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The Great Lie: Why Teams Don’t Exist in Business

August 17, 2026/2 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Shared goals are anathema in business. The ultimate individual sport: raises, rankings, promotions, every person for themselves.

Today’s post is by Larry Coval, author of the forthcoming book Misled: Why (Almost) Everything You Learned About Leadership Is Wrong and How to Fix It (Girl Friday Productions, September 2026).

I remember thinking how wrong he was. My boss had just finished an emotionally charged speech about how the team (him, me, my peers) could achieve the bigger goal. “Come on, team! We can do this if we all pull together!” So we’re clear, the bigger goal was his sales target for the quarter. Whether he made or missed his goal had no impact on us. We were all paid on our own performance against individual, quantifiable objectives.

There was a corporate-wide contest for the top 20 salespeople and I was determined to be among that group. Deep down, because we were competing for cash awards, I was kind of hoping that my “teammates” didn’t outperform me. I actually hoped they had some struggles, making my path to the top a bit easier.

Now, I generally liked my peers. But calling us a team? That was not the case at all. In fact, it couldn’t have been further from the truth. And everyone knew it.

Unfortunately, our boss always led that way. Team goals, team development, team performance. As a result, he never gave us any individualized coaching, development or career planning, so it should come as no surprise that people on his “team” struggled, some more than others. His ‘rah rah’ motivational speeches had zero impact on our performance. His egregious error was mischaracterizing what our collective really was. We were more like independent contractors than a team. A group of people who just happened to report to the same person and shared a Wi-Fi password.

So what actually makes a team a team? First, you must have a common goal. For instance, when your local fire department is called to go tackle a house fire, they have one goal. Put out the fire as quickly as possible with minimal loss of life and property. Nothing competes with it. Nothing distracts from it. Simple, clear, unifying. Try finding that kind of clarity in a Tuesday staff meeting.

Another defining characteristic of a team is the interdependency of the work and how each role must be performed successfully so that the other roles can do the same. The best examples of that come from sports. In football, each play has players in distinct roles performing unique functions and, for that play to be successful, each must execute their function adroitly. Even one player’s failure to do what is expected of them, run the wrong route, block the wrong player, deliver the ball late, can cause catastrophe. That’s interdependency. And it’s also another workplace fairy tale. A story leaders tell so you’ll see their goals as though they’re your own.

Maybe the most difficult thing about real teams to replicate in business is the idea of personal sacrifice for the greater good. My brain always goes to the men and women who wear the uniforms of our armed forces. Specifically, those specialized units like SEALs, Rangers, Delta Force. These people go on the most dangerous missions in the most daunting circumstances, and each one of them is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to ensure the mission’s success.

These distinctive things that we attribute exclusively to teams weren’t present in any of the business environments that I was exposed to. In almost four decades working at several companies in different roles and levels, I never saw it.

Shared goals are anathema in business. The ultimate individual sport: raises, rankings, promotions, every person for themselves. Interdependency? My success never depended on anyone else’s. It depended on me. Personal sacrifice for a common goal never came up. Not once. Not in a single meeting I ever sat in.

Just admit it. TEAMS DON’T EXIST IN BUSINESS.

And yet, everyone keeps saying we work in teams. It’s deception. Worse still, all the popular business leadership books have been written about teams. Their wisdom, their dysfunctions. The same goes for coaching programs, keynotes, and everything else the Leadership Industrial Complex has been selling for the last 30 years. Using the wrong unit of analysis has only set leaders up for failure.

So, it’s no wonder that the current state of the global workplace is so disheartening. And it certainly helps explain why the workplace survey data is as damning as it is. Gallup’s most recent data puts the global cost of disengagement at $10 trillion. DDI found only 29% of employees trust their manager. It’s because we’ve been taught to broadly lead the collective instead of focusing on each individual, enabling them to reach their performance ceiling. Yes, it’s more difficult. Yes, it means seeing each group member for who they are and what they can accomplish. And yes, it requires a reset on what makes a capable, effective leader. But it also has the benefit of being the right way to lead.

Leaders who coach and develop individuals well don’t get people quietly competing in a vacuum. Their people push each other’s performance bar higher, and real collaboration surfaces exactly when it’s needed, not because they’re told to be. That’s not a team. It’s something sturdier, and far more productive.

But the authors and keynote carnies know that style sells better than substance. So, it’s easy to see why the romanticized idea of ‘teams’ drowns out the fact that we actually work in groups. The word “team” evokes visions of the ‘Miracle on Ice’ or a ‘Band of Brothers (and Sisters).’ Saying “Go Team!” sounds better than “Go Group!” The word “team” just feels better. And even though they know it’s wrong, the Leadership Industrial Complex continues to sell emotionally theatrical words and platitudes instead of the hard, gritty words and skills that business leaders need in the modern workplace.

So maybe “group” doesn’t roll off the tongue like the other word or conjure up visions of your high school sports glory days. So what? When we use the right words and do the right things for our people, they’re significantly more successful. And so is the group. As leaders, what’s more important than that?

Larry Coval is a veteran executive with nearly four decades of experience leading organizations ranging from startups to billion-dollar operations across companies including AT&T, Global Crossing, and Cox Business. Throughout his career, he has transformed underperforming organizations, developed high-performing leaders, and built a reputation for challenging conventional leadership wisdom. He is the author of the forthcoming book Misled: Why (Almost) Everything You Learned About Leadership Is Wrong and How to Fix It (Girl Friday Productions, September 2026).

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The High Cost of Leaving Workplace Culture to Chance

August 10, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Communications, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Leaders often believe culture changes because of a new mission statement, a kickoff meeting, or a refreshed list of values. Those moments create awareness. Culture is shaped by what happens next.

Today’s post is by Natalie Johnson, co-author of Leading the Culture Journey: Elevating Everyday Actions to Create Extraordinary Workplaces.

Organizations don’t begin paying for a neglected culture when people leave. They’ve been paying all along. Most leaders recognize turnover as the most obvious cost of a struggling workplace culture. By the time talented employees resign, organizations have often been paying hidden costs for months or even years. They simply haven’t connected those costs to culture yet. The irony is that every organization already has a culture. The question is whether it was created intentionally or accidentally.

Culture is not a mission statement, a set of values on the wall, or an annual engagement survey. Culture is the way people relate with each other. It is reflected in everyday conversations, meetings, decisions, feedback, accountability, and the interactions that shape how work feels. Like an iceberg, turnover is only the visible top. Beneath the surface are the hidden costs organizations pay every day through the quality of the relationships between the people who stay.

The Hidden Costs of Accidental Culture

Turnover is often the first noticeable signal that something is wrong. Research from MIT Sloan found that workplace culture is a stronger predictor of employee attrition than compensation. Employees are often willing to leave higher-paying jobs if the everyday experience of work consistently diminishes their energy, relationships, or sense of belonging. By the time organizations begin calculating the financial cost of turnover, they have already absorbed months or years of declining trust, collaboration, and engagement.

Disengagement

Long before people leave, many stop fully participating. They contribute less discretionary effort. They stop sharing ideas. They avoid difficult conversations. They remain quiet during meetings because speaking up no longer feels worthwhile. Gallup estimates that low employee engagement costs the economy $8.9 trillion each year. Gallup also estimates that actively disengaged employees cost organizations roughly 18% of their annual salary in lost productivity.

These losses rarely appear as a line item on a financial statement, but behaviors are experienced every day through slower execution, reduced initiative, lower productivity, and missed opportunities.

