HOW METAPHORS REVEAL WHAT ADVICE MISSES: Borrow this Powerful Tool from a Master Coach

By Leslie Rohonczy, IMC™, PCC

Executive Coach | Leadership Development Expert | Author | Speaker | ©2026 | www.leslierohonczy.com

Halfway through an executive coaching session with a senior leader, I saw it: that juicy a-ha moment when an insight sparks, and the body responds before the words arrive. My client’s posture shifted as I offered him a metaphor for what he was experiencing. He leaned forward and began nodding, then his hands joined the conversation. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s exactly me. Do you have a camera in my office?”

For the record, I don’t have cameras hidden in my clients’ offices. But what I did have was a metaphor that illustrated something true about how he had learned to operate. It was a unique lens that reflected back to him the strengths he relied on, the pressures he carried, the ways he protected himself, and the costs of those strategies.

And, maybe most importantly, he felt seen. He understood that I ‘got’ him and wasn’t judging him. We now had a safe, shared language for exploring something that had previously been difficult for him to name. That’s one reason I return to metaphor so often in my executive coaching work.

I should clarify what I mean by metaphor. I’m not suggesting that leaders dust off those tired old sports clichés we’ve all heard a thousand times: keep your eye on the ball, step up to the plate, get back in the game. Those expressions may add a bit of colour to a conversation (if you like the colour beige), but they rarely reveal anything new. A developmental metaphor is personal, specific, and rich enough to help someone recognize a pattern in how they operate, then explore its strengths, limitations, and possibilities.

But metaphor isn’t just a powerful coaching tool; leaders can use metaphors when coaching and developing their employees, too. You don’t need to be a professional coach, invent elaborate imagery, or turn every one-on-one into a voyage of symbolic discovery. Sometimes one well-timed image can help an employee describe a challenge they’re having more clearly, so they can examine it with less defensiveness, and imagine a different way of responding.

The metaphor itself is not the point. What matters is what it helps someone recognize about what’s happening now, and the new possibilities that recognition opens.

MOVING FROM INSIDE THE PATTERN TO OUTSIDE IT LOOKING IN

When a behavioural pattern is deeply embedded, we don’t typically experience it as a pattern; we just experience it as our reality.

The leader who throws on his cape and flies in to rescue the team may believe, “This is what responsible leadership looks like.” The person who puts on a suit of armour before a difficult conversation may believe, “I need this protection to remain composed.” The executive who moves at jet-boat speed may see the wake she leaves behind her, without fully recognizing how hard it is to bring other people along with her.

Metaphor can help someone gain enough distance to examine what is happening. Instead of saying, “I’m impatient and terrible at bringing people along,” a leader can begin to notice, “I can feel my jet boat accelerating again.” Instead of thinking, “I shut people out,” someone might say, “This suit of armour is getting too heavy.” Instead of thinking, “It’s all up to me,” someone might notice, “I’ve picked up everyone else’s backpacks again.” Instead of thinking, “If I don’t get them engaged and developing, I’m not doing my job,” a leader can begin to notice, “I’m pulling up every seedling to make sure it’s growing.”

That small change in language matters. The behaviour is still theirs to understand and address, but it no longer defines the whole person. They can step back, observe it, and begin making more deliberate choices.

Research on metaphor supports its role in helping people make sense of complex or less tangible experiences by connecting them with something more concrete and familiar. A metaphor will not automatically produce insight or behavioural change. It does, however, create another way to explore an experience and experiment with different responses.

What felt personal and loaded yesterday can become something two people place between them and examine together today. It leads to powerful questions like, “What does the armour protect?” “When did the jet boat become necessary?” “What might you be taking away from your employees by flying in to rescue them?” “What are you trying to prevent by tending the garden so intensely?” These questions invite curiosity into a conversation where judgment, frustration, or defensiveness may have been getting in the way.

A LENS, NEVER A LABEL

There is a risk in all of this, of course. A metaphor can become so clever, appealing, or memorable that the person offering it falls in love with it. Once that happens, we may start trying to stuff the other person’s experience into our beautifully shaped metaphor, instead of allowing their experience to shape it.

A metaphor should offer a lens through which someone can examine their experience. It should never become a label that defines them.

When I offer a metaphor to a client, I tell them explicitly that I am not attached to it. Leaders can give an employee the same permission: “This image may not fit. We can play with it, change it, challenge it, or throw it out, and find something else that feels more like it fits your experience.”

I once offered a Labrador Retriever guide dog as a metaphor for a client’s ability to guide a new leadership team through a merger with another group. I thought it fit beautifully. He was terrified of dogs. Needless to say, we found a new metaphor. The person being coached gets the deciding vote. It’s as simple as that.

Even a metaphor that resonates with several people may mean something different to each of them. A gardener might represent patience and trust for one leader. For another, it might reveal a tendency to overwater every plant, pull up the seedlings to check whether they are growing, and take personal responsibility for the weather. Same garden. Entirely different coaching stance.

HOW METAPHOR SHAPES MY COACHING

Integral Coaching Canada’s methodology has deeply shaped my use of developmental metaphor.

In my executive coaching work, metaphor can help a client recognize how they currently approach an important challenge and envision a broader, more intentional way of leading. That developmental work is far more extensive than the simple application I am sharing here.

Leaders are often given objectives such as “delegate more,” “become more strategic,” “communicate differently,” or “strengthen executive presence.” These may be worthwhile goals, but they rarely help someone recognize what to do differently when the pressure is on.

A strong metaphor gives the objective shape and texture.

Consider the leader whose approach resembles a jet racing boat. They are fast, responsive, decisive, and highly capable of reaching a destination quickly. Those strengths may have been richly rewarded throughout their career. At the same time, there is very little room in the boat for anyone else, and the leader’s speed may leave a wake of dependency, confusion, or disengagement behind them.

Simply advising this leader to slow down probably won’t create much change. The metaphor opens a richer developmental conversation:

• When does speed genuinely matter?

• Who needs to be in the boat with you?

• When would creating shared ownership matter more than arriving first?

• How will you retain your decisiveness while making more room for others?

The metaphor makes an abstract objective easier to recognize and work with in real situations.

What follows is a simple way for leaders to experiment with metaphor in developmental conversations. It is not a substitute for professional coach training or a complete coaching methodology. Four clever questions do not make anyone a Master Coach before lunch, but they can help you have more effective developmental conversations with your direct reports.

WHERE USEFUL METAPHORS COME FROM

Often, people hand us their metaphors without realizing it.

An employee may describe themselves as running on a treadmill, carrying everyone else’s load, juggling ten balls, playing every instrument, or wearing armour into important conversations. That language is worth noticing because it may reveal how they already understand their experience.

Imagine an employee saying, “I feel as though I’m juggling ten balls and everyone keeps throwing me another one.”

A leader could move immediately into workload solutions. Or they could become curious about the image:

• Which balls cannot be dropped?

• Which ones belong to you?

• Which were handed to you by someone else?

• Are any still in the air because you haven’t decided where they belong?

The metaphor does not replace a practical conversation about workload. It helps both people understand the workload more precisely before deciding what to do about it.

Sometimes, the person creates the image. Sometimes, you build it together. Occasionally, you may offer one based on what you’ve observed. However it emerges, the employee needs room to define its meaning, revise it, or reject it.

A rejected metaphor is useful information. It tells you that you have not yet found language that belongs to the person.

METAPHOR CAN HELP A TEAM SEE ITSELF

Metaphor can also help a group name how it wants to work together.

