, and when it takes place within acceptable limits it’s healthy and even desirable. I’m leery of teams that pride themselves on an absence of conflict; in my experience that’s a potential sign of dysfunction. Teams that don’t regularly engage in conflict are often fearful that any interpersonal friction will escalate beyond acceptable limits, and consequently they don’t develop the communication skills and emotional maturity that are necessary to sustain conflict within these boundaries.

Conflict serves to surface a wide range of ideas, to convey varying degrees of conviction, and to portray divergent visions of how to proceed. When a team is unable to engage in conflict successfully, much of this information remains hidden and inaccessible. And in the absence of conflict, the team must rely on decision-making methods that may be impractical or may not yield the best results: Hierarchy rests on your judgment as leader. (Do you always know best?) Voting assumes the ability to apportion authority fairly and logically. And consensus often requires a great deal of time and space. Engaging in conflict doesn’t preclude the use of these methods, nor is it always preferable, but it can augment their effectiveness. [1]

When to Intervene

That said, healthy conflict occurs within acceptable limits: It’s not too heated. It’s not personal. It doesn’t last for too long. But definitions of “acceptable” are subjective, contingent, and dynamic. What’s acceptable to me may be unacceptable to you. What’s acceptable from someone we’ve known for years may be unacceptable from someone we’ve just met. What’s acceptable in a crisis may be unacceptable in calm conditions (and vice versa.) Every team must arrive at a shared understanding of their “acceptable limits,” which can only occur by engaging in conflict.

While conflict can be a sign of group health, and the absence of conflict can be cause for concern, teams can obviously engage in unhealthy conflicts. They get too heated, too personal, last too long, cause undue distress and rancor, or in other ways prevent people from doing their best work. Your decision to intervene to resolve a conflict will inevitably be an intuitive one, a sense that things are “going too far.” In the process, you should assess your own comfort level with conflict and the extent to which it aligns with group health. I’ve known leaders who jumped in at the first sign of conflict and prevented their teams from growing. I’ve also known leaders who were too hands-off and later regretted that they didn’t act sooner.

Facilitate, Don’t (Always) Arbitrate

As a leader there’s an easy way to conclude any conflict on your team: simply decide who’s right. And there are times when you must arbitrate disputes. But leaders sometimes adopt this approach reflexively, in part because it offers certain rewards: It’s efficient. It feels good to be viewed as an authority. And team members may prefer that you take responsibility, rather than do the work themselves.

But concluding a conflict isn’t the same as resolving a conflict. The end of open hostility doesn’t mean that anyone has changed their opinion, and a willingness to comply with your decision doesn’t mean that everyone is fully committed to that outcome. [2] While on occasion it’s necessary to arbitrate, when possible it’s preferable to facilitate.

Process vs. Content

Arbitration is focused on content: the issues in question, relevant facts and opinions, different parties’ respective positions and desired outcomes. The process by which arbitration is conducted is straightforward: The involved parties make their arguments, and you hand down a decision. Very efficient, very tidy.

Facilitation inverts this equation by putting the emphasis on the process rather than the content. This isn’t to say that the content is irrelevant, but when you’re acting as a facilitator you don’t need to be a subject matter expert, nor do you even need to have an opinion on “who’s right.” But you do take ownership for the process and conduct the dialogue in such a way that yields a thorough exchange of views, minimizes defensiveness, and increases the likelihood of mutual understanding and true resolution.

You remain a source of authority, but you’re acting more like a traffic cop than a judge. You’re not dictating the destination, but you are enforcing rules of the road and calling out violations to ensure that everyone arrives safely.

Preparation

Having made the decision to intervene, it’s important to prepare people for what’s about to happen. We rarely do our best work when we’re surprised, so don’t expect to spring a facilitated discussion on your team and have them respond perfectly. In some cases it’s worth taking the time to meet in advance with each individual to let them know what’s coming, while in others you can meet with people as a group or even provide written guidance. But don’t squander a chance at success by skipping this step to save time.

Help people understand the difference between arbitration and facilitation, and clarify the role you’ll play in the process. You don’t have to permanently revoke your right to arbitrate, but emphasize that your primary objective will be to foster a productive dialogue, not to determine the outcome. Another aspect of your role will be ensuring that everyone feels supported in the effort to have a candid discussion. (This is much easier when you’re not taking sides as an arbitrator.)

Give advance notice of any ground rules for the discussion. (See below.) People may want to air their grievances with you ahead of time, to be certain that you understand their point of view. That’s fine within limits, but when you hear language that would evoke defensiveness in the other parties if they were present, use that as an opportunity to offer feedback on how to be more persuasive during the facilitated discussion.

The Right Setting

Paying attention to logistical factors will make the discussion far more effective. If you’re meeting in person, choose a space where everyone will feel at ease. The space should be perceived as neutral and not as anyone’s turf. Everyone should have a comfortable seat and should be able to see everyone else’s face. (Long tables make this difficult.) The space should be free from distractions and interruptions. Avoid the use of slides and presentations; the focus should be on the other people, not on a screen.

If you’re meeting virtually, ensure that everyone will take responsibility for optimizing their own space. It has to be a level playing field–everyone needs solid connectivity and all cameras should be on. Everyone should be in a space where they will be free from distractions and interruptions. To ensure that the discussion remains confidential, everyone should be in a private space or be using headphones. Multi-tasking is not permitted, and all notifications are turned off. [3]

Pick a time when it’s likely that everyone will be in the right frame of mind, including you. Allot sufficient time to have a meaningful discussion, while being mindful that this may be a taxing experience, and it may be sufficient to make some progress and “call time.” (See below.) Somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes is generally optimal. You have to arrive early, but don’t be surprised if someone’s late. (They’ll have a legitimate excuse, but there’s probably some resistance to the process, and that’s normal.)

In the Room (or On the Call)

People will look to you to kick things off, and bear in mind your role as facilitator, not arbitrator. In that capacity you want to foster a spirit of inquiry rather than advocacy. In an arbitration, each party simply states their case, advocating for their point of view and their desired outcome. The arbitrator asks clarifying questions, but the respective parties rarely make inquiries of each other, and ultimately one side wins and the other loses. In a facilitated discussion, you want to change every aspect of this dynamic.

All parties will make their case eventually, but you want to encourage them to be curious about other parties’ point of view, not narrowly focused on asserting their own. The goal is mutual understanding, not “winning.” And you won’t be rendering an ultimate decision unless absolutely necessary, but a facilitator is by no means a passive figure. Be an active presence throughout the discussion until you observe that the dialogue is flowing freely without your intervention. Traffic cops are assertive when there’s a problem, but they don’t barge into the street when it’s not needed. Here are some ground rules and tactics to consider:

  • If there’s any tension, start with some small talk or even a joke to break the ice.
  • Reiterate your role as traffic cop, not judge, and note that you’ll interrupt, re-direct, pose questions, and police language as needed.
  • Emphasize that you’re open to feedback in the moment. If anyone perceives you as being too intrusive or unhelpful, they should speak up. You don’t necessarily have to agree with this feedback or change your behavior in response, but better for it to be voiced than stifled.
  • Observe communication patterns: Who’s speaking? To whom? For how long? Who’s not speaking? Who’s interrupting? Who’s being interrupted?
  • In some cases these patterns will strike you as counter-productive, but don’t act on that impulse immediately. Groups are often semi-consciously aware of such patterns and course-correct on their own.
  • And yet don’t wait too long to intervene. In some cases, do so without referencing the counter-productive pattern, as that can be disruptive. But at times the disruption is the point: you want to deliberately make them aware of behaviors that are making it harder to resolve the conflict.
  • When people appeal to you (as judge), redirect them back toward the other parties (as traffic cop.)

Facilitation requires a keen sense of intuition and the ability to step in and out of the discussion firmly but gracefully. Leaders often have extensive training as arbitrators but very little as facilitators. Don’t expect to be a master your first time out, but strive to learn as much as possible by reflecting on every experience and eliciting feedback if it hasn’t been offered.

Repeating Back

Here’s a tactic that’s worth exploring in detail. When a conflict becomes heated, the people participating are experiencing what’s known as a threat response, or a “fight, flight or freeze” response. This cascading constellation of physiological and emotional reactions serves an essential purpose by readying us to overcome perceived threats, but this can be counter-productive when those threats are social and symbolic rather than literal dangers to physical safety.

People in this state are primed to take strong, decisive action rather than pause and reflect, so they’re less effective at processing information. They miss visual cues, they don’t hear as clearly, and they garble some of what they do hear. As a result there will likely be a series of misunderstandings that are evident to you as the facilitator but invisible to the participants. Here’s how to turn these moments into opportunities for learning:

  • Person A has spoken, and you sense that Person B has misunderstood these remarks, and is about to respond on that basis.
  • Jump in and pause Person B, and have them repeat back to Person A what they think they heard.
  • If Person A agrees with Person B’s interpretation of their remarks, let the discussion proceed (and perhaps be a little slower to intervene next time.)
  • Often, however, Person A will disagree with Person B’s interpretation for a variety of reasons.
  • Person B may have misheard Person A. Or they may have heard Person A correctly but misunderstood Person A’s intentions. Or they heard and interpreted Person A correctly, but upon reflection Person A would like to modify their remarks. Or some combination of the above.

The key for you as facilitator is providing clarity without making anyone feel wrong, and helping people recognize that it’s possible to catch and correct misunderstandings themselves.

The Vulnerable Moment

Once a team develops a sense of comfort and efficacy with the process of conflict resolution, your role as facilitator becomes less figural. You may always play a necessary function as convener, but you will likely add more value by being less active over time. And a truly high-performing team will gracefully tell you to back off when your interventions are getting in the way of their independence. But as facilitator you will often retain the ability to perform a special function even in a highly-experienced team: You will sense and protect the vulnerable moment.

This is a critical step in most conflict-resolution processes: it’s the moment when a person who’s refused to acknowledge their contributions to the problem lowers their defenses and takes responsibility, and in so doing, makes themselves vulnerable. For a number of reasons, groups often miss this moment. Up to this point the person in question has probably been difficult, even combative, and what feels vulnerable to them may not look or sound vulnerable to others.

But as the facilitator you’re more likely to see this person clearly and to recognize their vulnerability when others can’t. At that moment it’s your job to slow things down and help everyone see what you see. This doesn’t mean you have to spell it out; sometimes it’s enough to simply give the person a little time and space. Why does this matter so much? Because expressions of vulnerability are a reliable way to evoke empathy, and empathy is what truly resolves conflict. [4]

Success

It’s entirely possible for a team to conclusively resolve a conflict in a single discussion, and with experience this need not be time-consuming. But when a team is new to the process (or when it’s a new team), temper your expectations. It may be more realistic to achieve meaningful progress and “call time” before people begin to feel fatigued. While these discussions aren’t merely exercises, every one is an opportunity to learn and become more adept at the process. If possible, leave 5 to 10 minutes at the end to debrief what went well and what you’d do differently. [5] One definition of success is that the team ends the discussion eager (or at least willing) to do it again.

Facilitation is usually more time-consuming in the short run, and it’s never as tidy as arbitration (and occasionally it’s downright messy.) But the payoff occurs over time, because when teams develop the capability to both sustain and resolve conflict, they become much more productive. People can share ideas freely and passionately without censoring themselves or walking on eggshells. Far less energy is consumed by efforts to avoid conflict, because the team has clarified its “acceptable limits” and trusts members to honor them. And on the inevitable occasions when those limits are exceeded, the team knows what to do–and they may not even need you to facilitate.

 

Footnotes

[1] Power Struggles Among Nice People

[2] Compliance vs. Commitment (On Behavior Change)

[3] For more on virtual discussions:

[4] Resolving a Protracted Conflict

[5] Successful Debriefing: Ask, Don’t Tell

 

Image generated via Google Gemini.

Raise or Sell? (Or Quit?)

January 24, 2026

Many of my clients are early- or mid-stage founder/CEOs, and I also work with pairs of co-founders or other members of the founding team. In many cases they’ve raised enough capital to allow them to make substantial investments in the business, and they’re generating sufficient revenue to validate the initial concept and point the way to product-market fit.

But they’re not quite there yet, which means that the business continues to face existential threats, and the venture may still fail. Nothing is guaranteed. So at regular intervals my clients must ask themselves, “Do we raise another venture round and keep building, or do we sell to a strategic acquirer or private equity?”

These aren’t mutually exclusive options, and it can be possible to run a dual process, but even when that’s feasible it’s burdensome and time-consuming. There are no simple answers, but there are a number of issues and questions that I discuss with clients to achieve greater clarity. My comments here are by no means exhaustive, but if you’re facing this choice, they should highlight areas for further exploration.

Autonomy

Founders are usually “pirates” who relish the opportunity to disrupt established industries, do things differently, and be the captain of their own vessel in the process. [1] This defiant attitude has sustained every startup that went on to ultimate success, but it has also led countless founders to go down with the ship. A critical factor is whether the founders will be able to retain control after the next round, and, if not, the nature of their relationship with new Board members. [2]

Alternatively, founders can find happiness in a role within an acquirer or working for a PE board, but they can also be deeply miserable. Much depends on the organizational culture within the acquirer or the culture of the new Board (which can be impossible to discern in advance) and on the length of any lockup or earnout periods.

The degree of autonomy enjoyed by founders who cede Board control or who sell a portion or all of their company varies widely. Investor-led Boards or acquirers often afford founders a great deal of latitude. But it’s worth noting that it can be difficult to make these commitments contractual obligations. Much will depend on the trustworthiness of assurances from investors and acquirers.

  • How much autonomy and independence do you enjoy today?
  • How important are these qualities in your professional life?
  • What would induce you to accept less?
  • How likely is it that you’ll retain control after another round?
  • Under what conditions would you be willing to work for someone else?
  • What might cause you to quit?
  • What do you know about your prospective investors and acquirers, specifically their approach to management and their organizational culture?
  • How might you learn more?
  • How have they built trust with you? How have they undermined trust?

Finances

Founders are rarely motivated solely by financial goals, but the potential to realize significant wealth is usually a factor in the decision to launch a new venture and in subsequent decisions to persist or alter course. Raising a new round may be necessary to enable a promising business to fulfill its potential, and dilution may be more than offset by subsequent growth. But it can be daunting to sit underneath an even bigger pref stack, knowing that this may decrease the likelihood of material returns for common shareholders.

Selling entails a preference for the risk-adjusted return of the acquisition offer, but that’s an emotional calculation as much as a financial one. The ability to achieve certain goals today (paying off personal debts, buying a home, saving for family obligations) may relieve a great deal of stress and anxiety. But the abandonment of even larger goals for the future can feel like a distasteful compromise, a loss of nerve, or even outright failure.