Relationships

Every one of these costs points back to the same source. Relationships. Organizations frequently describe people as their greatest asset. A more accurate statement is that the relationships between those people are the organization’s greatest asset. Healthy relationships create trust, strengthen accountability, accelerate learning, improve collaboration, and make adaptation possible. When relationships become strained, every business outcome becomes more difficult to achieve.

3 Ways to Change the Patterns

The encouraging news is that culture isn’t mysterious, and it can be intentionally designed. And it doesn’t begin with another engagement survey, a company-wide kickoff, or a refreshed list of organizational values. It begins with everyday behavior.

1. One practical place to start is by translating organizational values into observable behaviors. Many organizations say they value trust, collaboration, accountability, or innovation, but employees are left to interpret what those words mean. When values remain abstract, they cannot be coached, reinforced, or measured. Instead, define values in behavioral terms.If trust is a value, does trust mean admitting mistakes quickly instead of hiding them. Giving honest feedback with care? Asking for help? Assuming positive intent before jumping to conclusions?

2. If collaboration is a value, does collaboration mean inviting input before making decisions that affect others? Sharing information proactively? Building on ideas instead of competing with them?

3. Once values become observable behaviors, they become teachable and measurable. The next step is consistency. Values shape behaviors. Repeated behaviors become group norms. Group norms become culture. Every team develops norms, whether intentionally or accidentally. People learn what is expected by watching the people around them. Who speaks during meetings? Who remains silent? Are questions encouraged or discouraged? Are mistakes treated as opportunities to learn or reasons to assign blame? These everyday patterns become “the way things are done around here.” Changing culture means intentionally reinforcing the behaviors that represent the desired culture until they become the team’s new normal.

Leaders often believe culture changes because of a new mission statement, a kickoff meeting, or a refreshed list of values. Those moments create awareness. Culture is shaped by what happens next.

The meeting. The feedback. The difficult conversation. The recognition. The apology. Every interaction either reinforces the culture you want or strengthens the accidental culture you never intended to create. The opportunity isn’t simply to reduce turnover or improve engagement. It is to intentionally create a workplace where people trust one another, contribute fully, learn continuously, adapt confidently, and perform at their best.

Natalie Johnson is a cofounder of Vidl Work. She oversees business development, partnerships, strategy, and innovation while working with clients on keynotes, consulting, training and coaching. With more than 30 years of experience in human performance, resilience and leadership, she brings a deeply practical and human-centered approach to culture change. Natalie holds a master’s degree in Wellness Promotion and is an industry recognized Performance Coach sought-after keynote speaker, Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator and Wellcoaches® Certified Coach. Her first book, Leading the Culture Journey: Elevating Everyday Actions to Create Extraordinary Workplaces, with Vidl Work co-founder Rebecca Johnson, will be released August 4.

Create a Generational Business for Your Family

August 3, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Terry Conway shares his advice for operating a generational business.

Today’s post is by Terry Conway, author of Business is Simple: From A Family Cottage Business to World Processing and Markets.

I’ve always admired generational companies. There is a certain bond among the family shareholders; they pull together to preserve family values. Family shareholders have a certain enthusiasm about caring for their enterprise and seem determined to continue its success. In a word, they are proud. I thought to myself, “If ever own a business, it will focus on longevity.” Before that dream day comes, I need to figure out what it takes to make a generational company work.

Whenever an opportunity existed, I asked, “How did your family make it work for generations? What problems were overcome? What advice do you have?” Proven leaders had won the battle for generations. Their advice was pragmatic with clear dos and don’ts.

The ownership did come, and on the first day I assembled my curious associates. My presentation was short – I’m all about trust as the cornerstone of everything we will do, and our overriding principle is longevity. I’m in it for the long haul. There will be no shortcuts. We will be the best no matter how long it takes!

Now was the time to make a generational plan work.

1. Protect against estate tax shock

One advisor had some strong words. “Why let your life’s work be gobbled up by onerous estate taxes? There is no guarantee that your family will have the funds to pay estate taxes. Without planning a sale will be inevitable and could result in just a few dollars left over for the family. You must make plans now before your enterprise gets too valuable. Procrastinating could evaporate most of what you’ve worked for.

My tax advisor suggested a variety of plans including gifting non-voting shares to so called “100-year irrevocable trusts” where the estate tax would not become due until existing generations has passed on, approximately 100 years, and keep the percentage of voting shares low as they would be subject to estate tax. There were other suggestions such gift programs, preferred stock, and life insurance.

2. Restrict ownership to family bloodlines

Every generational owner emphatically gave me the same advice – whatever you do “restrict ownership exclusively to the bloodlines of the original owners.” Bloodlines in this context means limit stock ownership and subsequent sales to direct decedents of the founding generation. No wives or husbands of direct descendants. No family members outside the bloodlines who had become company executives. No adopted family members. No exceptions.

That policy seemed harsh at first. The advice was “you’ve got to protect yourself.” Divorces and poor performing executives outside the bloodlines can create costly and unusually long delays to resolve. Price per share is almost always in contention when the board seeks an involuntary buyback from shareholders outside the bloodlines. “A divorce brought our company to the brink of bankruptcy,” one owner told me.

3. Focus on business first

“Business first” is the battle that must be won every day. One saying I heard was, “When business is first there’s enough for all family shareholders; when the business is not first there is never enough for any shareholder.” It did not make sense at first until I understood that some families have long-term financial needs. Who decides the necessity for some and not others? My solution was a shareholder redemption plan, subject to board and lender approvals, that allows for redemptions in exchange for dilution of ownership.

I noted that every generational change needs a well-regarded leader to operate the business as a professional enterprise, keep the family focused on business first, and balance family needs with a board approved dividend program. The board, as part of its responsibility for succession planning, needs to develop such leaders.

4. Governance

To keep “business first,” I started with a combination of outside board and family members, including an all-important compensation committee. I kept hearing that directors prefer small boards because they want a chance to engage in meaningful discussions with management and family owners. “Limit your board to five members with two insiders who are working in the business and three outsiders.” Another advisor added, “I like outside directors to be active or retired CEOs with experience in your industry. They have the best perspective.”

5. Share the vision

How does a multi-generational vacation or family camp fit into a company’s longevity plan? It provides a relaxed environment that fosters communication among stockholders in a fun-filled environment, develops more interest in the progress and prosperity of the family enterprise, and, most importantly, builds relationships of trust that every family and family company will need someday.

6. Plan early

Early planning provides a generational enterprise with a better chance of working. Later, it may not be the best option for the family to continue, but it’s an option that may be the best choice.

Looking back after 25 years

The early plans worked out. We’re still enjoying the benefits of a generational company.

Terry Conway acquired sole ownership of Handy Seafood in 1981 and built the small cottage business into a prominent multinational brand with sales reaching $60 million in 2024. He has been Executive Chairman since 2016, when he transferred voting control to his five adult children. He lives in Salisbury, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore with his wife of 63 years. Since his recent retirement, he is Executive Consultant to the Board. For more information, please visit www.terryconway-bis.com.

The Importance of Paid Leave

July 27, 2026/0 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Trevor Jones

Learn the benefits of paid leave and how men and women can create a more equitable workplace together.

Today’s post is by W. Brad Johnson, PhD and David G. Smith, PhD, co-authors of FAIR SHARE: How Men and Women Can Create a More Equitable Workplace Together (HBR Press, June 30, 2026).