In my work with teams, I have seen the value of creating a collective metaphor that captures the team’s strengths, aspirations, relationships, and shared responsibilities. A team might identify itself as a pod of dolphins, for example, and develop its own understanding of what that image represents about how members navigate, communicate, protect one another, and move together.

The power comes from the meaning the team creates, rather than from the leader arriving with a polished image and announcing, “Good news, everyone. We’re dolphins now.”

A shared metaphor can give a team shorthand for conversations that would otherwise be difficult to begin. When the pod of dolphins is functioning well, what’s happening to make it so? When food sources are scarce and the pressure is on to find food, how does the pod adapt? What causes some dolphins to be separated from the pod, and how do the others help them navigate their way back?  

Because the metaphor belongs to everyone, it can become a useful reference point for reflecting on collective behaviour without immediately blaming an individual. The team can then discuss whether it’s living into its chosen image and what may need attention when it’s not.

Used thoughtfully, a collective metaphor can help a team name the culture it wants to create and recognize the everyday behaviours required to make that culture real.

USING METAPHOR WITHOUT GETTING IN ITS WAY

If you want to experiment with metaphor in a developmental conversation, a few practices matter:

• Listen for images already embedded in the person’s language. Their metaphor will often resonate more deeply than one imported from outside.

• Offer your own images lightly. “I wonder whether this is a little like…” creates more room than “Here is what you are.”

• Watch what happens before you elaborate. Changes in posture, energy, expression, words, or engagement may tell you whether the image is opening the conversation or closing it down.

• Let the person define the details. Ask what the metaphor means to them instead of explaining what you believe it ought to mean.

• Explore both its value and its cost. A jet boat, suit of armour, conductor, gardener, or superhero contains strengths as well as limitations. Development begins with understanding the whole pattern.

• Remember your authority. An employee may agree with a metaphor because their leader offered it. Make disagreement easy and explicit.

• Allow the metaphor to evolve. As the person develops, the image may acquire new features, change form, or become unnecessary.

Most importantly, don’t confuse recognition with transformation. A metaphor can create a powerful moment of awareness and insight, but insight is the beginning. Sustainable change still requires practice, reflection, experimentation, and new choices under real pressure.

YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE

Think about someone you are coaching or developing who has you feeling stuck. In your next conversation, listen carefully for the images embedded in how they describe their experience.

If none emerges naturally, you might ask:

“If this challenge were a vehicle (or a landscape, object, animal, machine, or character), what might it be?”

Then remain curious: What does the image reveal about how they currently see themselves or the situation? What strengths exist within it? What does the image protect, restrict, overlook, or leave behind? If it evolved to represent how they would like to approach the situation, what would change?

Resist the temptation to interpret the image for them or steer them toward the answer you think they need. The metaphor may help you see where their development could go next. More importantly, it may help them see it for themselves.

If you would like to explore the metaphors shaping how you lead, or create a collective metaphor that helps your team strengthen how it works together, I would love to help. Reach out to arrange a free exploratory executive coaching conversation at leslierohonczy.com.

10 C-SUITE ATTRIBUTES THAT MATTER MORE THAN EVER: Executive Leadership Has Changed. Have Our Leaders?

By Leslie Rohonczy, IMC™, PCC

Executive Coach | Leadership Development Expert | Author | Speaker | ©2026 | www.leslierohonczy.com

Imagine being handed the keys to the C-suite today. Congratulations! Now, about that job description. The economy is uncertain. Geopolitics has wandered straight into your strategic plan. Canada’s relationship with its largest trading partner is fractured. AI is changing work faster than many organizations can redesign it. Your people are tired of change, but you need them to get better at it, quickly. And somewhere in the middle of all this, you’re still expected to deliver the quarter. Welcome to the executive team.

This is an interesting time to be a senior leader in Canada.

For many years, I was the Corporate Coach at Export Development Canada, coaching leaders inside an organization devoted to helping Canadian companies grow internationally. One thing I learned from that experience is that moving beyond familiar territory asks something different of leaders. Assumptions get challenged. Relationships work differently. Risk changes. What made you successful somewhere familiar may be surprisingly unhelpful somewhere new. And that feels particularly relevant now more than ever.

EDC just reported (September 2026) that 72% of Canadian exporters plan to pursue new markets over the next two years, up from 65% just five months ago. Europe and Asia-Pacific are attracting particular interest. At the same time, companies are navigating tariffs, geopolitical instability, rapid technological change, productivity pressures and economic uncertainty.

KPMG recently asked Canadian CEOs which leadership capabilities they consider most important for navigating geopolitical instability and sluggish economic growth. Their answers included leading transformation and culture change, faster decision-making under pressure, stronger strategic foresight and scenario planning, and AI understanding and literacy.

The demands of the senior leadership job are changing.

So perhaps the question for boards, CEOs, and executives aspiring to the C-suite is no longer simply, “Who has performed well enough to get there?” We might also ask, “Who has the range to lead from there now?”

What does that kind of range look like in practice? While the answer will vary by organization, industry, and circumstance, some leadership capabilities are becoming increasingly important as the demands on senior executives change. These ten stand out to me, not as a definitive checklist, but as a useful way to examine whether our leadership capabilities are keeping pace with the world we’re being asked to lead in.

Here are ten leadership attributes I believe deserve particular attention.

TOP 10 LEADERSHIP ATTRIBUTES

1. STRATEGIC FORESIGHT

Nobody gets issued a crystal ball with their executive parking pass. Strategic foresight is something more useful anyway. It’s the ability to look beyond the most likely future and consider several plausible ones. What happens if a major market becomes less accessible? Or if a competitor changes your industry's economics? What if AI fundamentally changes the work? Or the assumptions underneath your five-year strategy stop being true?

It’s impossible to accurately predict the future, anyway. The real objective is to become less surprised by it.

STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: What would have to happen for our current strategy to stop making sense?

2. ADAPTIVE DECISIVENESS

Executives have always made difficult decisions. What has changed is how frequently they may have to make them without enough information. Waiting for certainty can feel responsible. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is indecision dressed up in a respectable suit.

Adaptive decisiveness means making a sound decision with the best information available, explaining the reasoning, watching what happens, and being willing to change course when the evidence changes.

Changing your mind because the facts changed isn’t weak leadership. Refusing to change it because your ego is now attached to the decision might be.

STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: Where are we waiting for certainty when what we actually need is a thoughtful decision?

3. GLOBAL AND GEOPOLITICAL CURIOSITY

For Canadian executives, geopolitics can no longer be something that happens somewhere else. Trade policy, currencies, regulation, supply chains, energy, political relationships and cultural differences can affect customers, costs and growth surprisingly quickly. And as more Canadian companies branch out to explore markets beyond the United States, leaders will increasingly encounter places where the familiar rules of business don’t necessarily apply.

That calls for something deceptively simple: curiosity, the willingness to understand before assuming, and occasionally to say, “We don’t know enough about this yet.”

STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: Which assumptions about our markets, customers, and competitors are we treating as facts?

4. ENTERPRISE THINKING

Many executives reach the C-suite because they have become exceptionally good at a specific function: finance, operations, technology, marketing, people, sales. Then the job changes. At the enterprise level, the question is no longer simply, “What is best for my function?” It becomes, “What does the whole organization need?”

A technology decision can create a people problem. A cost reduction can create a customer problem. A growth opportunity can introduce risks another executive sees more clearly than you do.

Strong C-suite leaders gradually loosen their grip on their functional identity and become stewards of the whole enterprise. In my coaching work, I’ve seen how challenging that transition can be, especially when functional expertise has been such an important part of a leader’s success.

STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: When my functional interests and the needs of the enterprise collide, which one wins?

5. TECHNOLOGICAL JUDGMENT

I deliberately haven’t called this AI expertise. Most executives don’t need to become technologists. They need enough understanding to ask good questions and enough judgment to recognize bad answers.

PwC’s 2026 Global CEO Survey found that only 12% of CEOs reported both revenue and cost benefits from AI, while 56% reported neither. That doesn’t argue against AI. It argues for thoughtful leadership around where and how it is being used.

Where does AI genuinely create value? What work should disappear or change? What should remain distinctly human? What risks are being introduced? Who remains accountable for the decisions? I explored another aspect of this question recently in IF AI SAVES TIME, WHO GETS THE TIME BACK? The technology may create capacity. But leadership must still decide what that capacity is for.

STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: Are we using AI because we can, or because we are clear about the value we want it to create?

6. THE ABILITY TO BUILD ADAPTABILITY

Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends research found that 85% of leaders consider building organizational and workforce adaptability critical. Only 7% say they are leading in helping their workforce continuously grow and adapt. That gap should get our attention.

Organizations can’t keep throwing change at people and calling their ability to absorb it “resilience.” Adaptability requires context, priorities, learning, tolerance for experimentation, permission to stop doing some things, and enough stability to innovate. Otherwise, adaptability becomes exhaustion, and exhausted people aren’t particularly strategic or creative.

STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: How are we building our organization’s capacity to adapt, rather than simply asking people to absorb more change?

7. EMOTIONAL SELF-REGULATION

This capability doesn’t appear on a balance sheet, but its consequences sure do. When uncertainty rises, people watch their leaders more closely. An executive who becomes reactive, defensive, or visibly anxious can send that anxiety through an organization faster than a layoff rumour.

Senior leaders don’t need to become emotionless. They need enough self-awareness to recognize what is happening inside themselves, enough social awareness to sense how others are feeling and anticipate how they may respond, and enough self-regulation to consciously choose what they send outward, and how. And remember, the higher the position, the bigger the wake you’ll leave behind you.

STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: Under pressure, what am I transmitting to others, and is it helping them respond at their best?

8. TRUST-BUILDING CANDOUR

I’ve seen uncertainty create an interesting communication problem in organizations. Leaders are often tempted to wait until they have answers before saying anything. And employees are often most hungry for communication when answers don’t exist yet.

Candour means being able to say what we know, what we don’t know, what has changed, what we are considering, and what happens next. It also means creating enough safety for other people to be candid with us. The more senior you become, the more courage it can take for someone else to tell you they think you’re wrong. I explored this more deeply in DO PEOPLE DISAGREE WITH YOU TO YOUR FACE?, because one of the less obvious risks of gaining authority is gradually losing access to the candid disagreement you need most.

If nobody challenges your thinking anymore, it might be worth wondering why.

STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: How am I creating the conditions to discover what people really know, see and believe, especially when it differs from what I want to hear?

9. TALENT MULTIPLICATION

There’s a point in an executive career when your greatest contribution shifts from what you can personally accomplish yourself, to what you can inspire and enable others to accomplish through your leadership.

Your job increasingly becomes creating the conditions for others to think, decide, challenge, experiment, and lead. That means developing successors, giving away meaningful authority, coaching rather than rescuing, and resisting that seductive little voice that says, “It would be faster if I just did it myself.” In truth, yep, it probably would. That’s why the habit is so dangerous.

If too many decisions still need you, eventually you become part of what’s slowing the organization down.

STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: Where am I adding value by being involved, and where has my involvement started preventing someone else from growing?

10. INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY AND COURAGEOUS CURIOSITY

The further people rise in an organization, the easier it can become to confuse experience with certainty. Experience is enormously valuable, until the environment changes enough that some of what we ‘know’ becomes an assumption worth examining.

Curious executives ask what they are missing, whose perspective they haven’t heard, what evidence would cause them to change their minds, and which assumption would be most dangerous if it were wrong.

Perhaps the hardest question is also the shortest: “Could I be wrong about this?”

That doesn’t diminish executive authority. Used well, it strengthens it.

STRATEGIC EXECUTIVE QUESTION: What am I so certain about that I’ve stopped being curious about it?

THE C-SUITE MAY NEED MORE RANGE

Canadian companies are being asked to protect what works while exploring what comes next. The expectation is to maintain U.S. relationships where possible, while building new ones, to invest while managing uncertainty, to leverage the hell out of AI while figuring out where it actually creates real value, and to transform our organizations while keeping people capable of absorbing the transformation.

Those challenges require strategy, capital, and execution. They also require leaders with range.

Perhaps that gives us a different way to think about C-suite readiness. Experience still matters, of course, but experience tells us what worked before. Leadership becomes particularly interesting when the environment stops cooperating with our experience.

The executives who lead Canadian organizations successfully through the next decade may be the ones whose ability to learn, unlearn, decide, and adapt, will help them survive and thrive without losing sight of the people they are asking to come with them.

YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE

Take another look at the ten attributes, but don’t choose the three you’re best at. That’s too easy. Instead, reflect on which one made you slightly uncomfortable.

Reflect on these two questions:

1. Where is that capability being tested in your leadership right now, and what do you tend to do instead?

2. If the demands of your role change faster than you do over the next three years, which capability will you wish you had started developing today?

SAVING YOUR DEVELOPMENT BUDGET FOR STRUGGLING EMPLOYEES? Invest in Your Strongest Performers for Real ROI

by Leslie Rohonczy, IMC, PCC, Executive Coach & Author

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Think about the strongest performer on your team. When was the last time you deliberately invested in their growth and development?

If it's been a hot minute, that's understandable. Our attention naturally gravitates toward the people who need us most: the employee who's struggling, the new hire who's still finding their feet, or the people navigating conflict, missing deadlines, and falling short of expectations. Those are the situations that feel urgent, and they deserve our attention.

Our highest performers are usually bright, dependable, consistent, and able to solve problems before they ever reach our desks. They deliver what we need when we need it, and they rarely ask for help. And that's exactly where the opportunity begins.

I've become convinced that one of leadership's greatest missed opportunities is failing to keep developing our strongest people. Every leader understands the cost of poor performance: missed deadlines, quality issues, customer complaints, conflict, and a hundred other visible problems that demand our attention every day.

The cost of under-investing in a high performer is much harder to see because it doesn't show up as an urgent crisis. If it does appear on your radar, it'll probably look like unrealized potential: future executives who plateau before anyone notices; high-performing individual contributors who continue troubleshooting instead of learning how to multiply their impact through others; teams that miss the opportunity to learn from people who could have become exceptional mentors, peer coaches, and role models; and organizations that continue benefiting from what these people already know how to do while investing very little in what they might become capable of next.

Most organizations invest significant time and money in courses, conferences, mentoring programs, leadership programs, executive coaching, stretch assignments, and succession planning. The intention is clearly there. But the challenge is knowing where to invest next.

When someone is struggling, the path usually feels obvious. You can see the gap, identify the missing skill, and work together to close it. High performers are different. They're already succeeding, producing excellent work, and they've earned trust. So, it's no surprise that many leaders find themselves wondering, "What exactly would I coach them on?"

I've heard versions of that question many times. "She's forgotten more about finance than I'll ever know." "He's the smartest engineer in the company." "What could I possibly teach someone who's already better than I am?" Those are common, honest questions that reveal one of the biggest misconceptions about leadership development.