Both a new round and a transaction hold the possibility of a secondary offering or carveout to provide founders and valued employees with liquidity. VCs can be of two minds here–some view secondary as sending a negative signal regarding founders’ confidence or determination, while others want founders to be focused on the business and undistracted by personal finances. Acquirers’ willingness to create a carveout (and to offer cash rather than equity) hinges on their perception of the extent to which founders and valued employees are necessary to continue growing the business (and for how long).

  • What are your immediate financial obligations?
  • What’s your capacity to meet them?
  • What are your longer-term financial aspirations?
  • How much money would feel like a win?
  • What are sources of financial stress, if any, both immediate and long-term?
  • What would you be willing to sacrifice to alleviate this stress?
  • What do you know about your investors’ attitude toward secondaries?
  • How might you learn more?
  • How necessary are you (and any key employees) to the company’s success?
  • In what ways are you uniquely valuable? In what ways are you replaceable?

The Narrative

Humans are meaning-making creatures, and the vehicle for this process is narrative. [3] A narrative is a reductive model of reality that links a series of data points to form a coherent story that allows us to interpret the past and present, and, as a result, anticipate the future. A company’s narrative can matter a great deal to the founders, not only because it affects the subsequent opportunities available to them, but also because it shapes how they “make sense” of and feel about their own lives.

As with financial outcomes, raising another round may make a more extreme narrative more likely, for better and for worse. The odds of glory go up, and so do the odds of ignominy. That said, sometimes the story of founders’ willingness to “take a big swing” matters as much as whether they hit or miss. Here, too, a company’s narrative is a subjective emotional matter, not just an objective financial one. Many acquisitions aren’t remunerative transactions for the founders or other common shareholders, but they present an otherwise valuable narrative: We built something that someone wanted to buy.

  • What narrative did you have in mind when you launched the company?
  • How has the company’s trajectory aligned with or deviated from that narrative?
  • What is the company’s narrative today?
  • How might raising another round or selling affect the narrative, for better and for worse?
  • How might these options affect your personal narrative, the story of your life and career?

Investors

Investors have rights that may influence or even dictate founders’ decisions regarding the direction or disposition of the company. But formal obligations may be less important than founders’ intrinsic motivation to fulfill stakeholders’ expectations. This isn’t because founders are saints. Founders care about stakeholders because investors (and employees, discussed below) believe in the company, and their commitments are often an expression of faith in the founders’ themselves.

Investors can have competing incentives. Venture capitalists must outperform the market over time to meet the expectations of their limited partners, but most of their investments lose money, and the majority of their returns are derived from a small number of high-performing deals. This can lead them to put pressure on founders to raise another round rather than sell for a modest return (or none at all, if they invested recently.) At the same time, VCs often want to maintain a reputation for being founder-friendly in order to maintain access to the best deals, so they may support a sale, especially if they expect the founders to launch a subsequent venture and hope to participate in it.

Founders sometimes believe a sale will satisfy investors by returning their original capital, but this depends entirely on who those investors are and their risk appetites. If the founders did a friends and family round, those investors are often unprepared to lose their money, and returning it may be very important to them (and to the health of their relationships with the founders.) But professional investors may have a very different point of view. As noted above, they may strongly prefer that the founders persist in the venture, even if the chance of success is minimal. They won’t complain about getting their money back, but it won’t make up for the loss of potential upside.

  • What do you know about your investors’ incentives?
  • What do you know about their expectations for your company?
  • What is their role and seniority within their firms, and how might these factors affect their risk tolerance?
  • If you raised capital from friends and family, what is their risk appetite?
  • To what extent would you rely on any of these investors for capital in a future venture?

Employees

Most employees have far fewer rights than investors, but founders may still feel highly motivated to meet their expectations, both because employees are often drawn from founders’ personal networks and because employees have just a single career and can’t spread the risk of a startup role across a portfolio of investments. Founders may also hope to hire employees again in a future venture.

If the team has grown beyond a certain size, there are likely to be differences between senior and junior employees, although there’s no specific cutoff point, and these distinctions are rough approximations. Senior employees (and some very early stage junior employees) stand to realize meaningful wealth from their equity and tend to value it more highly. They’re more likely to have the resources to go without a role for a period of time and may even welcome a break from employment. And when they chose this role, they typically had a wider range of options available to them. In most cases, the opposite holds true for junior employees.

This doesn’t mean that senior employees will always prefer the riskier option, or that junior employees are always more risk-averse, but these may be tendencies within the team. Nor is it the case that a new round is necessarily riskier for all employees than a sale. A strategic acquirer may view any number of functions as redundant and eliminate them. And private equity ownership will likely seek to wring new efficiencies out of the business by cutting costs.

  • What do you know about your employees’ expectations?
  • How would you assess their collective risk appetite?
  • Are there any specific individuals whose perspectives are uniquely important because of their seniority, their tenure, or their role?
  • While maintaining confidentiality, how might you learn more about their point of view?

Bankers

Everyone complains about investment bankers, and yet the profession seems to be in no danger of disappearing, so rather than reflexively dismissing them it’s worth understanding the circumstances under which they add value. If founders are determined to raise a new round and a sale is off the table, there’s no role for a banker. But if a sale is preferred or if a dual process is a possibility, a banker can be extremely useful.

It’s a banker’s job not only to be familiar with the universe of potential acquirers, but also to have established relationships with decision-makers, not just gatekeepers. Further, a banker should have insights into factors that might influence a given acquirer’s willingness or reluctance to enter into a transaction. This extends beyond business strategy and includes internal turnover or personal issues among an acquirer’s team.

Bankers are financially motivated to close a deal, which can raise questions about the alignment of incentives. And while the mere act of hiring a banker can signal a willingness to sell, potentially driving the price down, bankers are highly experienced negotiators–see below–so employing one as a go-between can more than make up the difference.

  • How extensive is your knowledge of potential acquirers?
  • How deep are your relationships with decision-makers?
  • If those relationships are lacking, how much time and effort would it take to develop them?
  • How would you test prospective bankers’ understanding of your industry and your potential value to an acquirer?

Negotiations

Whether it’s with venture investors in a new round or with strategic acquirers or PE firms, this process will involve extensive negotiations. And as I’ve written before, we can distinguish between two different negotiating “cultures”:

In a list-price culture, there’s a high degree of transparency and very little flexibility. An opening offer may not be take-it-or-leave it, but there’s relatively little gamesmanship in the process. There may be some room for negotiation on the margins, but the basic requirements necessary to close a deal are clear and straightforward, and it’s reasonably obvious when the two parties are sufficiently close to reach agreement and when they’re not.

In a haggling culture, the opposite is true. There’s very little transparency and a great deal of flexibility. Opening offers are never take-it-or-leave-it, and gamesmanship abounds. Everything is up for negotiation, and the basic requirements necessary to close a deal are uncertain and highly dynamic. It’s rarely apparent whether the two parties are sufficiently close to reach agreement, because their currently stated positions may bear little relation to their actual willingness to reach a deal. [4]

It would be an oversimplification to equate founders with the “list-price” culture and to identify everyone else as “hagglers,” but there are some parallels. In my experience most founders find negotiating unpleasant, and they prefer list-price transactions, which may mean they don’t get much experience. This can be unfortunate, because all of the other parties in this process, from VCs to corporate M&A execs to PE partners to investment bankers, are essentially negotiating every day. The starting point for founders is simply to be better prepared for this environment.

  • What are your strengths and weaknesses as a negotiator?
  • In what ways do you identify with the “list-price” culture?
  • In what ways do you identify with the “haggling” culture?
  • How do these identities contribute to your strengths and weaknesses?
  • Where do you see opportunities to gain more negotiating experience?
  • How might other parties assist you in the process?

Quitting?

As noted above, “the business continues to face existential threats, and the venture may still fail. Nothing is guaranteed.” In these circumstances, almost all founders I’ve known want to find a way to continue. The question they ask themselves is how to keep going, and not whether they should. Founders typically possess a degree of optimism and determination that can border on the reckless. But this “reality distortion field” is what enabled them to dream up the new venture in the first place and to envision themselves as its successful leader.

There is an inner logic here, as I’ve written before: “There’s a positive correlation between optimism and effective leadership, in part because the optimistic leader has a contagious effect on others, rendering success more likely.” [5] And yet at the same time there’s a risk that the optimistic, determined leader has a blind spot, a danger cited by adventure writer Jon Krakauer in his analysis of the disastrous expeditions on Mount Everest in May 1996:

The sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger… In order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die. [6]

Very few founders face the risk of literal death should their companies fail. But founders can sometimes identify with their companies so deeply that the prospective end of the venture can feel like death. This may lead founders to keep going, to “push for the top,” and in the process expose themselves and others to any number of unjustifiable risks, both professional and personal. There are worse fates than shutting down a business. The key to surviving a storm on Mount Everest is to pick a turnaround time that will allow you to return to safety if necessary. I’ve explored at length elsewhere how founders can do the equivalent. [7]

  • What do you imagine might happen if you shut down the company?
  • What about this prospect makes you anxious or fearful?
  • If you did shut down the company, who else would be disappointed or upset?
  • How might your desire to avoid these feelings–your own and those of others–influence your risk appetite?
  • If you did shut down the company, how much time and money would be required to conduct an orderly process?
  • If you put that time and money at risk–and the gamble fails–what might happen?
  • How might the absence of an orderly winddown affect you and others?

 

Footnotes

[1] Pirates in the Navy

[2] Not Your Friends, Not Your Enemies, Not Your Boss.

[3] The Importance of Shared Narrative

[4] Culture, Compensation and Negotiation

[5] The Traps We Set for Ourselves

[6] Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, page 233 (Jon Krakauer, 1997)

[7] Why Some Entrepreneurs Don’t Know When to Quit

 

Photo by Art Purée.

A Guide to Life’s Problems

October 13, 2025

Coaching generally involves helping people solve problems, but often what we think of as “the problem” is just a starting point. A set of issues appear more pressing or pointed at first, and over time we realize that they mask other, deeper challenges which emerge only when the former are resolved, in whole or in part.

We tend to progress through these challenges in a rough sequence, although it’s by no means universal, and we may deviate from this path in any number of ways. The sequence that I see most typically in my practice is illustrated in the graphic above, which I call, only half in jest, The Onion of Fear and Regret.

It’s inspired by the Hierarchy of Needs developed by Abraham Maslow, the great 20th century psychologist who’s one of my most important influences. [1] But where Maslow envisioned us climbing up and down a metaphorical ladder (not a pyramid [2]) as various needs are fulfilled or denied, I see us “peeling the onion” as we seek to mitigate our fears and avoid regrets, a process that starts at the outermost layer, working “from the outside in.”

 

Money

This is usually the presenting problem, although it’s rarely articulated quite so bluntly and can take an endless variety of forms. But many of the issues that come to mind as sources of fear and regret are, put simply, “money problems.” Sometimes we literally lack funds for life’s necessities, although this is rare among people I work with. More common are problems related to our perceived needs for power, freedom, and safety. However we spend it, money’s eventual purpose is enabling us to meet these perceived needs.

Note my emphasis on “perception.” Most of us have sufficient power, freedom, and safety to sustain life, but that’s a low bar measured against our expectations, which derive from our upbringing, our professional background, and our sense of social comparison–the extent to which we are “ahead” or “behind” the people we perceive as peers. [3]

Money problems are real, of course–try going without sufficient power, freedom, or safety for very long. But a theme in my practice is the dawning recognition that sufficient wealth to mitigate our money problems doesn’t eliminate all sources of fear and regret. Having enough money to meet our perceived needs for power, freedom, and safety merely allows those other, deeper needs to be felt more acutely.

Here, too, note my emphasis on “sufficiency.” Our money problems may never entirely disappear, no matter how much money we have. That’s a function of hedonic adaptation, the inevitable process by which we adapt to changes in our environment and take for granted material conditions that once seemed luxurious. [4]

 

Status

But if we achieve a degree of material success, at a certain point money problems begin to recede into the background. This doesn’t mean they’ve been extinguished. One of the reasons Maslow used a ladder and not a pyramid to illustrate his framework is that we occupy multiple rungs simultaneously as we’re climbing up or down.

And when we feel sufficiently powerful, free, and safe, we become more keenly attuned to our status, and “status problems” begin to emerge. This evokes images of “status symbols,” markers of prestige that can consume much of the money that’s been earned: The house, the vacation home, long-distance travel, the private jet to get there. And there are certainly people who desire these things merely for the pleasure of their consumption.

But in my experience that’s rare. In most cases status symbols are vehicles that enable us to obtain something far more important: desirable attention from people we esteem. That definition of status applies to everyone, even those of us who don’t care that much about fancy homes or exotic trips or personal aircraft.

We all require a sufficient amount of desirable attention from people we esteem, and when our material and financial aspirations are achieved, this becomes an even more important goal, and an inability to accomplish it poses a profound dilemma. This is by no means a bad thing–in fact, it’s a deeply rooted drive in human psychology that’s beneficial for the species, albeit problematic for us as individuals. [5]

And yet status problems can be even more difficult to solve than money problems, particularly in an increasingly dynamic society in which traditional institutions and social structures that formerly met our needs for status have declined or disappeared. This is one of the main factors fueling the rise of social media–it’s an easily accessible source of attention, even if it’s not all desirable, and even if most of it comes from people we don’t know, let alone esteem. When we’re denied legitimate, authentic status, we’ll settle for the fake kind.

 

Legacy

We’re subject to occasional concerns about status, largely because we evolved to associate a loss of standing in the clan with the risk of abandonment, isolation, and death. But over time and with sustained effort most of us secure a sufficient sense of status in our families, our personal networks, and our professional lives.

And when our status feels secure, we begin to worry about our legacy. I could also use the term impact here, because what I mean is transcending our individual experience and engaging and affecting others. This may take place in the moment by having an effect on those around us. But it can also occur over time, by having a lasting effect on those same people or on others at a distance, or by affecting those who come after us, so that our impact lives on.

This needn’t be a self-aggrandizing act of hubris, like that of Shelley’s Ozymandias, the vainglorious king. [6] But we don’t just desire attention from others–we want to know that we made a real difference in their lives. And the means by which we accomplish this goal, the vehicles for solving legacy problems are what anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Becker called “heroic projects.”

As I’ve written before, describing Becker’s views, “We engage in any number of activities with the (typically unconscious) goal of achieving a symbolic victory over mortality, which offers us at least a provisional respite from this terror. These energies can be directed toward many different ends–raising a family, building a business, pursuing fame or status or wealth.” [7] These are our heroic projects.