From World War II through the end of the twentieth century, the workplace was increasingly composed of women. Labor force participation rates for women peaked at the end of 1999 at 60.2 percent. By the end of 2024, women’s labor force participation was slightly lower at 57.3 percent, while the participation rate for men was 67.9 percent. Since the mid-twentieth century, changing attitudes about gender roles—including the acceptability of women working outside the home, increased levels of education for women, and technology-facilitated changes in the demands and skills required in the workplace—there has been compelling economic motivation for both women and men to engage in the workforce.

With more women and mothers in the workforce, we would expect a rebalancing of unpaid work at home, especially caregiving. However, in dual-earner couples and even those where women earn more than their husbands, women are doing two more hours of caregiving and three to four more hours of housework each week than their partners. The proverbial “second shift” lives on.

Here’s the good news: when fathers have equal access and take paternity leave for durations similar to mothers’, women are more likely to stay in the workforce and their earnings increase faster. And leave-taking fathers are more likely to retain shared childcare responsibilities and increase their housework—long after paid leave ends—which can indirectly improve mothers’ employment outcomes. The personal, relational, child development, economic, workplace, and societal impact of gender equality in paid leave is far-reaching and presents an incredible opportunity. When fathers have paid leave access and use all of it, there is a systemic economic impact on women’s earnings and careers, family budgets, business profitability, and national productivity.

So, how are we doing when it comes to gender-fair paid leave? Currently, only one country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), among thirty members, doesn’t offer any statutory paid family leave; you guessed it, it is the United States (one of only six countries globally without national paid leave). In 2024 there were thirteen US states with paid parental leave, and outside these states, roughly 27 percent of employees had access to paid parental leave through their employer. Across OECD countries, the average paid paternity leave is 2.3 weeks, average paid maternity leave is 18.5 weeks, and average paid parental leave is thirty-nine weeks (parental leave in many OECD countries is the total combined amount of leave available to the mother and father). In the United States, women have access to an average of ten weeks of maternity leave and fathers, a paltry single week of leave. Because maternity leave is typically inclusive of the medical leave mothers need to recover from childbirth, it reinforces the need for fathers to be present for the baby’s and the mother’s care. The inequality doesn’t end with access to paid leave. While mothers in the United States report taking a median eleven weeks of leave, most fathers take a week or less, and 70 percent are back at work within two weeks. As Dawn Huckelbridge, director of Paid Leave for All, notes, “Paid leave isn’t a women’s issue, it’s not a social issue, this is an economic imperative. And it impacts men.”

Parental, maternity, and paternity leaves are a focus of much of the advocacy and policy work for caregivers as they support long-standing research on infant and maternal health. However, the supply of informal caregivers—unpaid individuals who care for family and friends—is shrinking, even as demand continues to grow due to an aging population and the increasing rates of chronic illness. This widening gap is driven by societal shifts such as more women participating in the workforce, lower birth rates, and families living farther apart. Roughly 45 percent of men and 56 percent of women identify as informal caregivers, and the top reasons reported for not doing more informal caregiving were financial strains and not being able to take time off from work. Generous caregiving leave is vital to the health and vitality of society and requires the commitment of organizational leaders.

Communicate the Benefits of Paid Leave for Fathers and Families

Inclusive leaders dedicated to a gender-fair workplace must become informed evangelists for the evidence-based benefits of equitable and generous caregiving leave. Although the health and wellness benefits of paid leave for mothers are well established, fathers who use longer periods of parental leave also experience positive and transformative outcomes. Fathers who identify more closely with being involved parents and partners take a more equitable role performing unpaid domestic labor, which has a positive impact on women’s participation in the labor force, wages and careers, and the family’s overall wellness.

Equal paid parental leave is the secret to creating real gender equity at work and at home. The following efforts are a few ways leaders can voice the benefits and opportunities to men in their organization.

Leverage Paid Leave for the Transition to Fatherhood

Parental leave helps expecting and new fathers transition to this crucial role. Ben Reyes, lawyer at Blank Rome LLP, shared that when taking his parental leave, his wife was ramping down from her five months of maternity leave. He used that time to transition their daughter away from breastfeeding to bottle feeding, developing new habits, and sleep training, so that they could have her ready for daycare at six months old. Reyes said, “My leave paved the way to do that. It was crucial to our family dynamic and plan.” Co-parenting with an infant while managing two careers helps dads develop planning skills and builds a foundation for full engagement in decision-making, and equitable distribution of domestic responsibilities moving forward.

Developing caregiver competence and confidence is another salient benefit facilitated by generous caregiving leave for men. Mothers connect to the child over the first few months, bonding and learning to understand the child’s needs in a way that creates caregiver competence and confidence. Brad Harrington, formerly at the Boston College Center for Work & Family, told us that “if the father never has solo time with children, that caregiver skill set won’t develop, casting mother and father into traditional gender roles and exacerbating career and wage plateauing for mothers due to longer caregiver career interruptions.”

Fathers who take extended parental leave share more fairly in solo care of children and care of sick kids, spend more time on domestic labor over the long term, and have a stronger sense of ownership and competency for parenting than fathers who do not take extended parental leave. The impact of men taking paid leave in the first year has positive ripple effects across children’s lives. And fathers’ proficiency at home during the first year equates to more time and flexibility for women to focus on their careers over time.

Talk with Men About Positive Health Benefits

Leverage the compelling research on health outcomes to motivate men to take all their paid leave. One of our favorite strands of research addresses the buffering effects of paternal paid leave on risks to their partners’ mental and physical health. When fathers take leave and lean in as full caregiving partners at home, mothers have better mental health trajectories, including greater overall well-being, lower stress, and fewer symptoms of depression. One study found that when fathers take parental leave, their partners were less vulnerable to postpartum depression and reported fewer parenting struggles. And the health outcomes don’t stop with mothers; there’s a lot in this for fathers taking paid parental leave too, including greater overall well-being, and lower stress and fatigue.

How about mapping caregiving leave and gender-fair parenting to better brain health? To better understand the research, we turned to one of the leading researchers in developmental psychology, Darby Saxbe at the University of Southern California, who said, “There’s evidence that father’s brains remodel from preconception across pregnancy and into the postpartum period in a way that supports greater efficiency in parts of the brain that are linked with social cognition and accurately imagining other people’s mental states. And there’s evidence that those areas are tied to stronger bonding with their baby.”

The benefits of paid leave extend to relationships with partners and children. Fathers who use paid leave reported improved relationships with their partners, an experience reciprocated by partners who report that the increased support maps to a stronger partner bond rooted in shared parenting during leave. There’s even evidence that this improved relationship connected to shared caregiving leave correlates to couples staying married longer. And don’t forget the opportunity for closer relationships with children. Caregiving time with children in their early years allows fathers to nurture a lasting bond with their kids. In one study on father-child relationships, paternity leave-taking was associated with children reporting higher parent involvement, father-child closeness, and better parental communication. Increased time for caregiving leave creates an opportunity to experience daily activities with children in those critical early months and years that echo in stronger father-child bonds years later.

Show Men How Leave-Taking Provides an Economic Boost

We love the health and relationship outcomes of parental leave, but let’s get back to the dollars and cents of paid leave within families. Nothing does more to reduce the family gender wage gap than paid parental leave. When fathers take on more unpaid work at home, enabling mothers to return to work and more rapidly, mothers’ wages improve. Research shows that for every month of parental leave a father takes, his partner’s income increases by almost 7 percent. In fact, paternity leave has a larger effect on mothers’ future earnings than maternity leave.

Paid parental leave for fathers improves household income as well as general family financial well-being. And when men share in taking caregiving leave, we see the maternal wall (aka, motherhood penalty) come tumbling down. When both parents utilize paid parental leave, it allows both partners to remain engaged at work and minimizes gender disparities in career progression.