There's often another concern sitting just beneath those questions. You may worry that developmental feedback could demotivate someone, especially a high performer who's already succeeding.

In my experience observing hundreds of one-on-one conversations between leaders and their employees over fifteen years, thoughtful developmental feedback is usually received as a meaningful investment in someone's growth. For many high performers, the message isn't, "I'm not good enough." It's, "My leader sees even more potential in me, and is willing to invest in helping me reach it."

Early in our careers, development is largely about building capability. We learn technical skills, improve our communication, strengthen our presentations, become better at delegation, and learn how to navigate conflict. Progress is easy to recognize because we're continually adding new tools to our toolkit.

As we become more experienced, development changes. The work becomes far more reflective. Instead of asking, "What do I need to learn?", the conversation shifts toward questions like:

• What strengths have contributed to my success?

• How do those strengths affect the people around me?

• Where might those strengths be overused?

• What assumptions have become so familiar that I no longer notice them?

• How will the next level of leadership ask something different of me?

Those are leadership conversations. Some of the greatest leadership growth I've seen has come from helping someone see a familiar strength through a completely different lens.

One CEO I worked with realized his decisiveness had gradually begun shutting down healthy debate on the executive team. He wasn't trying to dominate discussions. He was simply moving quickly because that's what had always made him successful. Once he saw the pattern, he began inviting opposing viewpoints before making important decisions. His team became far more engaged, and the quality of their decisions improved.

Another leader discovered she was solving too many problems herself. She genuinely believed she was helping her team. Instead, she was unintentionally preventing them from developing their own judgment. As she experimented with stepping back, her team stepped into greater accountability and performance.

A dependable director prided herself on being indispensable, until she came to realize that she had become the biggest barrier to developing her people. Her greatest contribution was no longer doing more. It was creating opportunities for others to grow. (And bonus, she had more capacity for the strategic work she wanted to do.)

None of these leaders needed fixing. Their strengths simply needed to evolve.

Leadership potential isn't a fixed quantity. Some people are already performing at a remarkably high level, and they still have enormous capacity to grow. They may become your future executives, trusted advisors, exceptional mentors, or the people who elevate the performance of everyone around them, simply because of how they show up.

Current performance tells only part of the story. The more interesting question is how much untapped potential still sits beyond what you're seeing today.

We may know our strongest people still have room to grow, but we aren't sure what to talk about in a one-on-one beyond project updates and performance. If that feels familiar, here are six coaching conversations worth having.

1. Shift the conversation from performance to perspective. Instead of asking, "How's the project going?", ask, "What are you noticing about yourself as a leader that surprised you recently?" or "Where do you think your strengths have the biggest impact on other people?" High performers rarely need help doing the work. They often benefit from understanding the impact they have while doing it.

2. Challenge how they think, not simply what they do. Invite them into conversations where there isn't an obvious answer. Ask them to weigh competing priorities, explore trade-offs, or think several years ahead. Stretching judgment often creates more growth than assigning another project.

3. Help them shift from individual excellence to multiplying others. Ask questions like, "Who else could do this?" or "How could this project become a development opportunity for someone on your team?" Future leaders create results through other people, not just through their own expertise.

4. Coach the impact they have on others. Ask, "What behaviours do you think your colleagues have started copying from you?" or "If everyone on the team approached work exactly the way you do, what would improve, and what challenges might emerge?" Those questions often reveal blind spots that performance reviews never touch.

5. Create room for experimentation. High performers often feel enormous pressure to keep getting everything right. Talk openly about where it's safe to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and learn through experience. Continued growth requires space to experiment, not just expectations to deliver.

6. 6.      Give honest, forward-looking feedback. High performers hear "great job" all the time. What they hear much less often is, "Here's what the next level of leadership will ask of you." Helping someone understand what tomorrow requires can reignite their development in ways praise never will.

If you begin having conversations like these, something important happens: your strongest people continue evolving, your future leaders begin emerging earlier, and your culture becomes stronger because excellence begins multiplying instead of simply performing. And that's an extraordinary return on investment.

Thinking about the recent FIFA World Cup, it strikes me that we don’t ever question why the best players in the world still have coaches. We understand that excellence doesn't maintain itself. It requires continual challenge, fresh perspective, honest feedback, and deliberate development. We see the same pattern in Olympic sport, elite music, aviation, medicine, and business. Brené Brown has spoken openly about the coaches and mentors who've helped her continue growing throughout her career.

Organizations have the same opportunity. Every year, they invest enormous effort closing performance gaps. Far fewer invest the same energy expanding excellence. One protects today's results, and the other builds tomorrow's leaders.

Your next exceptional executive may already be sitting right there on your team. Maybe the next culture influencer is already solving problems just three desks away. Or an extraordinary potential mentor may be excited about an opportunity to help others stretch and grow, too.

The question is no longer whether those people have more potential; it’s: how will you deliberately help them discover it?

YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE

Before your next one-on-one with your strongest performer, resist the temptation to spend the hour reviewing projects and priorities. Spend the conversation exploring who they're becoming instead.

Ask them:

• what they're learning about themselves as a leader

• which of their strengths they'll eventually need to redefine

• where they suspect their biggest blind spot might be

• what future leadership responsibilities will require them to do differently than what made them successful today

Then notice what happens. You may discover you've spent years managing someone's performance, when their greatest opportunity was developing their leadership.

If you're curious about unlocking the next level of leadership potential in your strongest people, I'd love to explore the opportunities with you. Reach out for a free Executive Coaching conversation with me at www.leslierohonczy.com.

LEADERSHIP ALTITUDE: Are You a Helicopter, Jet, or Starship?

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I talk a lot about altitude with my executive coaching clients. One conversation in particular was with a senior leader who sat down across from me and said, "I'm working ridiculous hours, I'm constantly busy, and yet it feels like I'm falling further behind every week."

What struck me wasn't the workload itself, but the contradiction. Things were ticking along well, her team was delivering, and her dashboard showed everything was under control. But she spent most of her days bouncing from issue to issue, rarely finishing what she had planned to accomplish before the next urgent matter popped up. Because she was dependable and responsive, decisions, problems, requests, and approvals continually found their way to her. And every day, she felt like she was climbing up the down escalator.

As we unpacked her reality, we noticed a pattern emerging. There was a common thread at play: decisions flowed through her; problems landed on her desk; questions had to be answered by her. Her team depended on her for direction, approvals, information, and problem-solving, leaving her days consumed by operational details, responding to issues, and helping people navigate obstacles.

Of course, these are all important activities, to be sure. It might be tempting to think that she was not delegating well, or that she was a workaholic, but the real issue turned out to be her leadership altitude. She was spending most of her time operating at a Manager altitude, instead of the more strategic Vice-President altitude. In essence, she hadn't adjusted her altitude with her new responsibilities and span of control. That conversation stayed with me because I've seen countless versions of it throughout my years of executive coaching: leaders unaware they are flying at the wrong altitude.

THE ALTITUDE GAP

One of the most common, and most challenging, leadership transitions a leader can make is the shift from managing day-to-day operations and individual contributors, to leading other leaders, systems, functions, and strategy.

As leaders move through organizations, the horizon line they're responsible for monitoring expands. They become accountable for larger systems, more people, greater complexity, and decisions whose consequences may not appear for years. But many leaders continue operating at the altitude that made them successful in their previous role.

The behaviours that help someone become an outstanding Supervisor differ from those required to become an outstanding Director. The strengths that help someone succeed as a Director may eventually become limitations as they move into Vice-President, Executive, and C-suite leadership. That's why so many talented leaders feel overwhelmed. They're trying to lead a large organization while spending most of their time solving low-altitude problems.