 

Meaning

Heroic projects can take many forms, and they’re not all equally worthy. When we begin to feel that we’re capable of transcending our immediate experience and having an impact on others, whether our contemporaries or our successors, we start asking, “To what end?” Will our legacy ultimately be a meaningful one?

“Problems of meaning” are harder to assess and resolve than those that came before, in part because they’re more subjective. Money, status, and even legacy have objective elements that can be quantified and measured. Meaning is a more ephemeral construct.

This offers some advantages to those of us who’ve “peeled the onion” this far. It is up to us, and no one else, to determine whether our heroic projects are meaningful ones. But there are traps to be found here as well. Many such efforts are materially rewarding, high-status, and yield a lasting legacy, and yet we doubt whether they’re truly meaningful. It can be tempting to answer in the affirmative.

It can be equally tempting to stop asking the question. When our money problems are mainly (or entirely) solved, when we enjoy a sense of status, when our legacy is assured, it can feel superfluous (or daunting, or both) to wonder whether the life we’re living is a meaningful one. Why bother?

 

Existential Dread

This is why: At the end of this line of inquiry, at the center of the onion, we’re confronted with the starkest of realities. Whatever we believe about what precedes or follows this existence, we can surely agree that our time here, in these bodies, with these fellow creatures, is finite. A handful of species seem to demonstrate an understanding of death: elephants, ravens, whales. But it seems certain that we humans are uniquely aware of our own impending demise as individuals. It is, as Becker says, “a terrifying dilemma.” [8]

That dilemma is at the root of everything that has come before, at the core of life’s problems. Philosopher Sam Keen, in his introduction to Becker’s The Denial of Death, noted that Becker believed that “the basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.” [9] All of our “problems” in some way trace back to this primal fear, and all of our “solutions” are in some sense efforts to assuage this fear.

We don’t think about this on a daily basis, of course. Becker cites the Russian psychoanalyst and historian Gregory Zilboorg, who noted that the fear of death “must be properly repressed to keep us living with any modicum of comfort… Therefore in normal times we move about actually without ever believing in our own death, as if we fully believed in our own corporeal immortality.” [10] And yet we all find ourselves here eventually, even if it’s very late in the game.

 

Conclusion (From the Inside Out)

There’s no universal solution to existential dread, but all human activity can be viewed in this light, as one or another heroic project attempting to transcend mortality. That these efforts will not indefinitely extend our time on the planet is irrelevant. It’s by making the effort that we ensure that our time here will be well-spent. Thus the importance of choosing heroic projects wisely.

The heroic projects that appear to be most useful in this regard are those that most readily evoke a sense of meaning. This is different for everyone–again, meaning is highly subjective–but the activities that my clients most reliably describe as meaningful include raising a family, religious faith or spiritual practice, membership in a community, and building a business with a mission they care about. (To be sure, this is by no means an exhaustive list.)

Experiencing a sense of meaning in life will not shield us permanently from existential dread, but it’s a bulwark that helps us keep it at bay much of the time, and a toolkit for coping when it overtakes us. And if we start here and “work inside out,” the problems we considered previously may weigh on us less heavily. And recall how many of these problems are ones of perception, of “sufficiency.”

When we experience a sense of meaning, legacy problems become easier. When we’re confident that we’re leaving a legacy, status problems become easier. When we enjoy desirable attention from people we esteem, money problems become easier. When we feel more grounded on deeper levels, the “problems” we previously perceived on higher levels may no longer be problems at all.

 

Thanks to Mary Ann Huckabay and Kevin Martin for a rich discussion of The Onion of Fear and Regret. And thanks to Holly May and her Stanford GSB classmates Helen Chen, Jackie Bello Neumann, Jason Scott, Juan Gonzalez, Ken Ettinger, Michael Glassman, Neal Watterson, Suzanne Adatto and Yubing Zhang for the inspiration to (finally) finish this essay.

Footnotes

[1] For more on Maslow’s influence on my work, see the following:

[2] Who built Maslow’s pyramid? A history of the creation of management studies’ most famous symbol and its implications for management education, page 91 (Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings, John Ballard, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2019). I’m precluded by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from linking directly to a freely-available version of this paper, but you can search for it on the Victoria University of Wellington’s open access repository, which is located outside the U.S. and not subject to the DMCA.

[3] For more on social comparison

[4] For more on hedonic adaptation:

  • The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014): “Human beings have the remarkable capacity to grow habituated or inured to most life changes… What is particularly fascinating about this phenomenon, however, is that it is most pronounced with respect to positive experiences. Indeed, it turns out that we are prone to take for granted pretty much everything positive that happens to us.” [pages 18-19]
  • The Laws of Emotion, pages 353-354 (Nico Frijda, American Psychologist, 1988): “One must, I think, posit a law of hedonic asymmetry, the law of asymmetrical adaptation to pleasure or pain: Pleasure is always contingent upon change and disappears with continuous satisfaction. Pain may persist under persisting adverse conditions… The law of hedonic asymmetry is a stern and bitter law. It seems almost a necessary one, considering its roots, which, theoretically, are so obvious. Emotions exist for the sake of signaling states of the world that have to be responded to or that no longer need response and action. Once the ‘no more action needed’ signal has sounded, the signaling system can be switched off; there is no further need for it. That the net quality of life, by consequence, tends to be negative is an unfortunate result. It shows the human mind to have been made not for happiness, but for instantiating the blind biological laws of survival.”
  • We Won’t Be Happy WHEN. We Could Be Happy NOW.
  • Pain, Suffering and Hedonic Adaptation
  • Stop Trying to Be “Good Enough” by “Getting Better”

[5] Why We Crave Attention (and What We Can Do About It)

[6] “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

[7] Learning from Sisyphus

[8] The Denial of Death, pages 25-26 (Ernest Becker, 1973)

[9] Ibid, Introduction.

[10] “Fear of Death” (Gregory Zilboorg, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 12, 465–475, 1943)

 

Ask Me Anything, Anytime: The Ed Bot 2.0

April 26, 2025

Robot by Fred Seibert 5814007994

UPDATE: The Ed Bot can now be found at edbatista.ai.

Tarikh Korula, founder and coach, has trained a version of ChatGPT on the more than 1,000 essays that I've posted to this website since 2005.

We call it the Ed Bot 2.0, and you can use it to ask me anything, anytime.

(Version 1.0 was taken down when the startup that developed it was acquired.)

Privacy and Confidentiality

Here’s how your information is handled when you use this GPT:

  • I do not have access to any of your interactions with the GPT. This GPT is based on my published writings, but I am not involved in your use of this tool and cannot see what you share.
  • Tarikh Korula created this custom GPT, but he does not have access to your individual questions or responses. He doesn’t see or store your conversations. Everything you share here stays between you and the GPT, unless you choose to share it elsewhere.
  • OpenAI, the platform behind this GPT, may store conversation data for system monitoring and improvement. These logs are typically anonymized, and OpenAI does not use them to identify individual users.
  • Please avoid sharing sensitive personal details. While your input is treated respectfully, this is not a private or confidential coaching relationship, and this GPT is best suited for general leadership insights and self-reflection.

 

Photo by Fred Seibert.

Why Systems Change (and Why They Don’t)

April 23, 2025

The model above was developed by educators and consultants Mary Lippitt and Delorese Ambrose [1], and I first encountered it thanks to Noah Brier and James Gross. [2] (Here’s a larger version.) I find it a useful tool in my work with clients, almost all of whom are leaders seeking to drive organizational change. This obviously includes CEOs brought in to turn around an under-performing business, but it also includes startup founders who must transform their company at regular intervals in response to technological advances, market conditions, runway, team size, and any number of other factors. So if you’re a leader in a similar situation, here are some considerations to bear in mind:

1. Vision

A vision is an idea, of course, but it’s not sufficient for a leader seeking change to merely have a vision. It must be communicated to stakeholders in a way that allows for individual integration and collective action. In this sense a vision is a story, a narrative, and as I’ve written before,

We rely upon narratives to “make sense” of ambiguous situations and pursue a plan of action in coordination with others. But our reliance on narratives means that in the absence of a coherent story we will feel lost and ungrounded. This poses a risk when we face rapid change that may overtake our existing narrative and render it out of date… When disruptive events occur in organizational life, we require a shared narrative to re-orient ourselves and restore our understanding of the world around us. [3]

So your first task as a would-be change agent is to clarify and communicate your vision, which rests upon your effectiveness as a storyteller. Many leaders are natural storytellers, but it’s an eminently learnable skill. Improving as a storyteller entails repetition, which is necessary for people to grasp and internalize your vision. I regularly advise clients, “When you’re tired of hearing yourself, it’s starting to sink in.” The key here is finding the balance between variation and consistency. Core themes and concepts must be illustrated with novel anecdotes and language that suits the situation. [4]

2. Skills

One of a leader’s primary responsibilities is assessing their team and determining whether they have the skills necessary to initiate and sustain desired change. If you’re seeking to turnaround or transform your organization, it’s likely that you’ll need to make some structural moves and invest in training to ensure that your team’s collective skillset is up to the task. But in many situations such efforts can’t be enacted immediately, and sometimes, as the saying goes, “You don’t go to war with the army you want. You go to war with the army you have.” [5]

Whether or not you intend to pursue “the army you want,” you can certainly improve “the army you have,” and one avenue is by addressing your team’s mindset–how they think about their abilities, and whether they view the challenges they face as learning opportunities or threats. This doesn’t mean that your team can overcome any gaps in fundamental competence with willpower and enthusiasm, but the cultivation of a “growth mindset” in which people believe their abilities can be developed through persistent effort has been shown to yield results. [6] As the Roman poet Virgil wrote in The Aeneid, “They can, because they think they can.” [7]

3. Incentives

It’s essential to be aware that the status quo benefits someone, and change will generate resistance on their part. It may be possible to win their support by understanding what they value and determining how those needs might be met under new circumstances or what other “currencies” could be substituted. [8] That said, merely promising rewards is unlikely to yield sustained support, in part because the most readily available ones will likely lose their efficacy and more scarce or expensive resources will be required in the future. [9]

So it’s also important to attend to how people feel about the prospect of change, and how those emotions foster or inhibit incentives to pursue change. Management theorist and longtime MIT professor Edgar Schein had a relevant theory of change that I’ve discussed previously:

A key driving force is known as “survival anxiety”: We must change in order to accomplish our goals, and failure to change will threaten our existence. A key restraining force is known as “learning anxiety”: Our identity and sense of worth are connected to our current behavior, and change will result in a new (and uncertain) identity or a loss of self-esteem... Change occurs when survival anxiety is greater than learning anxiety under conditions of psychological safety. Only when these elements come together will we be truly open to taking risks and experimenting with new behaviors, the necessary precursors to learning and growth. [10]

4. Resources

The most important resources are self-evident: talented people and the capital to retain them. And yet countless change efforts undertaken by well-compensated all-star teams have failed. So what else do you need? Psychological resources. Talent and capital are necessary but not sufficient, and a key differentiating factor is how a team feels–how they feel about the talent and capital at their disposal, how they feel about working together, how they feel about the team itself. The concept of the “emotionally intelligent group” has been explored by psychologists Vanessa Urch Druskatt and Steven Wolff:

Study after study has shown that teams are more creative and productive when they can achieve high levels of participation, cooperation, and collaboration among members. But interactive behaviors like these aren’t easy to legislate. Our work shows that three basic conditions need to be present before such behaviors can occur: mutual trust among members, a sense of group identity (a feeling among members that they belong to a unique and worthwhile group), and a sense of group efficacy (the belief that the team can perform well and that group members are more effective working together than apart)… At the heart of these three conditions are emotions. Trust, a sense of identity, and a feeling of efficacy arise in environments where emotion is well handled, so groups stand to benefit by building their emotional intelligence. [11]

A related resource is noted above: psychological safety. This concept is often misunderstood as the absence of distress, a state in which “no one’s feelings can get hurt,” which, paradoxically, leads to a less safe environment. What psychological safety really means is that people feel free to speak up and be direct without fear of punishment. [12]

5. Action Plan

The absence of a plan clearly poses a risk, making it difficult for leaders and teams to prioritize the various steps to be taken and sequence them appropriately. But in my experience the opposite problem is just as risky: Change efforts can get bogged down and fail to achieve momentum because too much time and energy are devoted to perfecting the plan rather than launching and iterating. General George Patton had a clear point of view on planning: “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.” [13] Legendary entrepreneur Herb Kelleher felt similarly: “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.” [14]

 

Footnotes

[1] The model’s precise origins are unclear, and I haven’t been able to locate its first appearance, although I can find references that date to 1987. My research has led me to conclude that Mary Lippitt and the late Delorese Ambrose should be credited as its creators. Lippitt is a consultant and educator based in Florida, as well as the niece and daughter, respectively, of Gordon and Ron Lippitt, two major figures in 20th century social psychology. Ambrose was an author and management consultant based in Pittsburgh who served as a dean at Carnegie Mellon University. Lippitt holds the copyright on the model (and has taken legal action to maintain it), but there are also references that credit Ambrose, and it’s possible that Lippitt and Ambrose were active collaborators in the 1980s. Tim Knoster, a professor of education in Pennsylvania, is sometimes given shared or even sole credit for the model, but it appears that he merely included it in a book and subsequent presentations in the 1990s that helped to popularize it. There’s no evidence that Knoster was connected to Lippitt or Ambrose, and the earliest references linking Knoster to the model appear several years after those that credit Lippitt and Ambrose.

[2] In 2019 entrepreneurs Noah Brier and James Gross, who at the time were co-founders of Variance, included this model in one of their newsletters. Noah and James recently co-founded Alephic, an AI-driven marketing consultancy.

[3] The Importance of Shared Narrative

[4] For more on storytelling:

[5] Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said this at a press conference in 2004: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” As an astute Redditor later noted, however, “Rumsfeld’s got some great quotes, most of which were delivered in the context of explaining how the Iraq war turned into such a clusterfuck, and boy could that whole situation have used the kind of leadership Donald Rumsfeld’s quotes would lead you to believe the man could’ve provided.”

[6] Minding Our Mindset

[7] The Aeneid (Virgil, translated by Joseph Trapp, 1718). A version of this line is often mistakenly attributed to the American industrialist Henry Ford. I haven’t read Trapp’s 18th century edition of The Aeneid, but I have read Robert Fagles’ contemporary version, which I highly recommend.