The most gender-fair and forward-leaning employers are even creating positive indirect impact on employees’ partners. In our conversation with Molly Moon Neitzel of Molly Moon Homemade Ice Cream, she shared that the company has conversations with employees about Washington state’s paid family leave for men and women when they have a child, including how it will save their family money on childcare if the baby’s father also takes his full twelve weeks of leave. Moon Neitzel said, “This is a financial equation that benefits our employees. I hope there are a lot of men motivated to take parental leave because they’re partnered with an employee of our company, though not necessarily working for us.” We find this to be a terrific example of a company using its influence for the good of its employees.

Adaptation from FAIR SHARE: How Men and Women Can Create a More Equitable Workplace Together (HBR Press, June 30, 2026). by W. Brad Johnson PhD and David G. Smith PhD. Johnson and Smith are the cofounders of Workplace Allies where they consult, research, write, and speak around the globe on the topics of allyship, cross-gender workplace relationships, and inclusive leadership. They are the coauthors of Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women (2019) and Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace (2020).

The Hidden Cost of Stress: How It Undermines Your Leadership Authority

July 20, 2026/0 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Business Toolkit, Communications, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Trevor Jones

Stress does more than wear on leaders, it undermines them. What the research on nonverbal cues reveals about trust, and how to close the gap.

Today’s post is by Don Gregori, author of The Emergent Leader: A Guide to Brand Building, Leadership, and Self-Mastery.

The quarter was rough. I was just about to get in front of the team for a town hall, and some bad news was dropped in my lap. It threw me off my game. Business can be tough. I knew we would get through it. At the moment I was internalizing the stress and distracted by thinking of ways to lead through the challenge. As I spoke to the team my voice flattened. I was less animated, and the audience could sense a disconnect between how I was feeling and what I was saying. I could tell they weren’t buying it. I wasn’t lying to that room. I was stressed, and stress had changed the meaning in the words that I was saying.

Researchers who study non-verbal behavior under pressure have a name for that. It’s called the “flat affect.” Bergun and Kopper describe it as a pattern that shows reduced facial expressions, and speech that loses its dynamism and goes monotone. Interestingly, from a distance it looks like composure. Up close it reads as rigidity and detachment.

This isn’t about style and entertainment. What leaders should focus on is that people trust the non-verbal signal over the verbal one. Keep in mind that upward of 80% of our communication comes through non-verbal signals. People judge inconsistency between message and delivery as a sign of untrustworthiness, regardless of whether the words themselves are true. Unfortunately, we don’t get judged on what we meant or the words alone.

Researchers at Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence found that people calibrate to their manager’s mood within about seven minutes of interaction. They are unaware that they are even doing so. A leader’s emotional state shapes the performance and creativity of their team, not just their immediate mood. I didn’t simply lose credibility with the team at that town hall. Whatever confidence drained out of that meeting was carried back to other teams and perhaps to clients by people who had no idea they were carrying it. I unintentionally gifted them my stress.

I was standing in the gap between the quarter I’d expected and the reality of what was delivered. That gap is where the stress was really coming from. The distance between the two is where the anxiety lives. We set the expectation and as such, we are, quite literally, the primary source of our own suffering. That gap is wider right now for a lot of us than it used to be. Nobody can say with real confidence what skills will matter in eighteen months, what AI will and won’t touch, or what the market looks like two quarters out. Projecting certainty we don’t actually have is exactly the kind of incongruence our team can sense.

Two things would have served me better that day. First, narrowing the beam. Instead of trying to sound composed about a far-off uncertain future, I should have been specific about what we controlled and what we could have done right now. Certainty about the next ninety days beats vague confidence about the next year, every time. The second thing I could have done was to speak about the uncertainty out loud. Naming our fears takes some of the power away from them. The vulnerability that would have been demonstrated in that statement would have built so much more trust with the teams. It would have closed the gap between the message and the delivery that the room was picking up on.

If I could take that stage today, I’d throw away the artificial composure. I’d level with the room and say, “Sometimes business is hard. Sometimes work is a four-letter word. These tough times will pass, and when we come together to get through them. The satisfaction we will get on the other end will be so much sweeter. Let’s dive into what we can do right now.”

A stressed, rigid version of myself could have never delivered that message convincingly. Authenticity beats an artificially perfect veneer every time.

Don Gregori is COO of First Factory, Inc. and author of The Emergent Leader: A Guide to Brand Building, Leadership, and Self-Mastery (Torchflame Books). He writes and speaks on leadership, resilience, and building companies made to last. Find more about Don and his book at emergentleader.co and https://www.linkedin.com/in/emergentleader/

Seven Steps Toward Confident Communication

July 14, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Communications, Guest Blogger, Training /by Trevor Jones

Seven practical steps to become a more confident presenter through preparation, mindset, body language, and storytelling techniques anyone can apply.

Today’s post is by Andy Freed, author of Lead Like The Boss.

There are a handful of conferences I attend every year, and over time I’ve seen every kind of presenter imaginable.

Some speakers are true subject matter experts, yet they struggle to communicate their expertise effectively. Their presentations feel strained, the audience disengages, and the message gets lost. I’ve even seen evaluation comments that read something like, “Don’t put someone on stage who clearly hates being there.”

Then there’s the opposite extreme. The people who seem to command the room the moment they walk on stage. They appear relaxed, confident, and completely at ease. We often describe them as “naturals.”

But is that really the difference?

I think that’s a bit of a cop out. It suggests that strong communication is something you’re born with rather than something you can develop. It gives struggling presenters permission to say, “I’m just not a natural speaker,” instead of focusing on getting better.

The reality is much more encouraging. Most confident communicators aren’t relying on talent alone. They’re applying a set of habits and techniques that anyone can learn.

Here are seven that can make a meaningful difference.

First, remember that a great presentation starts long before you take the stage.

Before you open PowerPoint or create a single slide, think about your audience. One of the most useful frameworks I’ve encountered is the “Think, Feel, Do” model. Grab a blank sheet of paper and write down what you want your audience to think, how you want them to feel, and what you want them to do after hearing you speak.

That simple exercise shifts your mindset from focusing on your performance to focusing on your audience’s experience. After all, success isn’t measured by how you think you did. It’s measured by what your audience takes away.

Second, pay attention to your opening.

NFL teams often script the first several plays of a game, especially when they have a young quarterback. It helps establish rhythm and settle nerves.

The same principle applies to presenting. When you know exactly how you’re going to begin, and you’ve practiced it repeatedly, you remove uncertainty from the moment when anxiety tends to be highest. A strong opening builds confidence and creates momentum.

Third, be intentional about your breathing and pace.

When people get nervous, they almost always speed up. The result is a presentation that’s harder to follow and more exhausting to deliver.

Slow down.

A deliberate pace helps your audience absorb the information. Just as importantly, it helps you maintain steady breathing and manage your energy throughout the presentation.

Fourth, lead with your main point and avoid unnecessary qualifiers.

Confident communicators don’t spend ten minutes circling their recommendation. They state it clearly.

Compare these two approaches:

“There are a lot of factors to consider.”

“This is what I recommend.”

One creates clarity. The other creates uncertainty.

The same principle applies to language. Phrases like “I think maybe,” “I’m no expert, but,” or “This might be a crazy idea…” undermine your credibility before you’ve even made your point. If you don’t sound confident in your message, your audience won’t be confident in it either.

Fifth, be intentional with your body language.