Over the years, I've developed metaphors for leadership using three aircraft: the Helicopter, the Jet, and the Starship. Each operates at a different altitude and provides a different perspective. And each becomes increasingly important as a leader's scope of responsibility expands.

THE HELICOPTER

Imagine your leadership as a helicopter hovering a few hundred feet above the ground. You're no longer standing in the middle of the action, but you're still close enough to see what's happening on the ground. You can spot bottlenecks, notice tension between teams, identify missed handoffs, and observe where work is getting stuck.

This is the altitude of operational leadership, where leaders coach people, remove obstacles, allocate resources, clarify priorities, and help teams navigate challenges. Helicopter altitude keeps leaders connected to reality because they can still see the work as it unfolds.

Most of us spend a significant portion of our early leadership careers here. Supervisors, Managers, Team Leads, Project Managers, and frontline leaders often need to operate predominantly at this altitude because their success depends on helping people execute effectively to produce results.

The challenge is that Helicopter altitude feels productive. You can see a problem and solve it. You can answer a question and help someone move forward. You can remove a roadblock and watch progress happen almost immediately. The feedback is instant, and that sense of usefulness can become habitual.

Over time, some leaders become so accustomed to solving problems that they unknowingly train everyone around them to bring problems to them. Decisions, accountability, and responsibility all begin to migrate upward. And before long, the leader knows everything that's happening this week and very little about what needs to happen three months or three years from now.

I've worked with executives whose calendars looked like emergency dispatch units. Every issue found its way to them, minor conflicts required their involvement, and difficult decision somehow became their responsibility. They were admired, trusted, hardworking... and exhausted.

THE JET

As leaders move into larger and more complex roles, another shift begins to happen. The work itself becomes less visible. At first, it can feel uncomfortable, especially if you've built their careers on being knowledgeable, responsive, and closely connected to the work. Climbing higher often means giving up some of that visibility.

A Director overseeing six teams can't possibly keep track of every conversation, customer issue, project challenge, or interpersonal conflict occurring across their organization. And a Vice-President, responsible for several other leaders, hundreds of employees, and complex organizations, certainly can't.

What emerges in its place is something different: noticing patterns. Instead of seeing a single employee struggling, leaders begin noticing recurring turnover across a department. Instead of focusing on one delayed project, they begin recognizing a resource allocation issue affecting multiple teams. Individual events still matter, but they become clues pointing toward something larger, rather than signals to jump into action and solve them.

This is Jet altitude. The horizon expands dramatically. Details become harder to see (as they must), but the broader landscape becomes clearer. Leaders begin examining how departments interact, where priorities collide, what external conditions will likely impact their business, how information flows through the organization, and which systems are producing the outcomes they see.

The questions change as well. Rather than asking, "How do we solve this problem?" leaders begin asking, "Why does this problem keep appearing?" Rather than focusing on individual performance, they start paying attention to the systems and structure, processes, communication channels, incentives, governance, and culture.

Many leaders arrive at positions that require Jet altitude long before they become comfortable operating there. They continue solving issues one at a time, when the real opportunity is to improve the system creating those issues in the first place.

Jet altitude comes with its own traps, however. Leaders can become so fascinated by the system of strategy, frameworks, organizational design, and planning that they lose touch with the people living inside it. Most of us have experienced a strategic initiative that looked brilliant in a boardroom and bewildering everywhere else. Reality has a way of exposing details that weren't visible from 40,000 feet.

THE STARSHIP

The further leaders advance, the more another question begins to emerge. The focus shifts from "What's happening?" and "Why is it happening?" to a different question altogether: "What will happen next?" This is where Starship altitude becomes necessary.

Imagine looking back at Earth from space. Cities fade from view. Roads become invisible. Eventually, even national borders lose their meaning. Our perspective changes completely.

At Starship altitude, we stop focusing primarily on operations and organizational systems. Our attention shifts toward forces that may shape the organization for years, and sometimes decades, into the future.

We begin asking different kinds of questions: What technological shifts are reshaping the industry? How will demographics change the workforce? What customer expectations are emerging? What assumptions do we hold today that future leaders may laugh at? What must this organization become if it hopes to remain relevant ten or twenty years from now?

This is the altitude of enterprise leadership. It's where leaders wrestle with the big, bold questions of purpose, direction, positioning, legacy, and long-term relevance. They are less concerned with certainty, and more with understanding what version of the future may be emerging and how today's decisions might improve the organization's chances of thriving within them.

Starship altitude is partly about learning to notice what others overlook. Tomorrow rarely arrives all at once. The clues are usually visible long before the disruption becomes obvious, but they can be easy to miss when your attention is consumed by today's challenges.

Starship altitude has risks of its own. We've all encountered leaders who seem permanently stationed in orbit. They speak passionately about the next decade while their teams are struggling with problems that have existed for the last two years. Their vision may be compelling, but their connection to present-day reality becomes increasingly thin.

Organizations need leaders who can imagine the future, but they also need leaders who understand the realities of today.

WHEN SUCCESS BECOMES A LIABILITY

Promotions can create an unexpected problem: the behaviours that helped us earn a promotion to the next level of leadership frequently become the very behaviours that limit us afterwards.

The Manager who built a reputation for being responsive becomes the Vice-President who can't stop getting involved. The Director who became successful through personal expertise struggles to delegate decisions. The executive who built a career by solving problems continues solving them long after the role requires system-level thinking instead.

That's why leadership transitions can feel surprisingly uncomfortable. The issue is rarely intelligence, capability, commitment, or work ethic. It's altitude. The role requires one perspective while the leader continues operating from another.

That's exactly what was happening with the Vice-President I mentioned earlier. She was struggling because her responsibilities had evolved, but her altitude had not. Once she began spending less time solving operational issues and more time leading at the altitude her role demanded, something interesting happened. Her calendar became less crowded; her teams became more capable; her decisions became more strategic. And she finally stopped feeling like she was climbing the down escalator. What a relief!

YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE

The Altitude Audit: Set aside 10 minutes and reflect on the past two weeks. First, ask yourself:

• Have I been spending most of my time at Helicopter altitude, focused on tasks, issues, and execution?

• Have I been operating primarily at Jet altitude, focused on systems, priorities, and cross-functional outcomes?

• Have I been spending meaningful time at Starship altitude, scanning the horizon and thinking about the future?

Now ask a second question: What altitude does my role actually require most often?

Notice any gap between where you've been spending your time and where your leadership responsibilities require you to be. Then reflect on:

• What keeps pulling me toward my current altitude?

• What leadership challenges might be connected to this gap?

• What important signals, opportunities, or risks might I be missing?

• What is one thing I could do this week to operate at the altitude my role requires?

Many leadership challenges are not capability problems; they're altitude problems. Sometimes the most important growth a leader can make is learning to see a different horizon.

If you're curious about how your own leadership altitude may be helping or limiting your effectiveness, I'd love to help you explore it. Reach out for a free exploratory executive coaching conversation at www.leslierohonczy.com.

WHAT MUSICIANS CAN TEACH US ABOUT LEADERSHIP: Lessons from the Stage

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I've read hundreds of leadership books. Some were brilliant, some were forgettable, and a surprising number appeared to have been written by people who’ve likely never actually met another human being in the wild.

In fact, some of the most useful leadership advice I've ever encountered came from a conductor, a bass player, a jazz musician, a record producer, and a pop star.