[8] Currencies (On Motivating Different People)

[9] Compliance vs. Commitment (On Behavior Change)

[10] Why Change Is Hard

[11] Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups, page 83 (Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven Wolff, Harvard Business Review, March 2001)

[12] Safety Is a Resource, Not a Destination

[13] War As I Knew It (George S. Patton, 1947)

[14] Kelleher was co-founder and longtime CEO of Southwest Airlines, and this line is widely attributed to him. I haven’t been able to find definitive proof that he said or wrote it, but it seems consistent with his legacy.

 

Stow the Oars, Raise the Sails (On Leaving a CEO Role)

April 16, 2025

Sailboat by Alvin Trusty trustypics 9271643267 EDIT

A client is in the process of transitioning out as the CEO of the company he founded. He previously negotiated a sale to a corporate parent, which achieved his financial goals for the business while allowing it to continue operating independently and positioning him as a shareholder of the parent.

He's delegated managerial duties to his hand-picked successor, he's preparing to step into an executive chair role, and he's confident that this is the right move at the right time. He feels optimistic about the future of the business…and yet he's also had the nagging feeling that something was off, and a recent coaching session helped to illuminate the issue.

I suggested that Joseph Campbell's concept of the Hero's Journey might be useful in exploring his situation. Campbell was an American scholar who applied the insights of psychology to his study of mythology, folklore and religious traditions from around the world, and I find his ideas highly relevant to my work with leaders. [1]

In the Hero's Journey, also known as the monomyth because it appears so frequently in so many different cultures, we meet the hero in their ordinary existence, the "World of Common Day," as Campbell called it. The hero is "called to adventure," and if they heed the call they venture forth into a "Region of Supernatural Wonder," where they encounter various allies and adversaries in the course of a series of struggles in search of a "boon," a trophy or prize to be shared:

When the hero-quest has been accomplished…the adventurer still must return with their life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing [their prize] back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community. [2]

This led to a discussion with my client of leadership as a journey, with a destination, a goal, and a conveyance, a means of making progress along the path. As a founder and CEO, my client was an oarsman, straining hard to propel his craft forward. It was arduous work, but it had certain advantages. The destination was far in the distance over the horizon, but the compass pointed straight to it: the survival and ultimate success of the company. The goal was by no means certain to be achieved, but it was commonly understood: financial returns sufficient to meet the needs of all stakeholders.

There was another advantage to the work of an oarsman: my client's labors were clearly visible to all. Anyone with an interest in my client or the company could see that he was constantly striving and doing his best. There was never any question about his work ethic, his commitment, or his values. And yet having completed his "hero-quest" through the sale of the company, my client now found himself in uncertain territory. Retiring to a life of leisure held little appeal for him. While this may seem surprising to some, it's a common response among my clients:

We have a number of preconceived notions about what it would be like to not have to work, and they're often some form of "life as permanent vacation." That's certainly what some people do when they realize a windfall, and if it brings them joy, then good for them. But that's not what I've observed in my practice. It turns out that many people who've worked hard their entire careers have a finite capacity for being on vacation. [3]

When people like my client have achieved a degree of financial freedom, they still need to make a contribution through some form of work. But simply continuing on as an oarsman would pose inevitable difficulties. My client's successor was ready and able to take up the oars himself. He was eager to benefit from my client's guidance as executive chair, but he also wanted a degree of autonomy and independence as CEO. My client would have to determine how to add value in this new capacity without holding on to an oar. [4]

My client also has a role to play as a shareholder in the parent, but he realized that approaching it as an oarsman would be the wrong mindset. It would occupy more time and energy than necessary and distract him from the essential project of finding a new sense of purpose, a new identity. While he won't be "retired," he may elect to remain in the "World of Common Day," sharing what he learned on his quest and stepping into the role of teacher or sage. [5] Or he may find himself called to pursue another venture in the "Region of Supernatural Wonder" and embark on a new quest.

With these and other options now available to my client, he's realized that he must change how he thinks about work, which entails a change in how he thinks about himself. He's still on a journey, but not as an oarsman. It's time to stow the oars and raise the sails. The sailor doesn't just go where the breeze takes him, of course. He is an active navigator, but he must be open to possibilities, sensing and responding to the prevailing winds. Under the right conditions he can change course rapidly. And he can travel vast distances, enabling him to pursue a wider range of destinations.

And yet while this new way of thinking offers certain benefits, it also poses challenges. The sailor can make more progress than an oarsman, but the path he takes is far less predictable. The ability to change course and travel farther requires a greater tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. And while the sailor plays an active role with his hand on the tiller, his efforts aren't always visible. To the untrained eye it may look like he's just sitting there, which can be unnerving to the veteran oarsman.

But even these challenges play an important part in the process of bringing one Hero's Journey to a close and preparing for the possibility of another. Campbell notes that the hero's successful return is by no means an easy transition: "The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life." [6]

The oarsman struggles mightily against the current, but he enjoys the struggle, in part because it keeps the "banalities and noisy obscenities of life" at a distance. It can be tempting to keep them at bay by holding tightly to the oars, imagining that this remains duty of a hero. The new challenges posed by sailing remind the hero that they must adapt to their new circumstances.

 

Footnotes

[1] The Hero's Journey in Everyday Life

[2] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, page 167 (Joseph Campbell, New World Library, Third Edition, 2008)

[3] What Do You Need When You Don't Need the Money?

[4] The Ambiguous Role of Executive Chair

[5] The Warrior and the Sage

[6] Campbell, page 189.

 

Photo by Alvin Trusty.

You Don’t Have to Do All the Thinking Yourself

April 13, 2025

Thinker by Mike Dish mikedish 2306234071 EDIT 2

Most of my clients are CEOs, and many of them are founders, and they're almost invariably high-agency people who enjoy taking on responsibility and prefer to be in charge. This is consistent with research by psychologist Jerry Burger which showed that differences in the need for control have a significant impact on behavior and attitudes, and that people who score high on this scale are more likely to become leaders:

People with high desire for control were found to have a higher aspiration level, to respond to challenges with increased effort, to persist longer at difficult tasks, and to make attributions for task outcomes that facilitate future striving for achievement. [1]

This is also consistent with David McClelland's "motivational needs theory," which suggests that people are driven primarily by three distinct needs [2]:

  • The need for power, or concern "about having 'impact, control, or influence over another person, group, or the world at large.'" [3]
  • The need for affiliation, "or the need to be with people" and a concern with "establishing, maintaining, or restoring a positive affective relationship with another person or persons." [4]
  • The need for achievement, or "doing something better for its own sake, or to show [that one] is more capable of doing something." [5]

McClelland also studied people's capacity for "activity inhibition," or impulse control, and his research showed that the most successful senior leaders display 1) a relatively high need for power, 2) a relatively low need for affiliation, and 3) a high degree of impulse control, a distinctive pattern that he called "leadership motive syndrome." McClelland found that people who possessed this combination of traits were most likely to obtain senior leadership positions, ultimately outpacing those who merely had a high need for achievement. [6]

But another theme in my work is that our weaknesses are often overused strengths, a concept I first learned from my mentor and colleague Carole Robin. And while a high degree of agency and a desire to exert control can be "leadership superpowers," like all such traits they have "shadow sides." [7] One such shortcoming is a leader's perception that it's their responsibility to come up with the best ideas and solve problems on their own.

Leaders obviously have a special role to play in any problem-solving process, particularly early-stage founders whose visions for the venture may still reside largely in their heads and whose teams may lack sufficient context or expertise to act independently. But when this state of affairs persists, the leader may become a bottleneck, an unqualified decision-maker, or an outdated expert. [8] So if you're sensing that this might be a challenge for you, what can you do?

1. Look in the Mirror (and Ask for Feedback)

A starting point is assessing the extent to which your sense of agency and preference for control might be inhibiting more effective means of problem-solving. This entails being more self-aware of your impact on the people around you. [9] And note that your self-perception almost certainly includes some blind spots, so be sure to ask those people for input. In my first leadership role after business school I was lucky to have a mentor on my Board of Directors who took me aside and gave me this precise feedback. (He also advised me to address it by working with a coach, which was my first exposure to coaching.)

2. Invite Others Into the Problem (Even When They're "the Problem")

I'm not suggesting that you simply delegate problem-solving to others. They may not be ready, and you may be unhappy with the results. But in between A) deciding in isolation and telling people what to do, and B) delegating and hoping for the best, there are a range of alternatives: sell, consult, agree, advise, and inquire, to be specific. [10] I ask clients to consider how they might use one of these methods to "invite others into the problem" as a way to test their readiness and capacity.

This is possible even when other people themselves are "the problem." Another theme in my practice is the ubiquity of interpersonal conflicts between leaders and key stakeholders, from employees to investors. In you're in such a situation it's not possible to delegate the issue, but it's also not necessary for you to do all the work on your own. You can invite others to join you by being overt about your goal of improving the working relationship [11], by giving (and requesting) more candid feedback [12], and by discussing potential differences in your work styles that are likely contributing to the conflict. [13]

3. Foster a Better Problem-Solving Culture

Leadership teams vary widely with regard to their ability to problem-solve as a group, and this is one manifestation of their culture, as defined by management expert Michael Watkins:

Culture is consistent, observable patterns of behavior in organizations… Culture is [also] a social control system. Here the focus is the role of culture in promoting and reinforcing "right" thinking and behaving, and sanctioning "wrong" thinking and behaving. Key in this definition of culture is the idea of behavioral "norms" that must be upheld, and associated social sanctions that are imposed on those who don’t "stay within the lines." [14]

As the leader you don't dictate the culture, but you have a great deal of influence over it, particularly if you're a founder. So consider the following:

  • Do you have the right people in the room or on the call? Optimally your leadership team includes the most relevant and useful voices, but sometimes junior people have vital information and need to be included, and sometimes nominally senior people are just in the way and shouldn't be there.
  • Do you have the right people on the team? If there's a persistent mismatch between the composition of your leadership team and the most relevant and useful voices, that may be a sign that it's time for a change. [15]
  • Is everyone contributing constructively? Is anyone dominating (including you)? Is anyone being repeatedly interrupted or ignored? As the leader you have to be attuned to these group dynamics, because you're the person who's best-positioned to intervene and facilitate as needed. [16]
  • Do people feel free to disagree (especially with you) and to share bad news? This is what we actually mean by "psychological safety." [17]

4. Prioritize and Upgrade Your Own Reflection Time

Involving others in problem-solving doesn't mean you'll no longer engage in solo reflection. If anything, you should be able to devote your individual problem-solving time to even more meaningful and significant issues than before. But it's common for highly responsible leaders to deprioritize this time, to push it to the far corners of their calendar, or to allow it to come at the expense of personal obligations.

Here the key is recognizing that your attention is one of your organization's most precious resources, and it's up to you to be its steward. Very few others will care (or even notice) that your attention is finite, and that any time taken from solo reflection and directed toward other activities comes at a high cost. You have to be deliberate about protecting open space for this purpose [18], and creating the conditions that allow you to do your best thinking. [19]

 

Footnotes

[1] The Effects of Desire for Control on Attributions and Task Performance (Jerry Burger, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 1987)

[2] For an extensive discussion of each of these needs, see Human Motivation, Chapters 7-9 (David McClelland, 1987). Having developed his "motivational needs theory" around these three drives in the 1960s and '70s, later in his career McClelland suggested that a fourth such drive is the "avoidance motive," characterized by a fear of failure and a need to minimize anxiety and reduce distress (and discussed in Human Motivation, Chapter 10.) However, while McClelland's research on leadership identifies a relationship among the first three needs, he doesn't integrate the avoidance motive in the same way, nor is it included in most discussions of his theory, so I've omitted it here as well.

[3] Ibid, page 271. (McClelland cites a definition made by his colleague and former student David Winter: The Power Motive, 1973.)

[4] Ibid, page 347. (McClelland cites a definition made by his longtime collaborator John Atkinson with Roger Heyns and Joseph Veroff: The effect of experimental arousal of the affiliation motive on thematic apperception, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1954.)

[5] Ibid, page 229.

[6] Ibid, page 313:

"By way of contrast, those with high n Achievement peaked in their careers [earlier]. The nonlinear trend is significant. The explanation seems to lie in the fact that individuals high in n Achievement are used to doing things by themselves and for themselves… They are able to advance in the company as long as their job involves the individual contributions they make. However, at higher levels the focus on the job shifts to influencing others. The greater success of those with the leadership motive syndrome at this level can be explained on the grounds that they are interested in influencing others (the high n Power score), they are not unduly concerned about whether they are liked or not (the low n Affiliation score), and they are self controlled (the high Activity Inhibition score)."

[7] Superpowers and Shadow Sides

[8] How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More

[9] The Balcony and the Dance Floor

[10] Leadership, Decision-Making and Emotion Management

[11] Better Working Relationships

[12] How to Deliver Critical Feedback

[13] Work Style Differences

[14] What Is Organizational Culture? (Michael Watkins, Harvard Business Review, 2013)

[15] The Evolution of the Executive Team

[16] For more on group dynamics:

[17] Safety Is a Resource, Not a Destination

[18] Open Space, Deep Work, and Self-Care

[19] How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)

 

Photo by Mike Dish.

On Leadership Transitions and Public Narratives

April 5, 2025

I work with clients in open-ended engagements that typically last for several years. Either the client or I can elect to conclude our work together at any time, but I’ve found that my approach is a good fit for leaders who want a long-term thought partner. As a result, although most clients enter my practice occupying a leadership role that they expect to hold for the foreseeable future, I regularly accompany clients as they transition out of that role into a new chapter of their lives.

In some cases a client’s transition occurs in parallel with or is triggered by a business event, such as the sale of the company. Many of these situations provide a sufficient explanation for my client’s decision to leave their role. The CEO of an acquired company will likely stay on for a period of time to ensure a smooth handover, and if they leave shortly after the transaction no one wonders why. The change in the business is sufficient explanation.

But in other situations a leader’s departure will invite curiosity, and this is particularly true if the transition occurs in the absence of a corresponding business event. When this happens, anyone with a reason to care will begin to ask a series of questions. If these questions aren’t raised publicly, they will certainly be raised in private:

  • Why is the leader leaving? What does it mean?
  • Did the leader initiate the transition, or was it initiated by other stakeholders?
  • If the leader initiated the transition, do they lack faith in the business? Are they disgruntled or unhappy in some way?
  • If others initiated the transition, do they lack faith in the leader? Did the leader fall short of expectations in some way?
  • What are the implications for the future? How will the leader’s departure affect the business? How will this transition affect the leader’s career?