I’ve watched countless presenters spend an entire presentation staring at their confidence monitor, their notes, or the slides behind them, rarely making eye contact with the audience.

Communication is not just verbal.

Make eye contact. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. Use purposeful gestures rather than nervous movements. These small adjustments influence how your audience perceives you, and they often influence how you feel as well.

Sixth, don’t be afraid of silence.

Many presenters treat silence like the enemy and rush to fill every second with words.

That’s a mistake.

A brief pause after an important statement allows the audience to absorb what you’ve said. It also gives you a moment to reset, collect your thoughts, and maintain control of the room.

Used well, silence conveys confidence and authority.

Finally, there is no substitute for preparation.

Practice your presentation out loud. Listen for phrases that feel awkward or unnatural. Refine them until they sound like you.

For example, I occasionally present to medical audiences. There’s a particular medical term that I consistently struggle to pronounce correctly. Rather than fighting it every time, I simply use a different phrase that communicates the same idea.

I only know that because I’ve practiced.

Today, every one of us carries a high-definition video recorder in our pocket. Record yourself. Watch the playback. Identify opportunities to improve. Then practice again.

It won’t be perfect the first time, and that’s fine. Improvement comes from repetition.

Some presenters undoubtedly have a natural gift for communication. For them, many of these habits may come easily.

For the rest of us, confidence is built, not born.

The good news is that there’s a roadmap. Follow it consistently, put in the work, and you’ll become a stronger communicator than you are today.

See you on stage.

I’ll be the bald guy sitting in the back watching you master the room.

Andy Freed is a leadership speaker, author of Lead Like The Boss, and Chairman and former CEO of Virtual, Inc., where he focuses on helping leaders communicate with clarity and impact.

When Responsibility Is the Mask Fear Wears

July 6, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Project Management, Training /by Trevor Jones

Fear in leadership rarely looks like fear. It looks like responsibility, caring, and high standards. Here is how to tell the difference before it costs you.

Today’s post is by Erika Alessandrini, author of Maybe It’s Me: Looking Inward to Create Real Change Through Conscious Choices (Amplify Publishing, 2026).

It didn’t look like fear.

It looked like a leader who cared. Someone who stayed late, caught the details others missed, and never let a ball drop. From the outside, it looked like excellence. From the inside, it felt like the only way to make sure things went right.

That feeling – the urgent pull to step in, to take over, to handle it – rarely announces itself as fear. It arrives dressed as responsibility. As caring. As high standards. It sounds like “someone has to do this” and “I can do it better” and “it’s faster if I just take care of it myself.” It feels like competence. It feels like investment. It feels, honestly, like leadership.

But underneath those reasonable-sounding thoughts is something else entirely.

Fear doesn’t make you careless. It makes you controlling.

Not controlling in the obvious sense – not domineering or demanding. Controlling in the quieter sense: reaching for certainty when uncertainty feels unbearable. Narrowing the space when the space feels too open. Taking on more because letting go feels like a risk you can’t afford. Control – or the illusion of it – is what provides the security fear is craving in those moments. It works, too. Just not for long, and not without cost.

The problem is that fear wearing the costume of responsibility is nearly impossible to detect from the inside. You’re not lying to yourself. You genuinely believe you’re helping. You genuinely believe the stakes require your involvement. And you may even be right – in the moment. But the moment is not the whole story.

Here is what accumulates over time when fear has been running the show dressed as leadership: the team that stops bringing you problems because they already know you’ll solve them. The colleague who defers to you not because they trust your judgment but because they’ve learned that resistance costs more than it’s worth. The relationships that look functional and feel hollow. The leader who appears indispensable and is, slowly, becoming a ceiling for everyone around them.

The cost isn’t always loud. It doesn’t arrive as a crisis. It arrives as a quiet contraction – in the people around you, and eventually in you. And because it accumulates slowly, it’s nearly impossible to calculate in real time. You don’t see it coming. You just wake up one day and something has broken – a job, a marriage, your health – and you’re left trying to trace it back to a pattern that never felt like a problem because it always felt like leadership.

Here is what this is not: a case for doing less, caring less, or lowering your standards. The goal isn’t to step back. It’s to carry exactly what’s yours – no more, no less – and allow others to do the same. One hundred percent responsibility. Not ninety, where you’ve checked out. Not one hundred and fifty, where you’ve absorbed what belongs to someone else. Just yours. Cleanly, clearly, fully yours. And theirs, fully theirs.

That distinction matters because it changes what leadership feels like from the inside. Not lighter in a diminished way. Lighter in the way that comes from finally setting down what was never yours to carry.

So what do you do with this?

You don’t need a new system. You need a single question, asked honestly, in the moment before you step in.

Is what I’m about to do creating capacity in someone else – or dependency on me?

Capacity looks like someone growing, deciding, struggling productively, learning what they’re made of. Dependency looks like someone waiting for you to tell them what to do next. Both can feel like help. Only one of them actually is.

That question won’t always give you a clean answer. But it will slow you down long enough to tell the difference between a choice made from genuine leadership and a choice made because fear handed you a to-do list and called it responsibility.

Erika Alessandrini is the author of Maybe It’s Me: Looking Inward to Create Real Change Through Conscious Choices (Amplify Publishing, 2026). Her work helps leaders find peace and greater satisfaction without losing their edge. Learn more at erikaalessandrini.com.

The Psychology of Authenticity

June 30, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Communications, Guest Blogger, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

Whenever you’re developing your brand, navigating public relations crises, tweaking your marketing, or guiding your product team to better infuse authenticity into your products, walk through each step of TRUTH to ensure it comes off as authentic.

Today’s post is by Colin Hodge, author of OUTRAGEOUS STARTUP GROWTH: Uncovering the Secrets of User Psychology to Scale Your Business (Wiley, April 13, 2026).

Authenticity is a crazy powerful attribute, whether personally or professionally. We humans are wired to recognize when someone is being authentic—or be on guard if something seems off. It’s so ingrained in our biology that we often cannot explain why someone or something feels inauthentic. It’s the super-fast, pattern-matching part of our brains using thousands of past experiences combined with reading subtle body language and tone of voice, then making a split-second verdict if someone or some object seems genuine.

One of the grandfathers of behavioral psychology, Daniel Kahneman, refers to this part of our thinking as “System 1.” This system is usually responsible for how we feel about new things that we encounter: our “knee-jerk reactions” and “gut feelings.” That includes our initial reactions to products that we encounter, including their names, logos, slogans, and user interfaces. If everything feels like it fits together, from the problem we think that the product is addressing to the brand elements, then it usually feels “authentic” to us. If something feels obscured, sugarcoated, or otherwise incongruent with the problem it’s addressing or the brand elements, it feels inauthentic.

To our brain’s System 1, situations that are transparent, consistent, and congruent among its elements get the stamp of approval for trustworthiness and affinity. This system of thinking, the “thinking fast” part of Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, is incredibly quick at pattern-matching, spotting minute differences, and generating rapid assessments using those heuristics. Although quite impressive, these assessments are influenced by a number of biases.

Compared to the slower, more laborious “System 2” that analyzes complex problems using logical steps, System 1 tends to be more biased and is thus more susceptible to undue influences. When it comes to judging authenticity, we are vulnerable to so, so many cognitive biases, such as these:

Confirmation Bias: We seek and interpret information that aligns with our existing beliefs, ignoring contradictory evidence.

Halo Effect: We extrapolate a single positive (or negative) trait or association to the overall authenticity.

Mere Exposure Effect: The more we see something, the more we perceive it as trustworthy even if it’s not genuinely authentic.