Let’s start with one of the most profound leadership books I’ve ever read. It was co-written by Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and Rosamund Stone Zander, who was trained as a family systems therapist and has coached organizations around the world. I read their book, The Art of Possibility years ago, and it has stayed with me in a way most leadership books haven’t.

That raises a fair question. Why write about a book that is more than two decades old when leaders are already drowning in newer books, newer models, newer acronyms, and newer ways to make a perfectly good meeting sound like a government procurement process?

Because while some ideas age, other ideas deepen. The Zanders’ work has deepened for me because it speaks to something leaders are still wrestling with every day: How do you help people perform at their best when pressure is high, trust is fragile, attention is scattered, and everyone is carrying more than they are saying out loud?

Benjamin Zander has a famous line that has lodged itself permanently in my leadership brain: the conductor does not make a sound. The person standing at the front, a visible focal point for the performance, and getting all the attention and accolades, never plays a single note. In fact, they don’t make a sound. That idea is so simple it almost sneaks past you. A conductor has enormous responsibility and very little direct control, which is a pretty accurate description of senior leadership on most days.

You can't force trust. It doesn’t magically appear because you demand it. Engagement is not something people hand over on command. Creativity, courage, and ownership don't show up because someone in a leadership role says they should, no matter how inspiring your town hall deck may be.

What you can do is create conditions for clarity. You can set the tempo. You can help people hear one another. You can notice when the brass section is overpowering the strings, which is also an excellent metaphor for certain executive teams I've seen in action.

This is where I think musicians have a strange and wonderful advantage as leadership teachers. They spend their lives working with the same forces leaders work with every day: ego, pressure, collaboration, uncertainty, discipline, and the occasional public flop.

They also can't hide behind strategy language when things go sideways. If the music is off, everyone knows it, even if they can't name the particular instrument or musical error. But they feel it.

Victor Wooten, the great bassist and author of another of my favourite books, The Music Lesson, offers a leadership insight I wish we talked about more. He writes about music as a language, something learned through listening, feel, relationship, and practice. Victor talks about how we learn language as babies, as a metaphor for becoming a skilled musician. As babies, we’re not taught the grammatical rules and structure of the English language; we learn to speak English by being immersed in it, observing, experimenting, and trying new moves.

Leadership is similar. We can study the grammar of leadership all day, and I love a good leadership model as much as the next executive coach, but people do not experience us as models. They experience our attention, curiosity, timing, style, and whether we listen before we jump in with the answer we had already tucked in our pocket.

Wooten also writes about space as part of music. That one should be required reading for anyone who has ever filled a silence in a meeting because the pause made them feel squirmy. But silence isn't something to be avoided at all costs. The moment a pause appears, there's no need to rush to fill it with another opinion, explanation, or attempt to move the conversation along.

Musicians know the value of silent pauses, called ‘rests’ in music notation. The rests are part of the music, equally as important (and sometimes even more important than) the notes. In leadership, the pause is often where the more honest thought finally has room to arrive.

Herbie Hancock has told a story about playing with Miles Davis that has stayed with me for years. During a performance, Hancock played what he thought was the wrong chord, and was rattled in the moment. Miles responded by playing something that made the chord work. That story captures one of the most mature leadership behaviours I know: the ability to work with what has happened rather than burn energy wishing the original plan had survived contact with reality.

Leaders face wrong chords all the time. A project stalls, a stakeholder reacts badly, a talented person disappoints you, or the meeting takes a turn no one predicted. Some leaders freeze because reality has deviated from the sheet music in front of them. Others adjust and find the next note by listening for what's emerging.

Then there's Taylor Swift. She may seem like an unusual addition to a list that includes conductors, jazz musicians, classical performers, and music producers, but I think she offers one of the most powerful leadership lessons of all.

Years ago, when ownership of her master recordings became a highly public issue, she faced a situation many leaders encounter in one form or another. Something important was no longer under her control.

Most people, when faced with that situation, focus on the fight. They pour their energy into winning the argument, defeating the opponent, or getting back what was lost. Taylor Swift chose a different path. Rather than spending years fighting a battle on someone else's terms, she re-recorded her catalogue and created a new version of the future. That strikes me as a remarkably useful leadership lesson.

When leaders feel stuck, they often assume they have two choices: accept reality or fight reality. Sometimes there is a third option. Build a different game. I can't tell you how many times I've watched leaders exhaust themselves trying to force a door open when they would have been far better served looking for a different entrance altogether.

Rick Rubin brings a different kind of wisdom into the conversation. In his amazing book, The Creative Act, he writes about creativity through the lens of attention, receptivity, and noticing what wants to emerge. That may sound a bit woo-woo until you consider the damage that can be caused by action without awareness. Many leaders are praised for moving quickly, making decisions, and pushing things forward, even when they are moving quickly in the wrong direction. Rubin’s work reminds me that insight often starts before action. It starts with noticing the pattern, the tension, the missing conversation, or the thing everyone has learned to politely step around.

Yo-Yo Ma offers another leadership lesson, especially through his long-standing work with Silkroad, the organization he founded to bring together artists and cultural traditions from around the world to create something meaningful together. At first glance, that sounds like a music project. In reality, it is a masterclass in collaboration across difference. How do people with different histories, perspectives, experiences, and ways of seeing the world create something together without sacrificing what makes each of them unique?

That feels painfully relevant right now. Many leaders are trying to create alignment in environments where people don't see the world the same way, don't process information the same way, and don't always feel safe saying what they really think. Ma's work reflects a deep respect for curiosity, difference, and the discipline required to create something meaningful across traditions. Curiosity is not decorative in those conditions. It is operationally useful.

Then there is Wynton Marsalis, who has often described jazz as a metaphor for democracy. I think it also offers a useful lens for leadership. Jazz succeeds because each musician has the freedom to contribute their own voice while staying accountable to the rhythm, structure, and needs of the ensemble.

That is also what healthy organizations are trying to build. People need room to think and contribute, but they also need enough shared structure that the whole thing does not turn into twelve soloists competing for oxygen.

I think this is why music keeps giving me better leadership metaphors than most leadership books. Music understands influence without control. It understands dynamics, tension, timing, cadence, pace, listening, calibration, collaboration, and the reality that performance depends on both individual mastery and collective trust. When we pay attention to the whole sound, we notice who is carrying too much and who has gone silent, and we can sense when the tempo is too fast for the quality of performance that’s required.

True leadership is not about proving your own brilliance; it's about making more brilliance possible around you. What stays with me is that every one of these musicians, in very different ways, points to the same truth. Leadership involves shaping the conditions that allow great performances to happen, helping people contribute their best work and connect it to something larger than themselves. The leaders people remember are the ones who helped others find their voice, trust one another, and create something better than any one person could have produced alone.

If you want to expand your leadership repertoire, reach out for a free exploratory Executive Coaching conversation at www.leslierohonczy.com.

STILL FOLLOWING MOLDY LEADERSHIP ADVICE? What We've Unlearned Since Then

Leslie Rohonczy, IMC, PCC, Executive Coach & Author

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I recently fell down one of those internet rabbit holes that begins with good intentions and ends with me wondering how humanity has survived itself thus far. One of the rabbit holes I fell into (consider yourself warned) was a website called theretrocodex.com, which is essentially a curated archive of things people once believed with remarkable confidence, only to be proven outrageously wrong later. Medical advice, scientific assumptions, cultural 'facts,' all neatly organized by decade, like a museum of human certainty gone terribly sideways. Honestly, it is fantastic!