These questions are often problematic. The situation may be sufficiently complex that the answers are unclear, or different parties may have different answers. The answers may be embarrassing to one party or another, or the fact that there are different answers may itself be embarrassing. This can result in paralysis, with the questions hanging in the air, unresolved.

If these questions go unanswered by the leader or the company, other parties will be left to draw their own conclusions. As my colleague Carole Robin says, in the absence of data we make shit up. So in these situations what’s required is a public narrative that provides an explanation for the transition that is sufficient to answer these questions (and any number of others that may arise). Note that this narrative isn’t fictional or phony, but it is reductive. It leaves out information that may be confusing or distracting in order to emphasize specific aspects of the situation that provide a coherent explanation. In this sense a narrative is a story, and as I’ve written before,

Why is storytelling such a powerful process? Because we depend upon narratives to navigate the world–they are our compass in the wilderness, our lantern in the dark. Organizational psychologist Karl Weick called this “sensemaking”: we rely upon narratives to “make sense” of ambiguous situations and pursue a plan of action in coordination with others. But our reliance on narratives means that in the absence of a coherent story we will feel lost and ungrounded. [1]

So if you’re a leader about to embark upon a transition–or if one has been imposed upon you–what should you do? First, envision the various parties who may have an interest in your transition arrayed around you in a series of concentric circles. People in the innermost circle are there because you trust their discretion and their judgment, and their interests are fully aligned with yours. This space will accommodate a great deal of complexity and nuance, and you benefit by being as candid as possible with the people who occupy it, in part because they will be able to advise you on how to communicate with others.

As you go further out, in each subsequent circle there’s a little less trust and a more divergent set of interests. There’s less capacity to handle complexity and nuance. As a result, you’ll need adjust what you share with the people in that circle by modifying the narrative. Typically this entails reduction–leaving out certain aspects of the situation in order to emphasize others. This ultimately results in a series of narratives that explain your transition to different sets of stakeholders in terms that fit their ability and willingness to comprehend the situation and are appropriate to your relationship with them.

These narratives will get more reductive the further out you go, but it’s important that they’re all mutually consistent. They shouldn’t contradict each other, nor should they contain falsehoods. I don’t make this assertion out of naive idealism, but out of pragmatism. Contradictory narratives or those that are demonstrably false risk the loss of trust and create unnecessary complications that can usually be avoided with a modest amount of forethought.

The outermost circle is the public sphere, occupied by individuals you don’t know personally, but who for some reason have an interest in your transition. The narrative for the public sphere is generally reductive to the point of simplicity. Thus the cliché, “I want to spend more time with my family.” That’s almost always true, and it’s rarely the whole truth.

I’ll add that I often see leaders make three mistakes in this process:

They wait too long.

Leadership roles are hard to obtain, but they can be even harder to leave. Leaders tend to feel a high degree of responsibility for the business and their stakeholders, and they don’t want anyone to feel let down, misled, or betrayed by their departure. They want the narrative to reflect “good timing,” so they wait for (or try to engineer) a moment when no one will fault them for leaving. But that moment may never come, and the leader may find that the situation gets worse, not better. A theme in my practice is that sometimes there are no good options, only varying degrees of bad. The goal isn’t “success,” but “avoiding catastrophe.” I don’t advise acting with undue haste, but I do encourage clients to consider the potential costs of delay. [2]

They pretend they’re invulnerable.

I’m under no illusions about the risks to a leader of being perceived as weak or incapable. [3] But leaders in transition can also err by insisting on a narrative that rejects any hint of vulnerability and represents their career as a seamless trajectory with every move “up and to the right.” This can contribute to waiting too long as the situation worsens, but it can have other negative consequences. When a leader’s desire for a transition is being driven by a sense of fatigue or burnout, the pretense of invulnerability shuts out stakeholders who may be in a position to offer support and exacerbates the leader’s sense of isolation.

They rely on unreliable intermediaries.

I began my career as a journalist, and I’ve had many friends in the media, so I empathize with the challenges faced by people tasked with explaining events in the business world to their readers and viewers. But it’s unrealistic for a leader to rely upon journalists and other intermediaries operating in the public sphere to transmit the leader’s narrative–they will have narratives of their own. It’s also no longer necessary, as communications and PR expert Lulu Cheng Meservey makes clear:

Today, most of the planet is directly reachable by social media or email. There’s no longer a need to go through traditional gatekeepers of information and brokers of reputation–especially as their own credibility has plummeted… Going direct means crafting and telling your own story, without being dependent on intermediaries. [4]

 

For Further Reading

Handing Off to a New CEO

The Ambiguous Role of Executive Chair

The Problem with Hot-Swapping (On Exec Transitions)

Footnotes

[1] The Importance of Shared Narrative

[2] Kicking the Can Down the Road (On Hard Decisions)

[3] Cautionary Tales (Authenticity at Work)

[4] Go Direct: The Manifesto (Lulu Cheng Meservey, Flack, 2024)

9,000 Coaching Sessions (The Evolution of a Practice)

March 18, 2025

9000 by Michael Whiffen 2965180339 EDIT

Last Thursday, March 13th, I conducted the 9,000th coaching session of my career, and the milestone has prompted a look back at how my practice has evolved over the past two decades. I'm not suggesting that there's one right way to run a practice, or that anything I do should be emulated. But I've always tried to be thoughtful about what will work best for me and my clients, and perhaps these reflections will prove useful to colleagues as they experiment with their approach, or to clients who are curious about what this work looks like from a coach's point of view.

When I conducted my 8,000th coaching session in May 2024, 1:1 coaching was my only professional activity and had been since I last taught MBAs at Stanford in 2021. This was a stark contrast to my orientation when I launched my practice in 2006 under the mantle of "Executive Coaching and Change Management." At the time I envisioned that my work would be split equally between coaching individuals and various types of group engagements.

But as the years passed several factors led me to reset those expectations. My participation in Stanford's Group Facilitation Training Program that same year opened up more opportunities to work with groups at the university, including an invitation to join the first team of Leadership Coaches at the Graduate School of Business, where I'd earned my MBA in 2000. In parallel, it became more difficult to fit group engagements into the space available in my private practice.

These developments weren't accidental, but resulted from deliberate choices made in response to my evolving capabilities and skills, the fulfillment I derived from different types of work, and my growing understanding of the respective markets for these services. I was increasingly drawn toward 1:1 coaching, not only because I felt most capable and fulfilled in that work, but also because it was much more straightforward operationally. Today I regularly talk with aspiring coaches, and I encourage them to be very intentional about their business model.

Over time I concluded that I would be best served by focusing on 1:1 coaching rather than group engagements. Coaching experience compounds rapidly, given the consistency with which issues emerge in leaders' lives. The specific circumstances vary considerably, and all my clients must feel acknowledged as individuals, but I also add value simply by reassuring leaders that many of the challenges they face are quite common.

I accelerated my learning process by writing frequently, ultimately sharing more than 900 essays on coaching and related topics on this site since launching my practice. That's the equivalent of one post per week for nearly 19 years, although I usually write in productive bursts (and my pace has slowed recently, in part because I'm so busy coaching.)

My writing primarily serves two purposes: to integrate and solidify lessons distilled from multiple clients and my reading in a wide range of fields, and to create a library of content to share with current clients that augment our discussions in coaching sessions. I've never written with the expectation that anyone encountering my work would become a client, and that's proven accurate–my referrals have almost all come through word-of-mouth. Nor did I seek to monetize my writing–everything on my site has always been freely available to others under a Creative Commons license.

But this meant that I had to monetize my time, which was another reason why I focused on 1:1 coaching instead of group work in my practice. Coaching is time-efficient, particularly given my use of a flat hourly rate rather than a retainer, and less effort is required for discovery and scoping than in group work. I decided to dedicate some of that time saved to handling all of my practice's logistics, from scheduling to billing. Years ago I considered hiring an assistant as my practice grew but concluded that I preferred owning every aspect of my clients' experience. And so after a decade my practice consisted solely of 1:1 coaching engagements, and I was working with groups almost exclusively at Stanford, with occasional workshops for company founders or leadership teams.

During those initial ten years some of the most rewarding group work I did was facilitating T-groups in Interpersonal Dynamics (aka "Touchy Feely"), and I ultimately spent more than 1,500 hours in that role. One of the reasons I pursued that work so intensively was because I found it highly synergistic with 1:1 coaching. Engaging someone on a challenging topic in a T-group with 12 other people observing and joining in the interaction made the challenges in 1:1 coaching seem easier, and the coaching orientation I brought to T-groups made me a better facilitator.

My practice continued to grow during these years in part because I was honing my skills, but also because I simply said yes as often as possible. This was easier because I'm not a parent, nor did I have many obligations beyond work. My role at Stanford was sufficiently flexible that I could see clients in San Francisco in the morning or evening before or after class. I also began working virtually, holding my initial long-distance coaching sessions via phone or Skype. I assumed that this would always be a minimal part of my practice, but I found that virtual coaching was as effective as in-person, although it was a different experience.

Looking back on this period I joke that as a coach I was a "five-year overnight success," meaning that it took that amount of time to develop the critical mass of former clients who turned out to be the most fruitful source of future referrals. This became evident in 2012 when I began earning more from my private clients than from my full-time role at Stanford, seven years after I started coaching and six years after formally launching my practice.

Despite this development, I opted to stay at Stanford for a number of reasons, including my commitment to the Leadership Labs course and the Leadership Fellows program, which my colleagues and I had helped to establish in 2007. While those initiatives had proven successful, after four years the school wanted us to revamp them, and we spent 2011-12 rolling out a radically different LeadLabs course and integrating Fellows with the pre-existing Leadership Coaching & Mentoring curriculum. These efforts were daunting, but they were also highly energizing and a tremendous source of learning.

The following years also presented me with with some unique opportunities at Stanford. In 2015 I was given a chance to teach my own course, which I called The Art of Self-Coaching. In 2016 I was invited to join the Interpersonal Dynamics faculty and teach the course that I'd facilitated for a decade. And at this point I realized that the balance I'd established in my professional life was no longer tenable–I needed more time for 1:1 coaching in my practice, and that could only come by spending less time with groups at Stanford. So in 2016 I resigned from the full-time role at Stanford that kept me involved with Fellows and LeadLabs, and in 2017 I facilitated a T-group for the last time.

I enjoyed all of that work immensely, particularly the opportunity to guide Leadership Fellows as both a group facilitator and a 1:1 coach. And while each T-group is a unique entity composed of a set of unique individuals, there are a number of patterns that reliably emerge in every group. I'll always be fascinated by group dynamics, and my grounding in this topic makes me far more useful to my coaching clients, who are often seeking to help their leadership teams operate more effectively. But I felt that I had more to learn in other settings, and it was time to move on.

I settled into a new professional routine where I taught one day a week and spent the rest of my time with clients in my private practice. The Art of Self-Coaching proved sufficiently popular that I was invited to teach it in all three academic Quarters, and so in 2017 I stopped teaching Interpersonal Dynamics in order to focus on my course, but the overall balance of teaching and coaching remained the same. These years, 2016 through early 2020, were some of the most gratifying of my career, and I will always view it as a special era. The balance between coaching and teaching was very fulfilling, and although teaching consumed 20 percent of my time and provided 3 percent of my income, it still felt like a fair exchange.

What I enjoyed so much about teaching The Art of Self-Coaching was the opportunity to create the optimal environment for experiential learning, which entailed constant evolution and refinement. I'm not a brilliant lecturer, nor am I particularly gifted at the Socratic method. I am, however, a world-class experiential educator, a role whose closest analogue is perhaps circus ringmaster. The ringmaster merely entertains, of course, and while I was a lively presence in the classroom, my intent was to help my students feel at ease while inviting them to challenge themselves, to go deeper, and to learn more in the process.

I loved being in the classroom one day a week, and I loved the fact that I was able to spend the rest of my time with clients in my private practice. I gave some thought to teaching less often, just once or twice a year instead of three times, because Amy had correctly observed that I ended each Quarter feeling depleted, and my commitment to teaching required me to maintain a waitlist for my practice. So life wasn't perfect, but I was content, and I expected to spend the rest of my career in some form of that arrangement. And then the pandemic hit, and many things changed.

Because I was already conducting roughly one-third of my coaching sessions long-distance, it was relatively easy to go 100 percent virtual. I taught The Art of Self-Coaching virtually in Spring 2020, including a version that I made freely available to the public, and it was a great experience, largely because everyone was coming together to face this unprecedented threat. But I decided to drop down from teaching all three Quarters to just one, primarily because I was exhausted and overwhelmed. My clients were facing the greatest challenges of their careers, and I didn't think I could sustain my support for them while also teaching all year.

I taught virtually again in Spring 2021, and it was not a great experience, largely because I failed to adapt to the needs of students who were also exhausted and overwhelmed. So I took a year off from teaching entirely in order to assess the role I wanted it to play in my life, and in January 2023 I concluded that it was time to retire from Stanford and focus solely on my practice and 1:1 coaching. Sixteen months later I conducted my 8,000th coaching session, and at the time that orientation still seemed right. And then things changed yet again.

In addition to triggering an even sharper focus on 1:1 coaching in my practice, the pandemic led to monumental changes in my personal life. Amy and I left San Francisco, our home for 30 years, and moved to a working sheep and cattle ranch in the far northwest corner of Marin County. It was a deeply affecting experience that taught me much about the natural world, the cycle of life and death, and my evolving identity in middle age. The seclusion we enjoyed was at first simply a respite from the chaos of life under lockdown. But it also allowed me to hone my craft like never before.

I coached all day, every day. I coached more people than ever, from all over the world. I coached more sessions in a day, and more days in a year, than ever before. In 2019, teaching all year and coaching 4 days a week, I held 672 sessions with private clients. In 2020, teaching just once, I held 851 coaching sessions. In 2021, without teaching at all, I held 988 sessions. In 2022 I expanded my hours in order to work with clients in a wider range of time zones and held 1,042 sessions. In 2023 that process continued, and I held 1,132 sessions. Last year I held 1,164 sessions, and I expect to equal that figure in 2025.

In addition to opting out of teaching, working virtually, and expanding my hours, what made this increased workload feasible is that on the ranch I had very few distractions, living among a flock of sheep and a herd of cattle on 250 acres. I think coaches are well-served by living a boring life, and I practice what I preach. And for more than three-and-a-half years it was a wonderful existence, occasionally even magical.

To be sure, rural life posed many challenges, from unreliable Internet to lost sheep to downed tree limbs that trapped us on the property until I learned how to use a chainsaw. We weren't responsible for the livestock, but we were the only full-time residents, so we still had plenty of responsibilities. But Amy grew up on a farm, and I followed her lead, and with the occasional mishap we managed just fine. And yet as we approached the fourth anniversary of our time on the farm, it became clear to me that yet another season of change was upon us.