Appeal to emotion, especially to nostalgia or fear: This can heighten the feeling of authenticity even if the facts don’t support it.

Bandwagon Effect: This occurs when the perceived “social proof” from many people sways us.

Anchoring Effect: Our first impression of authenticity sticks or a reference point to a different object creates a relationship between the two in our minds.

Authority Bias: An endorsement comes from a trusted figure, artificially raising its perceived authenticity.

Framing Effect: Our perception of the object is influenced by what’s around it or how it’s described.

But these biases aren’t all bad. Just like pattern-matching and spotting inconsistencies, our brains use these biases as shortcuts, because we don’t have the time or the energy to think critically about everything we observe, using System 2. They exist because we need to make quick assessments and decisions every day.

Psychologically, we may be programmed to seek authenticity over eons of evolution, where deception meant being outcast, starved, cheated, or killed. That deception could’ve been a trap, a scam, or a battlefield feint.

Let’s stir up some of our stereotypes and preprogrammed patterns now, to illustrate the point.

Close your eyes. Imagine yourself in a retail clothing store like Uniqlo, on the lookout for shoplifters and thieves. Picture what they look like and what behavior they would exhibit. Are they avoiding eye contact with the staff? Are they shying away from the security cameras? Do they look a bit nervous?

That’s your System 1 programming running to detect deception, with the help of your System 2 to critically break down the scenario and identify what System 1 is scanning for.

How to Make Your Brand “Authentic”

In a sea of products in your market that feels too whitewashed or too disconnected from the reality of how people are using them, be the lighthouse that draws them in with clarity.

The allure of authenticity means people perk up when hearing about your product, show real and powerful reactions, and pay attention to your product despite the crowded market.

So what is authenticity when it comes to a brand and its products?

First, it’s Transparency. Be direct and open about your products’ real uses, values, and mission. Consumers respond positively to directness and boldness, not fluffy corporate-speak messages.
Second, it’s Relatability. Connect with your audience in a genuine, no-bullshit manner. It’s refreshing and exciting to hear from a flawed and raw speaker rather than someone or some company that pretends to be perfect and sterilizes every word.
Third, its Uniqueness. Stand out from the crowd and stay true to what sets your brand apart. Being a copy of something else by definition isn’t authentic, so highlight your differences.
Fourth, it’s Trustworthiness. Be consistent with your messaging, deliver on promises, and maintain integrity. Humans are adept at spotting inconsistencies and can harshly punish companies they perceive as breaking the core promises of the brand.
Fifth, it’s Honesty. Communicate sincerely, directly, and naturally. We are wired to trust people who appear to be telling the truth without obfuscation and naturally what’s on their mind (“telling it like it is”).

There’s a simple acronym to remember what authenticity means for a brand: TRUTH (Transparency, Relatability, Uniqueness, Trustworthiness, and Honesty, as detailed later in the chapter). This “TRUTH checklist for authenticity” can be a handy tool in your startup.

For the same reason that we profile what shoplifters act like, we scrutinize similarly with brands and products. Our brains are on the lookout for liars and seek the safety of truthfulness. We’re drawn to trustworthiness, and the less a brand or person seems to hide, the more trustworthy it seems to be.

Adapted from OUTRAGEOUS STARTUP GROWTH: Uncovering the Secrets of User Psychology to Scale Your Business (Wiley, April 13, 2026). Colin Hodge, the co-founder of DOWN and creator of The Outrageous Growth Method, shares his decades of hard-earned wisdom from how he scaled startups to over 100 million users, navigated high-stakes negotiations, and achieved successful exits and even re-entries.

Mental Readiness is the Key to Successful Management of Crises

June 22, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

Want to become a trusted advisor to leaders in crisis? Learn how to help leaders make smart choices under stress.

Today’s post is by Helio Fred Garcia, co-author with James E. Lukaszewski of Influencing Leaders: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, to be published in August 2026.

Leaders are judged by how they deal with their greatest challenges. Some rise to the occasion and are rewarded for their thoughtfulness, courage, and leadership; many do not and suffer meaningful harm as a result.

I’ve been a crisis management advisor and professor for decades. I’ve advised hundreds of senior leaders in companies, governments, the military, and not-for-profits. And I have concluded that the single most-common cause of failed crisis response is lack of mental readiness on the part of leaders.

The most common cause of a crisis response failure is that leaders made choices based on personal preference. The landscape is littered with senior leaders who improvised and failed when the stakes were high: they panicked, prevaricated, or otherwise failed to behave like responsible leaders when it mattered most. This never works. That’s because under stress humans experience a fear response, which shuts down critical thinking and leads to self-protective decision-making. Leaders who make choices based on personal preference will predictably make choices that protect their comfort, but likely fail to live up to the standards stakeholders hold leaders accountable to.

Like other forms of management, crisis management is a rigorous business discipline. It is the management of choices leaders make when trust is on the line – and with it, all other measures of competitive position that trust makes possible: stock price, employee morale and productivity, customer demand for products and services, and the like. As with any other business discipline, there is a method to making smart choices in a crisis. It requires having clear decision criteria for every foreseeable decision in a crisis: what to do, what to say, when to do and say it, how to do and say it, etc. But just having those clear criteria is not enough: In a crisis, leaders need to actually follow those criteria.

Mental Readiness

Mental readiness has three distinct components:

Emotional discipline. This, in turn, has three elements:
- Contain panic: This is a learned capacity. Firefighters learn to walk calmly into a burning building; military are trained to move toward the people shooting at them, etc. This goes against every human instinct. And yet, we can train ourselves to stay calm amidst the noise and do the uncomfortable things necessary to accomplish our goal.
- Self-regulate: One of the most common leadership failures is the inability to regulate moods, impulses, drives, and to re-direct them to a more productive place.
- Exhibit humility: The key to getting through a crisis is to demonstrate empathy toward those negatively affected by the crisis. Humility is what that makes empathy possible. Fail to show humility, and stakeholders – both internal and external – will lose trust in the leader.
Deep knowledge. This has two parts:
- Pattern recognition: Crises follow predictable patterns. And patterns have two kinds of power: explanatory power, helping make sense of the past; and predictive power, helping anticipate what will happen next. One pattern: Some things never work in a crisis: denial, diminishing the significance of the harm, blaming others, lying, shooting the messenger. Another pattern: Most harm in a crisis is self-inflicted, the result of leaders doing the things that never work in a crisis.
- Study multiple crises: Often leaders need to see an example of another leader making a scary choice that leads to success. In my work with leaders, I help them recognize that they can get through a crisis well by showing them what leaders did in similar crises.
Intellectual rigor: One way to understand strategy is to think of it as ordered thinking: of deferring certain topics until you’ve considered certain prior topics. The sequence of consideration matters. If we jump into how we might respond to a crisis before considering prior issues, we will likely respond poorly. We need to ask other questions before prescribing options — questions that analyze the nature of the crisis, the risks the crisis represents, how we might mitigate those risks, who is affected by the crisis, and what those stakeholders will expect from us.

The key decision criterion for what to do or say in a crisis is driven by the elements of trust. Trust can be understood as the natural consequence of promises fulfilled, expectations met, and stated values being the lived experience of stakeholders. Fulfill a promise; meet an appropriate expectation, live your declared values – trust is locked in. Break a promise; miss on an expectation; behave contrary to stated values – trust falls.

The decision criterion for what to do and say is simple: Imagine those who matter to the organization, and ask: What would reasonable people appropriately expect a responsible organization to do in this kind of situation? The answer often provides a roadmap to a productive resolution of the crisis. It allows us to respond in ways that align with the appropriate expectations of our stakeholders, and thereby maintain trust as we address the underlying issue.