There is something I find comforting about discovering that entire generations confidently believed things that now sound absurd. Weirdly, it makes me hopeful about the future, and hey, I'll take hope wherever I can find it these days.

Did you know, for example, that margarine was once marketed as a healthy alternative to butter? Or that doctors once endorsed cigarettes? Entire industries were built on 'facts' that now seem unfathomable to most of us.

And naturally, I wondered: where is the RetroCodex for leadership? Well, friends, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there isn't one. But if one did exist, some of the outdated leadership beliefs I've helped clients with in my executive coaching work would deserve a prominent place of honour, right beside smoking cigarettes in the office and mandatory skirts and stockings dress code (yep, it used to be a thing.)

The uncomfortable truth is that outdated leadership beliefs rarely look outdated when you're on the inside of them. They usually appear dressed up as other things, like professionalism, accountability, belonging, executive presence, or 'the way things are done around here.'

So in the spirit of public service, let’s scrape the mold off a few winners and see how today's truth challenges those outdated assumptions.

1.  GOOD LEADERS ALWAYS HAVE THE ANSWERS

This one has had an impressively long shelf life. For decades, leadership was often associated with certainty. The person at the top was expected to know, decide, direct, and project confidence, preferably without visible hesitation. That may have worked when business environments were slower and hierarchies were tighter. Today, that model starts to crack under complexity.

Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety at Harvard has shown that high-performing teams thrive when leaders create the conditions where people can raise concerns, share ideas, and challenge assumptions without fear. Learning organisations depend on candour, not theatrical certainty.

We have all seen the alternative: a leader makes a spectacularly wrong decision with unwavering confidence, and no one flags their concerns.

TODAY'S TRUTH: Don't pretend to know everything. People can often tell when you're bullshitting anyway, and that erodes trust faster than honest uncertainty ever will. Focus instead on creating enough trust that the best thinking in the system actually surfaces.

2.  IF YOU WANT SOMETHING DONE RIGHT, DO IT YOURSELF

Ahhh... the unofficial anthem of overwhelmed leaders everywhere. This belief often disguises itself as high standards. Sometimes it's called accountability. Sometimes it is a genuine focus on quality. And sometimes, if we are being really honest, it is ego dressed up in sensible shoes.

Liz Wiseman’s work in Multipliers draws a sharp distinction between leaders who expand the capability around them and those who unintentionally diminish it by becoming the bottleneck.

If every important decision, approval, rescue mission, or client issue must pass through you, that is not leadership excellence. It is a leadership model built on dependency.

TODAY'S TRUTH: Your job is not to be the hero of every operational subplot. Modern leadership means building capability, trusting good people with meaningful ownership, and resisting the seductive little voice that says, “Honestly, it’ll just be faster if I do it myself.”

3.  PROFESSIONALISM MEANS EMOTIONAL RESTRAINT

There was a time when professionalism seemed to require becoming emotionally indistinguishable from office furniture. Steady; controlled; stoic even (and before the modern Stoicism enthusiasts come for me, I'm referring to emotional suppression, not Stoic philosophy.) 

The assumption was that emotion made leaders look weak, messy, or unstable. Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence helped challenge that premise by showing that leadership is deeply relational work. People don't stop being human when they log in to work in the morning.

This does not mean unfiltered emotional leakage, dramatic oversharing, or turning every meeting into personal theatre, but real emotion that others can feel, recognize, and understand because it's authentic and universally human.

TODAY'S TRUTH: Professionalism is not the same as emotional suppression. Knowing and naming what you're feeling, understanding how it affects your behaviour, and paying attention to what others may be experiencing in response to you are all aspects of emotional maturity.

4.  PEOPLE NEED TO BE WATCHED TO STAY PRODUCTIVE

Well, this belief got a fresh makeover during the Covid pandemic, didn't it? While remote work was a lifesaver (and business saver), it was also uncharted territory for businesses. Suddenly, some leaders became strangely obsessed with green dots, login times, and whether Margaret was really still working at 4:17 p.m.

Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index report identified what they called productivity paranoia: 87% of employees said they were productive at work, but only 12% of leaders said they had full confidence their team was productive. Yikes, talk about a delta! This should not have surprised anyone: adults generally perform better when treated like adults.

TODAY'S TRUTH: Trust, clear expectations, autonomy, and meaningful accountability outperform surveillance. If your management strategy involves monitoring mouse movement, the issue may be less about productivity and more about trust and empowerment. Either way, it's worth exploring with a curious mindset.

5.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY MEANS BEING NICE

This one needs to be escorted out of the building along with its little cardboard box full of platitudes, toxic positivity, and matching 'Teamwork Makes the Dream Work' mugs.

Somewhere along the way, psychological safety got mistaken for permanent politeness, with no space or tolerance for disagreement, no discomfort, and no challenge. But that interpretation misses the point entirely.

Amy Edmondson has been clear that psychological safety supports high standards and honest conversations. It creates the conditions for people to speak honestly, take interpersonal risks, admit mistakes, and challenge thinking.

TODAY'S TRUTH: On a high-performing, healthy team, people can respectfully disagree, raise concerns, share their authentic views, and challenge ideas without fearing social punishment. If everyone is smiling while important truths remain unsaid, what you may be looking at is conflict avoidance dressed up as harmony.

6.  YOU NEED MORE EXECUTIVE PRESENCE

Translation: Somehow be more impressive (but we will provide zero operational definition for what that means, or how to do it.)

Executive presence has suffered some unfortunate branding. For years, executive presence has been confused with airtime, extroversion, charisma, confidence theatre, and that oddly polished panel-discussion voice people seem to acquire at conferences.

Susan Cain’s bestselling book Quiet challenged the long-standing assumption that extroversion naturally equals leadership effectiveness. Adam Grant’s research has also highlighted that leadership effectiveness depends far more on context and behaviour than personality stereotypes.

TODAY'S TRUTH: Influence is not volume, charisma, theatre, or performative posturing. Some of the most compelling leaders I've seen in action are quiet. They don't suck all the air out of the room trying to show how smart they are. They may say less, but when they do speak, people pay attention because their contribution actually moves the conversation forward.

7.  IF I'M BUSY, I'M IMPORTANT

Does your calendar resemble an aggressive game of Tetris? For years, chronic busyness has functioned as a strange status symbol. Packed calendars, midnight email replies, and performative exhaustion sends the message that if I am overwhelmed, I must be important.

Microsoft’s research on the 'infinite workday' has shown how digital work has steadily eroded boundaries, recovery time, and focus.

Packed calendars and performative exhaustion do not signal importance. Sometimes they convey weak boundaries, poor capacity management, or reactive operational focus with little strategic value.

TODAY'S TRUTH: Busy is not a leadership competency. Modern leadership requires protected thinking time, sound judgment, and enough strategic altitude to notice what others miss. If your calendar leaves no room to think, you may be demonstrating operational stamina while actively undermining your strategic credibility.

8.  LEADERS ARE NOT TO BE CHALLENGED

There was a time when leaders were expected to project authority and maintain distance. They did not invite dissent, challenge, input, or inconvenient truths from the people below them. Leadership was something to be respected, and in some workplaces, even feared. Suggesting to your boss that they might handle something differently would have been career-limiting behaviour.

Some remnants of that thinking still linger. Edgar Schein wrote extensively about how hierarchy can inhibit honest communication, especially when leaders fail to create the conditions for upward candour. And as leaders progress up the ladder and gain more authority, people often become even more selective about what they share with them.