Focusing my practice on 1:1 coaching while also living on a remote ranch for four years ultimately came to feel somewhat narrow. I still loved coaching, I woke up every day eager to talk with my clients, and I knew I was doing the best work of my career. But eventually I realized that I missed the stimulation of group experiences in my personal and professional life, from walking down a busy street to leading a workshop or teaching a class.

This was one of the reasons we decided to leave the ranch in mid-2024 and move to Petaluma, the town of 60,000 people in Sonoma County that had been our primary commercial center while living in the country. And it was also why I considered expanding my practice beyond 1:1 coaching for the first time in many years and began seeking out opportunities to work with groups again.

I explored a range of options, including returning to Stanford. I reached out to a faculty member I knew for guidance, and he was decidedly ambivalent. There were reasons I might want to come back, and there were reasons I might not want to come back, and I might not be welcomed back. Amy was definitely not ambivalent–she thought it was a terrible idea.

I had to conclude that I'd been right in January 2023: "Today I'm struck by the extent to which the courses and programs that were products of the 'new curriculum' are now viewed as features of the landscape, as if they'd always been there. This is gratifying, but it also reminds me that it's time to move on before I, too, am viewed as a feature of the landscape."

I reflected on what I was trying to accomplish in working with groups again. I wanted to work with people like my coaching clients–senior leaders who feel responsible for building a culture that enables their employees to do their best work. I wanted to foster connections between individuals and to create a sense of connection among members of a group. I wanted to draw upon the Art of Self-Coaching curriculum that I'd been developing since 2009. And whatever I did had to be complementary with my existing practice.

The first initiative that came to fruition was a 6-week virtual version of my course, The Art of Self-Coaching for CEOs, which I now offer to small groups of 6 leaders. The first cohort in late 2024 was sufficiently successful that I've planned several more for this year, and Cohort #3 begins tomorrow. I'm still pursuing other efforts, including a retreat for leaders in midlife and collaborating with colleagues to coach a company's leadership team, and I'm contemplating even more, such as a program to help coaches improve how they structure engagements and manage their practices.

We're now nine months into our new lives in Petaluma, and although we miss aspects of life on the ranch–the huge sky, the endless pastures, the addle-headed flock–it's good to have neighbors again and to be able to walk downtown. I know that 1:1 coaching is my ikigai: I love it, I'm good at it, the world needs it, and, happily, I'm paid to do it. And I feel re-grounded with new forms of group work in my professional mix, although I'm increasingly mindful of the limits on my capacity and the need to preserve open space in my life.

But even as I strive to manage my boundaries, as all happy workaholics must, I find it fulfilling to be so busy and am grateful to be of service to my clients. Barring any unexpected developments, I'll conduct the 10,000th coaching session of my career in early 2026. Maybe by then I'll know what I'm doing.

 

Acknowledgments

Always: Thank you to the hundreds of clients who have entrusted me with the opportunity to play a unique role in your lives and careers. It is truly a privilege that I never take for granted. Thank you to the MBA students with whom I conducted 1,064 coaching sessions at Stanford from 2007 through 2020. I'm thankful to the GSB for bringing us together. And thank you, Amy, for your care and counsel on every step of this journey.

In the Beginning: As a student and early in my career I was blessed with some of the most gifted and caring teachers and mentors a young person could want:

Lloyd Schaefer, Millicent Rinehart, Naomi Duprat, Selby Doughty (Cumberland Valley High School), Tim Dayton (Duke), Richard Lerman (School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston), Chris Mauriello, Dagmar Herzog, Tom Simons, Mary Gluck (Brown), the late Don Flaxman, James Van Horne, Joel Peterson, Mary Ann Huckabay, Roberto Fernandez (Stanford), Jerry Fuchs, Kathy Taylor Gaubatz, Vince Stehle, Lynn Labieniec

Getting Started: A number of people played essential roles as I began exploring coaching as a potential path in 2005 and launched my practice in 2006, and I've done my best to pay it forward:

Andrea Corney, Barbara Brewer, Carole Robin, David Bradford, Dietmar Brinkmann, Erica Kisch, Evelyn Williams, Joe Murphy, Justin Sherman, Karin Scholz Grace, Kevin Martin, Lynn Labieniec, Mary Ann Huckabay, Rebecca Zucker, Ricki Frankel, Seth Goldstein, Scott Bristol, Tim Dorman, Vince Stehle

At Stanford: A host of colleagues contributed to my growth and made my work possible at the Graduate School of Business from 2007 to 2021:

Allison Rouse, Amy Kraus, Anamaria Nino-Murcia, Andrea Corney, Agnes Le, Anthony Ramsey, Barbara Brewer, Barbara Firpo, Bob Joss, Bob Sutton, Bonnie Wentworth, Bri' Godfrey, Brian Lowery, Bryan McCann, Carrie Lee, Carole Robin, Chevalisa Bruzzone, Chris McCanna, Chris Sadlak, Christopher Williams, Collins Dobbs, Courtney Payne, David Bradford, Delilah Gallardo, Dietmar Brinkmann, Dikla Carmel-Hurwitz, Domenico Anatrone, Don Hejna, Erica Peng, Evelyn Williams, Garth Saloner, Gary Dexter, Grace Yokoi, Graham Veth, Graham Weaver, Hugh Keelan, Inbal Demri Shaham, Ingrid McGovert, James VanHorne, Jamila Rufaro, Jana Basili, Jed Emerson, Jeff Pfeffer, Jimena Galfaso, Joe Murphy, Joel Peterson, John Cronkite, John Johnson, Johnnie Walton, Joy Hsu, Karin Scholz Grace, Ken Chan, Kevin Martin, Kirstin Moss, Kris Becker, Lara Tiedens, Lela Djakovic, Leslie Chin, Lily Kimbal, Ling Lam, Lisa Kay Solomon, Lisa Radloff, Lisa Schwallie, Lisa Simpson, Lisa Stefanac, Liselotte Zvacek, Lynn Santopietro, Margee Hayes, Marie Mookini, Mark Voorsanger, Mary Ann Huckaby, Melinda Tuan, Michael Terrell, Mike Hochleutner, Mindy Williams, Nancy Dam, Nirit Hazan, Nonna Kocharyan, Nora Richardson, Paul Abad, Paul Mattish, Paul Roberts, Rebecca Taylor, Rebecca Zucker, Rich Kass, Richard Francisco, Richard Haukom, Ricki Frankel, Roberto Fernandez, Sara Stone, Saraswathi Ram Mohan, Scott Bristol, Sharon Richmond, Stephanie Stevens, Sunny Sabbini, Sue Neville, Suzan Jensen, Tony Levitan, Tuquynh Tran, Ursula Kaiser, Vince Stehle, Yifat Sharabi-Levine, Zoe Dunning

My Community Today: I'm privileged to call these people colleagues and friends, and I'm deeply grateful for their encouragement and support:

Agnes Le, Anamaria Nino-Murcia, Andy Sparks, Andrea Corney, Anita Grantham, Annie Riley, Bonnie Wentworth, Brad Stulberg, Brooks Barron, Carole Robin, Cameron Yarbrough, Celine Teoh, Chip Conley, Chris Douglas, Collins Dobbs, Dan Oestreich, Dana Bilsky Asher, Doug Sundheim, Eduardo Andere, Glenn Terrell, Gwen Mellor Romans, Harry Max, Heather Corcoran, Jennifer Ouyang Altman, Jennifer Porter, Joe Dunn, John Baldoni, José Hernandez, Julia Markish, Justin Doyle, Kevin Martin, Khalid Halim, Lauren Weinstein, Lela Djakovic, Lisa Stefanac, Madelyn Sierra, Mario Fraioli, Mary Ann Huckabay, Meredith Whipple Callahan, Michael Chang Wenderoth, Michael Melcher, Michael Terrell, Moshe Ovadia, Natalie Guillen, Nikki Turner, Pam Fox Rollin, Priya Nalkur, Rebecca Zucker, Richard Hughes-Jones, Rick Winters, Rodrigo Lopez, Ronni Hendel-Giller, Scott Eblin, Stephanie Soler, Stephanie Stevens, Steve Magness, Steve Schlafman, Terra Winston, Tim Dorman, Tim Sullivan, Whitney Birdwell, Vineet Rajan

 

In memory of Roanak Desai and Erik Bengtsson, two people I was honored to know and to coach. RIP

 

Photo by Michael Whiffen.

Looking Under the Lamppost (On Problem-Solving)

January 31, 2025

Lamppost Streetlight by Abeeha Batool capturemoments-notjustphotos 9357021396 EDIT

A guy walking home one evening sees his neighbor staring at the street under a lamppost. "What are you looking for?" he asks.

"My house keys," the neighbor says. "I dropped them in the yard."

"Then why are you looking here?"

"The light's better."

That's a very old joke that comes up in my practice on a regular basis. [1] Why? Because it's how we often approach problem-solving. Rather than solve the problem that needs to be solved, we solve a problem that we want to solve.

Sometimes the problem that needs to be solved is outside our area of expertise. So we find another problem to solve, one that's under the lamppost, where the light's better.

Sometimes the problem that needs to be solved will take a long time to solve, and we want to feel "productive." So we find a whole bunch of little problems to solve that we can check off our to-do list.

Sometimes the problem that needs to be solved may truly be insoluble, and we're scared of trying and failing and looking foolish. So we find an easier problem to solve, one that will burnish our image and our ego.

These are all very understandable responses. Solving hard problems isn't merely an intellectual exercise, and sometimes we simply don't have what it takes to grope around in the dark, flailing endlessly, and occasionally having to admit defeat. But when we routinely limit ourselves to simple, small and solvable problems, we never develop the capacity to do anything else. Our comfort zones only grow when we get outside them.

This doesn't mean we should view ourselves harshly, without compassion. The fortitude to confront the problems that need to be solved can be derived from many sources, but it's more readily accessible when we invest in self-care practices that put us in the right state of mind and body. [2] Even then, we may lack confidence in our ability to solve these problems, but as I've noted before, "Confidence is a calculation of the odds of success. Courage is a calculation that the cost of not trying is higher than the cost of failing." [3]

And that latter calculation is far easier to make when we accept that our efforts to solve hard problems will often fail. This doesn't mean that we should be blasé or cavalier about failure. But when we view such failures as learning opportunities–"the ruling out of possibilities," in Peter Attia's phrase [4]–we realize that it's actually riskier to keep looking under the lamppost, where the light is, and the solutions to meaningful problems will only be found out there, in the dark.

 

Footnote

[1] Apparently this joke was a staple of American newspapers starting in the 1920s.

[2] Investments, Not Indulgences

[3] Courage Isn't Confidence

[4] The Ruling Out of Possibilities

For Further Reading

The Traps We Set for Ourselves

The Obstacle Is the Way

Learning from Sisyphus

 

Photo by Abeeha Batool.

A Reading List for Leaders in a Crisis

January 10, 2025

Danger by AppleDave 2668423965 EDIT

1. Responding to the Crisis

How Leaders Overcome Adversity

Engage others in shared meaning. Find your distinct and compelling voice. Put your integrity and values into practice. Grasp the context of the crisis. Tap into your hardiness.

From Peacetime to Wartime

Determination. Persistence. Calm. We need these qualities in our wartime leaders because they must act decisively and with conviction, mobilizing those around them to work together under conditions of great uncertainty while avoiding panic.

When Leaders Break Glass

The leader who never breaks glass runs the risk of missing out on narrow windows of opportunity and being overtaken by fast-moving threats. Sensing when to break glass and learning how to do so with the right amount of force are essential leadership skills.

Compasses and Weathervanes (30 Questions for Leaders)

The question isn't "What kind of leader should I be?" but rather "What kind of leadership is called for at this moment–and am I capable of summoning it?"

2. Supporting Others

Talking with Colleagues About Suffering

A theme in my practice is the leader who's aware or senses that a colleague is suffering and would like to offer support but is unsure how to broach the topic. If you're in this situation, here are some suggestions.

Viktor Frankl on the Meaning of Suffering

Frankl is not denying the grief and rage that spring from suffering and tragedy. He's not "making the best of things." He's not blithely suggesting that "everything happens for a reason." He is encouraging us to acknowledge our grief and rage, and also to see our suffering as an experience in which it is possible to find meaning.

Mourning Ends, Grief Need Not

There's a difference between mourning and grief. Mourning ends, because we have to return to the world, but grief need not, and we can return to our grieving to honor our feeling and our memories of the person we lost at any time.

3. Managing Yourself

How to Fight a Fire (Self-Coaching in a Crisis)

Some situations truly test a leader’s ability to self-coach, to manage themselves effectively while also guiding others. Here are four factors that have helped clients who’ve had to surmount a crisis.

Taking the Leap (Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty)

Rather than minimizing risk and avoiding uncertainty, we’re better served by more effectively managing the emotions that these qualities trigger. To be clear, managing emotions doesn’t mean suppressing them. Efforts to ignore our feelings or pretend that they don’t exist aren’t sustainable over time (and may even exacerbate the very emotions that are causing us difficulty).

The Importance of Slowing Down

The impulse to hurry should often be interpreted as a signal to slow down.

4. On Coping

Pockets of Agency

Even–and especially–as we feel a loss of control in the world at large, we can strive to create "pockets of agency," smaller settings within our lives in which we can "cause or control the movement."

Aggression, Panic, Paralysis, Denial

Some people are moving assertively to win competitions or bolster their status. Some people are overwhelmed by fear. Some people are unable to take necessary action. Some people are acting as though everything will be "back to normal" soon.

Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy

Why does this matter? Because many people aren't moving up the ladder, they're moving down.

The Legitimacy of Loss

People are failing to grieve their losses. In some cases this may simply be a form of denial, but in many others I suspect that people believe that their losses are somehow illegitimate because they are lesser, and that grieving their losses would be unseemly or inappropriate when so many have suffered far worse.

5. Learning from a Crisis

Some Crises Build Character. Others Reveal It.

Something bad happened, and there was a crisis. There are still many risks, and the situation could yet turn worse, but at the moment, catastrophe has been averted. If approached correctly, this can be a fruitful learning experience for you and the people around you. It may seem too early to learn from the crisis, but don't wait too long.

Double-Loop Learning

Double-loop learning occurs when we expand the analytical frame to explicitly identify and then challenge any underlying assumptions that support our stated goals, values and strategies.