Of all the expectations stakeholders may have, there is one that applies for every stakeholder of every organization in every form of crisis. In a crisis, every stakeholder expects the organization to care: That some system or process or judgment failed and needs to be remedied. That people are hurt or hurting as a result. And that the leader cares about – and sometimes needs to care for – those directly affected.

In short, effective crisis response is never about how the leader feels; it’s what our stakeholders need to experience in order believe that we care.

I have the privilege of being in the room with leaders when they face their biggest challenges. I serve as a kind of CEO-whisperer, helping the leader make productive choices even when all the choices still lead to an undesirable outcome. I help the leader choose the less bad outcome – the one most likely to demonstrate that they care. This, too, is a learned capacity.

Want to become a trusted advisor to leaders in crisis? Learn how to help leaders make smart choices under stress.

Helio Fred Garcia is executive director of the Logos Institute for Crisis Management and Executive Leadership. He teaches crisis, ethics, leadership, and communication in a number of universities and professional schools, including Columbia University and New York University. He is co-author with James E. Lukaszewski of Influencing Leaders: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, to be published in August 2026.

The Question That Exposes Your Blind Spot as a Leader

June 15, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

Most leaders think they know themselves, but 95% of behavior is unconscious. Learn the one question that reveals your hidden Ego and transforms your impact.

Today’s post is by Christie Garcia, author of Your Ego Is Showing: How Ego Management Unlocks Authentic Confidence and Meaningful Success.

I fell three stories off a fire escape on a Friday morning in San Francisco. When the paramedics arrived, my first concern was whether I could still throw my holiday party that evening.

That moment was a perfect portrait of my Ego running completely unchecked. I have what I call a Controller Ego. Controllers are driven by achievement, push hard, move fast, and pride themselves on handling anything and everything. The downside is that we also tend to be emotionally unavailable, hyper-rational in moments that call for real emotions, and completely blind to the “real” impact we have on the people around us.

That blindness is what I want to talk about, because it is not just a Controller problem. It is a human problem, and it may be the single most expensive leadership habit you have right now.

In my work as an executive coach, I have found that 95 percent of the time, leaders are operating on autopilot. Their Ego, the unconscious brain, is driving every decision, every reaction, every conversation. The unsettling truth is that everyone around them can see it. They are usually the only ones who cannot.

I call this the self-awareness gap.

There are three Ego types I work with: the Complier, the Protector, and the Controller. Each has real gifts which are often our biggest weaknesses when overused. I like to call these overused gifts our liabilities or our Ego tactics. These tactics quietly sabotage our relationships, happiness, and success in both work and life. With almost two decades of coaching, I have yet to meet a leader who has not identified with at least one of them.

The Complier is warm, easy to work with, and deeply people-oriented. The liabilities of the Complier Ego is that they forfeit their power to keep the peace. I worked with a leader I will call Diane. She was a beloved director at a mid-size nonprofit, the kind of person everyone wanted on their team. But in every senior leadership meeting, she would agree with whoever spoke last, even when she privately disagreed. She told herself she was being collaborative. What she was actually doing was accumulating resentment quietly, until one day she sent an email to her executive director that was so out of character it blindsided everyone, including Diane herself. When we unpacked it, she realized she had been swallowing her truth for nearly two years. Her Complier Ego had convinced her that speaking up was a threat to being liked. What it actually cost her was her credibility.

The Protector leads with integrity and logic. They are often the most principled person in the room, and the most guarded. I think of a client I will call Marcus, a COO who was brilliant at strategy and notoriously hard to read. His team respected him but never felt close to him. When a high performer resigned, she told HR that she never felt like Marcus believed in her. Marcus was floored. He had been her biggest internal advocate for two years. The problem was that his Protector Ego had built walls so effectively that his support was never communicated to the employee. He assumed she knew how proud of her he was. One of the Protector’s liabilities is their black-and-white thinking. They struggle to see the gray, which prevents them from sharing details, giving praise, or telling people how they really feel (both good and bad). Most often, the Ego’s beliefs are that people should know how he feels, they should just do their job, and results speak for themselves. Unfortunately, in this situation, they did not. His team needed to hear it from him directly, and he had no idea that was missing.

The Controller, my own dominant Ego, is ambitious, decisive, and gets things done. The liabilities of the Ego are that we tend to define success through accomplishments and unintentionally make the people around us feel like tools rather than partners. A client I will call Tom was a sales director who consistently hit his numbers and consistently lost his top performers. The exit interviews always pointed to the same theme; he was inspiring to be around but exhausting to work for. Nothing was ever quite good enough and they can always accomplish more. Tom’s first instinct when I shared this was to defend his high-quality work and standards. His second, once he got quiet, was to admit he had no idea how to celebrate a win before moving to the next one. His Controller Ego had convinced him that satisfaction was the enemy of improvement. What it was actually doing was burning out the very people he needed most.

Here is what all three of these leaders had in common. They were not trying to create these problems. Their Egos were running the show unconsciously, and nobody brought these liabilities to their awareness without triggering their Ego. Once they heard the feedback in a productive way, they were able to look in the mirror and truly find the value in the feedback.

This is where Ego Management begins. Not with fixing yourself, but with seeing yourself clearly and taking ownership of your unintended impact.

Once you choose to acknowledge the perception of your impact and start owning this truth you can get curious. What is my part in this? Not what went wrong, not who dropped the ball, but where did I contribute to this outcome? It is a question the Ego prevents you from asking yourself. It doesn’t want you to know the truth. It wants you to stay stuck, disappointed, unsatisfied, and in the drama of life and relationships. Diane started asking it before every difficult meeting. Marcus started asking it when a relationship felt distant. Tom started asking it every time someone on his team went quiet.

The Ego never fully goes away. It grows with you and gets smarter as you learn about it. The goal is not to eliminate it but to recognize it early enough to choose differently. One percent better today. And then again tomorrow.

That is how leaders stop letting their Ego show and start letting their best self lead.

Christie Garcia is an executive coach and the founder of Mindful Choice, a leadership development company. Her book Your Ego Is Showing: How Ego Management Unlocks Authentic Confidence and Meaningful Success is available wherever books are sold. Learn more at mindfulchoiceacademy.com/book.

When Systems Scale Faster Than People: A Leadership Story About Holding the Line

June 8, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Guest Blogger, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

A leadership story about scaling operations, and demonstrating how clear decision boundaries, accountability, and culture helps teams to adapt without losing trust.

Today’s post is by Dan Leiva, author of AMPLIFIED: The Operator’s Playbook for Scaling Human Potential in an AI World.

The alert came in just after 2:17am. This alert did not signal that there was a system outage, it showed something worse. Everything was working exactly as it was designed to. But that was the problem.

A product rollout of global scale had just gone live, and the systems had been optimized and automated – ready to go! They were fast. Faster in fact, than anything the company had deployed before.

However, it only took a few minutes for the customer complaints to start coming in. The complaints were not about bugs or failure. Instead, they were about the decisions that the system was making on their behalf.

Inconsistent discounts had been applied, and service prioritization felt arbitrary, especially when long-standing customers were suddenly being treated as if they were new ones.

When sunrise finally came, the executive team was looking for an answer to a simple question: Who owned the decision? They were met with silence.

The fact is that the engineers had worked hard to build what was asked of them, while the data team had ensured that models had been trained properly. In addition to this, the operations team had signed off on the workflows, but still nobody could clearly identify where human responsibility ended and system autonomy began.