6. Other Resources I Recommend

Ten Things To Keep In Mind During A Crisis (Anamaria Nino-Murcia, 2022)

Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others (Laura van Dernoot Lipsky with Connie Burk, 2009)

Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (Peter Levine with Ann Frederick, 1997)

In An Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness (Peter Levine, 2010)

 

Photo by AppleDave.

When Leaders Break Glass

November 20, 2024

Break Glass by Nancy McClure aperte 948080386 EDIT

We've seen it countless times on fire alarms and panic buttons: Break glass in case of emergency. (The example above is from a San Francisco BART station.) It's a fitting figure of speech for a theme in my practice: When a client feels that their company's established processes are too slow or that employees are addressing a situation with insufficient urgency, they "break glass" and intervene to bypass those processes, generate the requisite urgency, and ensure that the issue is resolved now.

The leader who never breaks glass runs the risk of missing out on narrow windows of opportunity and being overtaken by fast-moving threats. Sensing when to break glass and learning how to do so with the right amount of force are essential leadership skills. But the leader who breaks glass incessantly at the first sign of delay causes other problems.

Such knee-jerk reactivity can affect the company's culture and infrastructure. As I've noted before, "[Leaders] generally have a bias for action, and when they’re faced with a system that seems to be slowing things down, they simply ignore it. This can be a great strength–but it can also be a crucial weakness, particularly when a leader’s reflexive disregard for systems prevents their healthy evolution in the organization at large." [1]

It can also affect employees' sense of responsibility and motivation: "When a leader repeatedly continues to intervene…as an organization grows…people are taught that this is the leader’s job, not theirs, and they fail to develop their own crisis-management and problem-solving abilities… Ultimately even the most intrepid employees can feel demotivated when the leader is always there to 'rescue' them." [2]

So if you're a leader facing this dilemma, what can you do? How do you know when to break glass and when to let a scenario play out? There's no single solution, but there are some practices that can help you find the right balance.

Know Your Tendencies

Most leaders I've worked with tend toward one end of the spectrum or the other. Founders and other early-stage leaders often break glass without a moment's hesitation. Many new ventures are essentially ongoing exercises in glass-breaking, and that attracts a certain personality type.

There are also many leaders who resist breaking glass or find it very difficult. Their training, formative experiences and past successes have taught them to build and rely upon orderly systems. This approach lends itself well to any number of enterprises–often large-scale or highly regulated–which also attract a certain personality type.

The challenge is that companies are dynamic entities, and leaders must be able to adapt their style to suit changing circumstances. As I've written before, "the fluidity and ambiguity that foster creative problem-solving in an early stage startup will feel like chaotic dysfunction at a later point in the company’s development." [3] And the smooth-running corporate machine will run itself right into a ditch if leadership is unable to interrupt established procedures and change course when necessary.

Knowing your tendencies is insufficient on its own, but in the absence of that self-awareness you'll likely stay in your comfort zone, do what's familiar,  and miss opportunities to adapt.

Regulate Your Emotions

Despite the popular conception of emotion as an impediment to rational thought, decades of neuroscience research has made it clear that it's a vital input to the reasoning process. [4] Even so, as the eminent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has written, and as we all know from personal experience, "uncontrolled or misdirected emotion can be a major source of irrational behavior [and] seemingly normal reason can be disturbed by subtle biases rooted in emotion." [5]

The most relevant emotion in this context is anxiety. It's typically some form of anxiety that either drives a leader to break glass too often or prevents them from doing so when it would be useful. I'm not suggesting that you should discount or ignore your anxiety. Emotion's primary function is to alert us to potential opportunities and threats, and if we lacked the capacity for anxiety we would be in grave danger. [6]

But emotions are data, and like all data they're comprised of both signal and noise. Emotion regulation isn't suppression–that's just pretending that you're not feeling what you're feeling. In contrast, regulation involves assessing what you're feeling and putting it in perspective in order to discern the meaningful signal in the midst of all the distracting noise. In this context, this requires you to sense, comprehend, articulate and express your anxiety in ways that enable you to make a deliberate decision about whether–and how–to break glass. [7]

Learn From Every Situation

Becoming more effective at breaking glass–and knowing when not to–isn't just a matter of advance preparation. It also entails looking back at each situation in order to learn from it. You observed a potentially troubling delay, and you either intervened and disrupted established processes, or you refrained from taking action and let things play out. What happened?

You have to assess not only the benefits of your choice, but also the costs, and here it's important to take others' perspective into account. A theme in my practice is the leader who breaks glass repeatedly and achieves the desired result in a given situation, but over time their employees become demotivated or disaffected. I'm not suggesting that you should feel obligated to tread lightly and avoid giving offense. That will cause you to hesitate at moments when you should act decisively. But there are inevitably costs to breaking glass, and they're not always obvious.

Key factors in this process are a degree of rigor in your analysis, feedback from other stakeholders, and an ongoing effort to hone your intuition. Rigor isn't rigidity, and it may be sufficient to simply ensure that you have regular time for reflection in your calendar. [8] To provide a little more structure, consider keeping a decision journal to track your results. [9]

Soliciting feedback from stakeholders doesn't mean that they get to determine whether your choice was the right one. But in the absence of input from others, you're left with your own perceptions of success or failure, and we reliably deceive ourselves under certain circumstances. [10]

Any given decision to break glass or not will be an intuitive one, made on the basis of imperfect information and dependent on subtle cues, both internal and environmental. If the choice is obvious, it will usually be made by someone more junior than you who's closer to the problem. Intuition isn't some mystical quality–it's merely pattern recognition occurring on the margins of consciousness, as noted by economist and psychologist Herbert Simon:

The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition. [11]

Your task is to ensure that the accuracy of your intuitive judgments improve over time, resulting in fewer false positives–when you broke glass and the costs outweighed the benefits–as well as fewer false negatives–when you failed to break glass but should have.

 

Footnotes

[1] How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[5] Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, page 52 (Antonio Damasio, 1994)

[6] "It is clear that emotion should not be very susceptible to willful control. If we could turn off all our emotions, feel no pain, never laugh, not be gripped by fear or despair, stop being excited, and so on, we could easily end up dead… The priority of emotions over will is important for our survival because it allows our plans to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality." (White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control, page 123, Daniel Wegner, 2nd edition, 1994)

[7] The Tyranny of Feelings

[8] How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)

[9] Shane Parrish of Farnam Street offers a useful set of decision-making resources:

[10] When Heuristics Go Bad (On Cognitive Biases)

[11] What is an "Explanation" of Behavior? (Herbert Simon, Psychological Science, 1992)

 

Photo by Nancy McClure.

Everyone’s the Hero in the Movie of Their Life

November 8, 2024

Joker and Batman by Brecht Bug 14365592824 EDIT

Much of my work as a coach involves helping clients deal with "people problems." The CEO with an overbearing investor who's full of unhelpful advice. The investor with an egotistical CEO who never listens. The CEO with a defensive executive who calls any oversight "micromanagement." The executive with a distrustful CEO who can't give up control.

In any situation like this it's important to bear in mind that everyone's the hero in the movie of their life. This is true for my clients, and it's true for the people who are causing their problems. It's true for me, and I'm willing to bet that it's true for you. It's true for almost every single person we encounter.

When we're frustrated with someone and unhappy with their behavior, or when we feel thwarted by someone and view them as an obstacle, it's remarkably easy to characterize them as a villain. We imagine that they're intentionally working at cross-purposes to us, and that their primary aim is to prevent us from achieving ours. They're not trying to build anything–they just want to tear us down. There may be some truth to such perceptions, but they rarely encompass the full truth.

Sociopaths exist, but the lifetime prevalence of antisocial personality disorder is estimated at 1 to 4 percent, and most of those people are in prison. [1] It's extraordinarily unlikely that we'll ever interact with an actual villain in day-to-day business life. I've been a coach since 2006, and I've conducted over 9,000 coaching sessions [2], and in all that time only a single client had an antagonist whose behavior was sufficiently irrational and destructive to raise the possibility of sociopathy.

It's true that there are countless zero-sum scenarios in life where there will be few winners and many losers, and the resulting pressure causes people to act selfishly and aggressively. But when we find ourselves in such a contest, it's useful to remember that our rivals and and competitors aren't villains, at least not in their own minds. From their perspective they're the heroes, fighting the good fight, and we may be their villainous adversaries.

So what's happening here, why does it matter, and what can we do about it? Humans are reliably subject to an illusion described by theologian Eric Springsted, drawing upon the work of philosopher Simone Weil: "The illusion is that it appears to us as if we were at the center of the world. We thus appear as terrifically important, and what else is of value can be ranked by its proximity to us." [3]

And as I've written before, "We can readily grasp why evolution has selected for the center of the world illusion–viewing ourselves from this perspective, we typically put our subjective needs and desires above those of others, making our own biological success more likely." [4] It's a short step from there to villainizing others while valorizing ourselves, and thus we are all the heroes in the movie of our life.

This mental model confers some benefits in a competitive environment, but it also carries a number of costs. When we view others' intentions as malevolent and their behavior as hostile, we protect ourselves against potential villains, but we also make it less likely that a mutually beneficial outcome will be achieved. We turn every contest into a zero-sum scenario, often needlessly. We forego the possibility of collegial relationships, even with rivals. And we keep ourselves in a perpetual state of hyper-vigilance and distrust, undermining our own quality of life.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we naively assume good intentions or leave ourselves vulnerable to bad actors. My former Stanford colleague Jeff Pfeffer describes a student of his who did just that and came to regret it:

"Why did you do that?" I inquire. "Because," she responds, "I have been taught to build relationships of authenticity and trust at work." When I ask how her efforts went, she comments that of course they didn’t work at all, because her peer was not interested in "repairing a relationship" or behaving with trust and authenticity; he was interested in taking over her team for his own advantage–a not uncommon situation. [5]

But there's a world of difference between allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of and viewing all competitors and rivals as villains. We can protect our interests and work toward our goals in a competitive environment while viewing other parties realistically and dispassionately. Some of them will turn out to be untrustworthy, overly aggressive, even predatory, and we'll need to respond appropriately. But almost all of them will believe that they're the hero, and it will serve us well to bear this in mind.

We craft stories to explain others' behavior, and there's always some missing data left out of our narratives. Further, we take action on the basis of theories and beliefs which rest upon our interpretations of a selective data set, and at each stage of this "ladder of inference" errors may creep into our thinking. Slowing down to consider what data we might be missing or misinterpreting allows us to take a broader view of the situation and act with deliberation, not reflexively. None of this precludes the possibility that we may find ourselves in a hostile conflict. As I've written before,

Sometimes fights have a way of finding us, and sometimes angry people show up uninvited and refuse to leave, and sometimes the circumstances simply dictate a zero-sum struggle. And if we're unable to de-escalate the conflict, unable to find a win-win solution, and unable to turn adversaries into allies, then a successful outcome may depend on our ability to step into the conflict and make effective use of our anger. [6]

 

Footnotes

[1] Despite the rarity of antisocial personality disorder among the general population, it's estimated that 60 percent of male prisoners have this condition. For more on this topic, see the following:

[2] See 9,000 Coaching Sessions (The Evolution of a Practice) from March 2025 or 8,000 Coaching Sessions from May 2024.

[3] "Will and Order: The Moral Self in Augustine's De Libero Arbitrio," page 92 (Eric Springsted, Augustinian Studies, Volume 29, Issue 2, 1998). This essay is also available as a chapter in Springsted's The Act of Faith: Christian Faith and the Moral Self (2015).

[4] We're Not the Center of the World (But We Think We Are)

[5] Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, pages 42-43 (Jeff Pfeffer, 2015)

[6] The Value of a Good Fight

For Further Reading

The Importance of Missing Data

Racing Up the Ladder of Inference

The Importance of Slowing Down

 

Photo by Brecht Bug.

Guidelines for Better Virtual Events

October 7, 2024

Virtual Events by David Fulmer daveynin 49818982567 EDIT

We've optimized our space and equipment for virtual work.

We're on time, ready to go, in the right frame of mind. This may entail leaving a prior event early to take a break and avoid going back-to-back.

We keep our cameras on and ensure that we're well-lit. Facial expressions convey meaningful data that's important to share.

We keep our microphone on and don't mute ourselves. Laughter, murmurs, sighs, gasps and other sounds are also meaningful data worth sharing.

We wear headphones or ensure that we're in a private space where the conversation won't be overheard by others.

We turn off all other applications and notifications to ensure that we're not interrupted and our attention remains focused on the conversation.

We don't multi-task. Our phones are out of sight for the duration of the conversation.

We don't use chat or text to hold sidebar conversations with other participants. With the exception of breakout rooms, all communication is equally available to all participants.

We strive to find the balance between leaving space for others to complete a thought, and interrupting to express ourselves in the moment.

 

Thanks to Lisa Stefanac for her insights derived from teaching Interpersonal Dynamics virtually at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Photo by David Fulmer.

The Antidote to “Manager Mode” is Actual Management

September 2, 2024

Steering Wheels

This is not the solution.

Management as a concept seems to have fallen into disrepute. In a recent essay Paul Graham described "manager mode" as the unpalatable alternative to "founder mode." But what is Graham really criticizing? He recounts a talk given by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky:

The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He followed this advice and the results were disastrous…

The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.

Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground. [1]

So Graham isn't criticizing actual management. He's criticizing the absence of management, which is an issue I've observed in my practice for years and wrote about in 2022:

It's possible for a less-experienced CEO to get in the way of their senior leaders–but more typically I see the opposite problem. The CEO gives their executives a great deal of space, only to find several months or quarters later that they backed off too far, and some important objectives were neglected and fell into the gap. [2]

Why does this happen? Why do otherwise capable CEOs fail to provide sufficient oversight to senior leaders? And why is Graham's critique of "manager mode" resonating with so many people? In large part because the historic critique of management practices–a decades-old phenomenon, not a recent one–has been so badly misunderstood and so poorly implemented that many leaders are now so fearful of being called a "micromanager" that they fail to provide sufficient management at all.

The concept of "micromanagement" is associated with the work of MIT professor Douglas McGregor, a mid-20th century pioneer in the application of behavioral science to the challenges of organizational life. [3] McGregor offered a compelling critique of the conventional approach to management, which he dubbed "Theory X." He noted that Theory X manifests in both a "hard" version that extracts employee compliance through coercion and threats, and a "soft" version that renders employees pliable by catering to their desires for comfort and security.

While we associate "hard Theory X" with the early industrial era, and it remains common in certain sectors and parts of the world, today we encounter "soft Theory X" almost everywhere in the information economy. But both hard and soft Theory X are rooted in a shared view of human nature: that people are "indolent…lack ambition, dislike responsibility [and] prefer to be led" and therefore must be "persuaded, rewarded, punished [and] controlled" in order to give best effort in pursuit of organizational goals. [4]

McGregor's alternative, Theory Y, takes as its starting point an entirely different set of assumptions about people and their capabilities:

People are not by nature passive or resistant to organizational needs. They have become so as a result of experience in organizations.

The motivation, the potential for development, the capacity for assuming responsibility, the readiness to direct behavior toward organizational goals are all present in people. Management does not put them there. It is a responsibility of management to make it possible for people to recognize and develop these human characteristics for themselves.

The essential task of management is to arrange organizational conditions and methods of operation so that people can achieve their own goals best by directing their own efforts toward organizational objectives.

This is a process primarily of creating opportunities, releasing potential, removing obstacles, encouraging growth, providing guidance. It is what Peter Drucker has called "management by objectives" in contrast to "management by control."

And I hasten to add that it does not involve the abdication of management, the absence of leadership, the lowering of standards, or the other characteristics usually associated with the "soft" approach under Theory X. [5, my emphasis]

It should be obvious that putting these Theory Y principles into practice isn't easy. Finding ways to confront and overcome this difficulty is one of the central themes in my work with clients and in my writing on this site. But compounding the problem is that McGregor's complex and nuanced ideas have been dumbed down to mean "Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs," which often results in "the abdication of management [and] the absence of leadership"–precisely the outcomes that McGregor sought to avoid.

There's a noteworthy and relevant parallel here with the work of Amy Edmondson, whose research has highlighted the importance of psychological safety in organizational life. Sadly, this concept has been misinterpreted to mean, "No one's feelings can get hurt," when it really means "No one should be punished for speaking up and sharing bad news." What has resulted are organizational cultures in which leaders are fearful of being direct and walk on eggshells to avoid giving offense, which are actually psychologically unsafe environments. [6]

So what can we do? First, let's rehabilitate the concept of management. While excessive direction and control on the part of leadership is unlikely to yield the best results from highly-skilled knowledge workers, those workers still need to be managed. They need leaders who are actively involved in the process of determining 1) who will do what by when, 2) to a certain standard of quality, 3) with regular check-ins to assess progress, 4) and the ability to intervene and change course when necessary. That's not "micromanagement"–that's just management.

And yet let's not over-correct in the process. Graham doesn't offer much detail in his definition of "founder mode," other than endorsing engagement with a wide range of employees beyond the leader's direct reports. But he does offer a warning, in his final footnote:

I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use founder mode as the excuse. [7]

At certain stages in a company's life, the leader must be intensely involved in the most minute details of every aspect of its operations. Some issues will remain under the leader's close scrutiny indefinitely, while others will come and go depending on the context, and the cultivation of the ability to know the difference is an essential leadership skill.

But just as McGregor and Edmondson's ideas have been misunderstood and misconstrued, I fear that Graham's concept of "founder mode" will be misinterpreted as both an excuse and an obligation for leaders to operate this way well beyond the point of diminishing returns, contributing not to excellence, but to under-performance and personal overwhelm. I want to free leaders from the fear of being called a "micromanager" when they're simply providing the necessary elements of management. But I also want leadership to be a sustainable calling, not a ticket to burnout. [8]

 

This is a companion piece to the following:

Footnotes

[1] Founder Mode (Paul Graham, 2024)

[2] Mind the Gap (On Leading Senior Executives)

[3] In The Micromanagement Disease: Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Cure (Public Personnel Management, 2010), Richard White makes a connection between McGregor's work on Theory X and the subsequent emergence of the term "micromanagement." White cites the Oxford English Dictionary's attribution of the first usage of "micromanagement" to a 1975 article in The Economist, but I haven't been able to verify this.

[4] "The Human Side of Enterprise," page 6 (Douglas McGregor, Leadership and Motivation, 1966). This essay is McGregor's best-known and most influential work–it originated as a speech on the Fifth Anniversary of the School of Industrial Management at MIT (later known as the Sloan School) in 1957, and was published in the American Management Association's Management Review in November of that year. It subsequently formed the basis of his 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise. My citations here are from a posthumous collection of McGregor's work issued by MIT two years after his death to commemorate his contributions.

[5] Ibid, pages 15-16.

[6] Safety Is a Resource, Not a Destination

[7] Graham, 2024.

[8] For more on leadership and sustained excellence:

 

Photo via TomEatonSA.

Why Your Bonus Plan Isn’t Working

August 4, 2024

Hundreds by pictures-of-money 17121925920 EDIT

A major theme in my practice is executive compensation. Like all other professionals, my clients are seeking to obtain a fair return in exchange for their services, and they’re also leaders who must offer competitive compensation to attract and retain top talent. In some conversations, we’ll focus on a client’s own financial requirements, and in others we’ll address the needs of one or more employees, or the company’s overall approach to compensation

I don’t provide comparable datasets or detailed guidelines for compensation plans, although I can refer my clients to people who do. [1] Instead, when working with clients on their individual compensation I’m generally helping them think about their overarching goals as well as their immediate negotiation strategy. [2] And when working with clients on employee compensation, my role is to help them consider the organizational implications of any particular choices they might make.

In the latter case, we often wrestle with the issue of bonuses. Economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes the various forms bonuses can take:

Advance inducements to make some major commitments (e.g. enlistment in the army), after-the-fact lump-sum rewards (e.g. veteran’s bonuses, retirement bonuses), discretionary rewards by employers (e.g. Christmas bonuses), payments tied to extraordinary individual achievements (e.g. overfulfilling sales quotas, landing a big account, inventions that become company property), payments tied to collective performance (e.g. shares of company profits, group productivity rewards), and more. [3]

Typically my clients hope to use a bonus to motivate and reward behavior that will lead to “extraordinary individual achievement” or yield improved “collective performance,” although for a bonus to achieve these goals a set of conditions must be met. And a problem I often see in my practice is a bonus that’s offered in the absence of one or more of these conditions, which renders it far less effective as a motivator and yields frustration on the part of employees, management, or both. Why does this happen, and if you’re a leader in this situation, what can you do about it?

A Lack of Clarity or Control

The desired behavior must be sufficiently distinct from ordinary activity, and employees must have a degree of control over the intended outcome. The desired behavior need not be novel or innovative–it may simply entail “do more of what’s already working.” It’s also not necessarily the case that management must provide explicit guidelines or instructions–that’s rarely feasible with highly-skilled knowledge workers. But employees must grasp that something different is being asked of them, even if it’s up to them to determine how to proceed.

Should employees accept that challenge, they must also feel a sense of agency in the process. There has to be a connection between their expenditure of effort and the achievement of the goal. This doesn’t mean that employees need to have total control over the outcome or that exogenous factors can’t ever get in the way. But the more control they enjoy, the more effective the bonus as a source of motivation. And below a certain level of control, any bonus plan will likely be viewed as unfair and demotivating.

The Wrong Risk Profile

Employees must be comfortable with the concept of variable compensation, and optimally they prefer this to a fixed salary. Everyone’s comfort level with risk varies, and this risk profile can play a significant role in our career choices. People with a relatively high tolerance for risk gravitate toward fields that offer variable payouts, largely because they’re attracted by the potential upside, but in some cases because they find the uncertainty itself stimulating. They’re gamblers, in a sense, and they like to bet on themselves.

This risk profile is common among the entrepreneurs and investors who comprise the majority of my clients, but it can be found in most market-facing fields, particularly sales. (And most of my clients must sell in one way or another, from closing deals to raising funds.) But many people are uncomfortable with risk, and their caution may be heightened when it comes to financial matters. They’re less interested in upside potential and more intent on downside protection.

A bonus is of interest to this latter group to the extent that it’s merely additive on top of already sufficient compensation–so it may not really serve leadership’s goals at all. This isn’t to say that bonuses never work outside of sales or similar roles. But the overall organizational culture must foster an appetite for risk, even in conventionally risk-averse functions.

Hedonic Adaptation and Loss Aversion

The bonus must be viewed as a quid pro quo for the desired behavior, not an expected function of employment. But a challenge is that we readily adapt to improved conditions and soon come to take them for granted, a process known as “hedonic adaptation.” [4] Even if the above conditions are satisfied, when a bonus is paid out repeatedly it may well come to be expected by employees.

It can help to maintain a clear delineation between base and variable compensation, although even then it’s likely that at least some employees will come to view the bonus as a given. When that occurs, the absence of a bonus in the future will cause even greater unhappiness, the result of “loss aversion,” our propensity to weight perceived losses more heavily than equal gains. [5]

There isn’t really a “solution” to these states, which are deeply rooted in human psychology. But it’s important to be aware that they generate continuous upward pressure on ambitious employees’ financial expectations, and leaders who fail to prepare for this eventuality are engaged in magical thinking. [6]

On Currencies

Even as I work with clients to help them optimize their compensation plans, I believe it’s essential to bear in mind the work of the great 20th century psychologist Frederick Herzberg, who provided a sharp critique of conventional approaches to motivating employees, which he referred to as “kicks in the ass” or KITA. These kicks aren’t only negative, in the form of criticism or threats–they can also be positive, in the form of desirable rewards:

Let us consider motivation. If I say to you, “Do this for me or the company, and in return I will give you a reward, an incentive, more status, a promotion, all the quid pro quos that exist in the industrial organization,” am I motivating you? The overwhelming opinion I receive from management people is, “Yes, this is motivation.” I have a year-old schnauzer. When it was a small puppy and I wanted it to move, I kicked it in the rear and it moved. Now that I have finished its obedience training, I hold up a dog biscuit when I want the schnauzer to move. In this instance, who is motivated–I or the dog? The dog wants the biscuit, but it is I who want it to move. Again, I am the one who is motivated, and the dog is the one who moves. In this instance all I did was apply KITA frontally; I exerted a pull instead of a push. When industry wishes to use such positive KITAs, it has available an incredible number and variety of dog biscuits (jelly beans for humans) to wave in front of employees to get them to jump. [7]

As I’ve written before,

Herzberg is exaggerating for comic effect here–I don’t think he ever kicked his dog. But his larger point holds: rewards like dog biscuits and jelly beans may result in movement, but that’s not the same thing as motivation. This doesn’t mean rewards are irrelevant as incentives, but a key in deploying them effectively is understanding that there are two different types of motivation, intrinsic (deriving from the work itself) and extrinsic (deriving from by-products of the work or aspects of the environment in which work occurs). [8]

Bonuses and other forms of compensation are extrinsic motivators, which Herzberg called “hygiene factors.” His research indicates that inadequate compensation causes tremendous job dissatisfaction, but above a certain amount (which varies for everyone), additional compensation doesn’t yield greater satisfaction. I’m not suggesting that bonuses never work–that’s obviously not the case. But should you find that your bonus plan is failing to deliver the desired results even in the presence of the conditions described above, it may be worth considering what other “currencies” your employees value that you may be failing to provide. [9]

 

Footnotes

[1] For more detailed guidance, I recommend these experts on executive compensation:

[2] Culture, Compensation and Negotiation

[3] A Humbler Bonus (Viviana Zelizer, The Huffington Post, 2009)

[4] For more on hedonic adaptation:

[5] For more on loss aversion:

[6] The Traps We Set for Ourselves

[7] One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees? (Frederick Herzberg, Harvard Business Review, originally published 1968, republished 2003)

[8] Currencies (On Motivating Different People)

[9] Ibid.

 

Photo by pictures-of-money.

The Ambiguous Role of Executive Chair

July 28, 2024

Direction Signs by Kyle Taylor kyletaylor 2399310532 EDIT

According to Spencer Stuart, the outgoing CEO becomes the Board's Executive Chair in over 40 percent of S&P 500 CEO transitions, and I've worked with several clients who followed this path. [1] In these cases everyone agreed in principle that the company would benefit from the continuity afforded by having the former CEO take on this special role, but what this meant in practice was often highly ambiguous.

A degree of ambiguity is inevitable. Any standardized "job description" for such a specialized role will fail to meet a given company's unique needs. (This is also often true for Chief Operating Officers, another role that varies widely from one organization to another. [2]) But too much ambiguity makes it difficult for the parties involved to understand what it will take for this new arrangement to work.

This can pose a particular challenge for the Executive Chair and the incoming CEO. The Chair may have played a large role in recruiting and selecting their successor, and if so it's likely that both parties said the right things about their future working relationship and were reluctant to jeopardize the deal by asking too many inconvenient questions. As a result sometimes very little is spelled out with any specificity before the Chair and CEO must begin working together, which can easily lead to misunderstandings.

I don't believe there are best practices that an Executive Chair must follow in order to succeed, but here are a set of questions that a new Chair and an incoming CEO can explore to arrive at a shared definition of success:

The Executive Chair and the CEO

  • What expectations do you both have for this relationship?
  • How clearly have those expectations been articulated?
  • How often will you communicate, and on what issues?
  • What decisions does the Chair expect to be consulted on?
  • How does the CEO (really) feel about this?
  • What decisions does the CEO expect to make autonomously?
  • How does the Chair (really) feel about this?
  • What will happen when you disagree?
  • How will any disagreements be resolved?
  • What role will the Chair play in assessing the CEO's performance?
  • If necessary, how open are you to working jointly with a coach?

The Executive Chair and the Board

  • What role will the Chair play during Board meetings?
  • Will they facilitate or have any other special responsibilities?
  • How does the CEO (really) feel about this?
  • What role will the Chair play in between meetings?
  • Will they hold one-on-ones with other Directors?
  • If so, is this an option or an obligation?
  • And how does the CEO (really) feel about this?

The Executive Chair and the Business

  • What ongoing responsibilities (if any) will the Chair have?
  • How much autonomy will they have to conduct these duties?
  • How accessible will the Chair be to other parties, such as investors, analysts, or the media?
  • What role will they play in those settings?
  • To what extent will they be empowered to speak for the company?
  • And how does the CEO (really) feel about this?

 

Footnotes

[1] 2023 CEO Transitions (Spencer Stuart, 2024)

[2] The Mythical COO

 

Photo by Kyle Taylor.

My Appearance with Ryan Hawk on the Learning Leader

July 27, 2024

Learning-Leader-Podcast

On May 1st I conducted the 8,000th coaching session of my career, and my post on lessons learned came to the attention of Ryan Hawk, who’s been hosting the Learning Leader podcast for over 9 years. Ryan invited me to join him for Episode 592, and we discussed topics ranging from coaching and leadership to the elements of effective feedback.

Recorded June 6, 2024. Published July 21, 2024.

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