These moments reinforce an important leadership lesson when it comes to scaling large-scale operations: efficiency is great – but without accountability, it is not progress. It is risk.

In essence, when organizations start to grow, there is a natural instinct to optimize, reduce problems, increase speed, and automate decisions.

While these steps are essential, scaling often fails to account for a critical reality: every system functions as a decision-making engine. Without clear governance, scaling simply amplifies ambiguity.

In fact, ambiguity does not happen when things are working. It happens then they aren’t, and unfortunately by then it is already too late.

This brings about an important and immediate lesson: before you scale a system, you must define its decision boundaries.

You can do this by asking three questions:

What decisions is this system allowed to make?
What decisions must remain human?
Who is accountable when outcomes don’t meet expectations?

Most organizations can answer the first question easily; however, they may take more time to answer the second question. The third? Few can answer clearly.

The early morning call had confirmed that it was not a technology failure, but a gap in leadership design. In fact, the system had been executing perfectly, even when conditions changed, and while it had been built for efficiency, it had not been built for adaptability.

This is where lesson number two comes in: resilient systems are not the ones that are faster. They are the ones that can adapt when under pressure.

Better code does not promote adaptability, instead it depends on how people interact with the system.

Can someone pause it? Can it be overridden? Can it be questioned without causing problems? If the answer is no, then what you’ve built is no longer a system, it is a constraint.

As the day continued, the team started to make an important change, and decided not to start by rewriting the technology, but instead by redefining its ownership.

This was done by assigning proper accountability for decision-making layers, and creating paths of escalation, where humans can step in quickly. Perhaps, more importantly, they made clear and visible intervention points within the organization.

The result was a system that didn’t slow down. Instead, the organization gained confidence in how they used it.

This leads to the third lesson: culture and governance are as important as technology itself.

Without a clear understanding of when to trust a system versus when to challenge it, even the most sophisticated infrastructure remains dangerously fragile.

People either disengage and think “the system knows best,” or they often overcorrect “we can’t trust this at all.” Unfortunately, neither is sustainable.

Strong leadership encourages teams to stay engaged with the system and not become subordinate to it. This creates a middle ground.

In other words, organizations need to build habits, and not just tools. In addition to this, it is crucial that automated decisions are regularly reviewed, so that there is space for feedback from frontline teams. It is ultimately about rewarding people not just for being efficient, but for practicing sound judgment.

The system was still in place at the end of the week, and while the automation did not disappear, it did start to operate differently. Boundaries were clearer. Oversight was stronger, and there was a renewed sense of ownership, as the technology had not changed nearly as much as the leadership approach had.

Now for the final takeaway. The future of scaling is not about replacing human decision making. It is about amplifying it.

An organization that gets this right won’t only move faster, they will move with intention, and understand when to trust their systems, and when to trust their people.

In AMPLIFIED: The Operator’s Playbook for Scaling Human Potential in an AI World, veteran technology executive Dan Leiva delivers a practical leadership framework for navigating the hybrid future of work, where humans and intelligent machines operate side by side. AMPLIFIED published by Beyond Publishing in Dallas, Texas, and featured in Kirkus Reviews, provides the playbook.

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers But People Do

June 1, 2026/0 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Business Toolkit, Guest Blogger /by Trevor Jones

Self-awareness is a huge perk of being human. Unfortunately, it can also lead to chronic illness.

Today’s post is by Steve Adams, CEO of Tiger Performance Institute and author of Unleash the Peak Performer Within You.

Zebras are horse-like creatures with beautifully striped coats that fascinate children and adults alike. Zebras have a distinct advantage over humans in one particularly important area of life: how they manage stress. To understand this phenomenon, we need to begin with the concept of interference. In my book, Unleash the Peak Performer Within You, I share the Performance Formula. Simply stated, it reads:

Performance = Skill – Interference

What is Interference?

Interference is a term representing anything that prevents your skills from taking over to produce a high level of productivity and performance. A short list of potential interference includes anxiety, ADD, emotional control problems, and poor sleep. There are many more sources of interference, and they all get in the way of good performance. Eliminating or reducing your interference represents a direct path to improved performance.

As you begin the journey of learning how to reduce interference and change your health trajectory, understanding and strengthening your autonomic nervous system is vital.

The Autonomic Nervous System

What is the autonomic nervous system (ANS)? The ANS is a branch of your nervous system that regulates involuntary functions and is constantly assessing the environment around you and sending information to the brain. This ongoing process keeps you healthy and safe and goes unnoticed as you go about your day. Its goal is to balance your body to its environment.

Functions such as heart rate, salivary secretions, eye dilation, digestion, and adrenaline release are governed by your ANS.

Your ANS has two branches, each at one extreme of functioning. These branches are called parasympathetic (rest and digest) and sympathetic (fright, fight, or flight).

An example from animals is in order…

Stress Responses: Humans vs. Animals

When a zebra is being chased by a lion, its blood flow concentrates to core life-sustaining organs. Digestion slows and heart rate increases. When you face a stressful situation, your body will do the same thing.

Once a zebra has eluded the lion, it returns to a “rest and digest” state or parasympathetic response. This is when the body returns to balance with its environment.

Animals are always one-to-one with their environment. This is where the difference between humans and animals becomes evident. Animals live on instinct. We are different; we are capable of conscious thought.

When you experience stress, your sympathetic branch of the ANS is activated. It’s what’s commonly referred to as a “fight-or-flight” response. It’s okay when a mortal danger presents itself. It’s not okay when you chronically respond to everyday life this way.

In fact, when you unproductively manage stress in this way, it leads to common and preventable disease such as type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and high blood pressure to name a few.

Because we are self-aware and have the power of creating theater of the mind, humans can and do ruminate about past events and worry about future concerns. We can literally invent stress in our minds by looking back or ahead.

The fascinating thing about this is that your body doesn’t differentiate between real events playing out in front of you, such as a stranger threatening you, and an event playing out in your mind. Either way, you end up with a stress response. When the conversations you are having with yourself are chronically stressful, you are putting yourself into chronic stress.

The research is settled: chronic stress and chronic debilitating disease are highly correlated. Learning to manage stress properly is one thing you can do to significantly improve your health today and tomorrow.

So now you know why zebras don’t get ulcers, but people do! Our habit of unwittingly placing ourselves in a state where our bodies think a lion is chasing us drives a cascade of reactions in our brains and bodies that make us physically and mentally sick. Our ability to perform at a high level is then severely compromised.

Chronic stress, and all its negative consequences, represents serious interference. Learning to manage stress well will reduce your interference and improve your performance.

How to Reduce Interference

Strategies to improve your autonomic nervous system balance include heart rate variability training, deep diaphragm breathing, optimizing sleep, daily movement, and practicing gratitude. Additionally, learning how to properly process thoughts and not hang onto them, leading to endless ruminations, is key.

The next best step is to assess imbalances in your autonomic nervous system, then seek training from a qualified organization and provider to help you regain control. The goal is to become your own best coach and learn to self-regulate your responses to life’s events. In doing so, your nervous system will then work for you rather than against you. When it does, you will live healthier and become a peak performer based on your definition of success and performance!

Steve L. Adams, MBA is the author of Unleash the Peak Performer Within You and founder and CEO of Tiger Performance Institute. His passion lies in helping high-achieving entrepreneurs, professionals, and CEOs achieve sustainable peak performance through his innovative, hyper-personalized, precision health optimization system and performance training. You can check out Adams here at www.steveladams.com, and learn more about his training programs at www.tigerpi.com.