TODAY'S TRUTH: If people decide that telling you the truth is unsafe, inconvenient, or pointless, you may be the last person to know what is actually going wrong. Strong leaders create the conditions for honest feedback to travel upward, not just downward.

SO WHAT IS STILL SITTING IN YOUR LEADERSHIP ATTIC?

The tricky thing about outdated leadership beliefs is that many of them genuinely did work back in the day, or at least seemed to. Some rewarded us earlier in our careers, which is exactly what makes them so sticky. The people who believed those old RetroCodex 'facts' were not foolish; they were operating with the assumptions, norms, and accepted wisdom of their time. Leadership is no different.

Nobody wakes up in the morning and consciously decides to lead like it's 1987. Old beliefs linger because they once helped us succeed, feel competent, or stay safe in systems that rewarded them. That does not make someone a bad leader. It simply means leadership has evolved.

Some of today’s most confidently held leadership beliefs will eventually look just as dated. The more interesting question is which ones you may still be holding onto without realizing it.

YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE

Most outdated leadership beliefs do not announce themselves with a little flag that says Hello, I am obsolete. They tend to feel sensible, responsible, and strangely familiar. This practice is designed to help you uncover one belief that may still be shaping your leadership, and then test whether it still deserves shelf space.

YOUR LEADERSHIP RETROCODEX

STEP 1: SPOT THE MOLD: Read through the beliefs in this article and notice which one made you uncomfortable, slightly defensive, oddly validated, or uncomfortably seen. That reaction is useful. Complete this sentence: One leadership belief I may still be holding onto is... Examples: "Good leaders should always have the answer." "If I want something done right, I should handle it myself." "Being busy means I am valuable."

STEP 2: TRACE ITS ORIGIN STORY: Most leadership beliefs started life as adaptations, not mistakes. Ask yourself: Where did I learn this? Who modelled this for me, or rewarded me for it? When did this belief first help me succeed? What did it help me avoid?

STEP 3: EXAMINE THE CURRENT COST: Now get brutally honest. Ask yourself: How might this belief be limiting me now? What does it cost my team? How does it affect trust? What undesirable behaviour does this belief keep reinforcing?

STEP 4: WRITE THE UPDATED LEADERSHIP TRUTH: If your old belief belongs in the RetroCodex, what replaces it? Complete this sentence: Today’s truth for me is... Example: Old belief: I need to stay involved in everything important. Today’s truth: My leadership value grows when I build capability instead of dependency.

STEP 5: RUN A LIVE EXPERIMENT: Within the next week, experiment with deliberately behaving according to your updated belief. Say less in the meeting. Delegate the thing. Ask the uncomfortable question. Admit you don't know. Protect thinking time. Invite dissent. Whatever your belief requires.

STEP 6: REFLECTION QUESTIONS: What happened? What surprised me? What story did my inner narrator start telling? What felt easier than expected? What still felt risky? What does this tell me about my next experiment?

If outdated leadership beliefs are influencing how you lead, and you're curious about what stronger, more modern patterns might serve you better, reach out for a free exploratory Executive Coaching conversation at www.leslierohonczy.com.

HOW DO YOU KNOW YOUR LEADERSHIP IS WORKING? Accurate Self-Assessment for High-Performance Leadership

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Most leaders I work with don’t struggle with effort. They’re showing up, working hard, and trying to get it right. The harder question just below the surface is whether all of that effort is translating into high-performance leadership.

If that question feels a bit uncomfortable, that’s understandable. Accurate self-assessment can be challenging. And as your leadership career moves up, signals get softer. People choose their words more carefully, and that makes it easy to fill in the gaps with our own assumptions. If things aren’t falling apart, it must be working. If the team is delivering, leadership must be effective. If no one is pushing back, things must be aligned. I’ve seen this play out with strong leaders more than once, and it rarely leads where they expect.

High-performance leadership shows up in patterns over time and in what happens when we are not present. The most useful indicators are often easy to miss because they sit in the background of day-to-day work. A more accurate read starts to show up when we pay attention to what repeats, not what happens once.

• Ownership: When something important is in motion, where does it land? Does it move forward through others, or return to us? Work that consistently comes back often points to how expectations, trust, or decisions are set. Leaders who are highly responsive tend to step in quickly, which may help in the moment but can train the system to route work back to them. Over time, ownership concentrates instead of spreading.

• Contribution: In meetings, are we hearing fully formed ideas, or cautious half-steps? High-performing teams speak before everything is perfectly shaped. When everything sounds safe, something is likely being held back. Leaders who jump in quickly with their own thinking can shorten the space others need to think out loud or challenge direction, which narrows contribution (even while conversations feel efficient).

• Decision Durability: When an agreement has been made, does it stick, reopen, shift, or stall? Agreement can happen quickly, while commitment shows up later. A decisive leader can drive toward closure fast, which can be useful, but it can also lead to premature agreement that doesn’t hold after people leave the room.

• Presence: How much depends on us being there? If momentum rises with our involvement and drops without it, the system is relying on us more than it should. What happens when we step out of an email thread or a meeting? Does work stall until we join, or do conversations stall until we weigh in with our opinion? High responsiveness amplifies this pattern by speeding up progress when we engage and slowing it down when we step back, creating uneven momentum.

If we watch closely, we start to notice patterns in how these signals show up in our everyday rhythm. And once those patterns become visible to us, we can't unsee them. A more interesting question then begins to emerge: How does my leadership style influence outcomes over time?

That question keeps our development work grounded in curiosity, and it opens up a different way of looking at what’s happening. If our impact is shaped by what others experience, rather than by what we intended, then a gap can open up. We may believe we are creating clarity while others feel pressure, or think we are being supportive while others experience us stepping in too quickly.

And here's another angle worth paying attention to: leadership is experienced over time through tone and timing. People learn how to respond to us based on repeated interactions, and those responses shape what becomes possible.

When we look at it this way, our self-assessment becomes more accurate because attention shifts toward observable patterns instead of internal confidence.

This is where experimentation becomes useful, because small adjustments create insights about what actually changes.

YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE

Choose one situation this week and run a small, deliberate experiment. Keep it simple so you can see what changes.

• In a meeting where you normally drive the conversation, hold your view for a few beats longer than usual, then watch who steps in and what emerges before you speak.

• Choose one decision that was made in a meeting and name ownership before closing the discussion, then leave the decision untouched for a few days and observe whether it holds or drifts.

Capture what you notice in real time. Look for shifts in ownership, contribution, and follow-through, and use those signals to adjust your next move.

Over time, your observations become data you can rely on. They show you where your leadership is creating movement, and where it is getting in the way. That’s the shift that sticks.

 If you are curious about how to evolve your leadership, reach out for a free exploratory Executive Coaching conversation at www.leslierohonczy.com.

FEEDBACK ISN’T YOUR PROBLEM (But Your Relationship to Feedback Might Be)

By Leslie Rohonczy, IMC™, PCC

Executive Coach | Leadership Development Expert | Author | Speaker | ©2026 | www.leslierohonczy.com

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Most leaders believe they’re open to feedback… right up until the moment they hear something they don’t like. But it’s what happens next that reveals our relationship to it.

I remember sitting across from a senior leader who told me he was "very open to feedback". He wasn’t posturing; he meant it. He regularly asked for input, encouraged it, and even thanked people for it. Technically, he was doing all the right things, right up until that critical moment.

His peer offered him feedback about a client meeting they attended together. Within seconds of hearing her observations, he stepped in with all the context: a bit of background, a quick clarification, a touch of justification, a hint of over-explaining, even a suggestion that she had misread his intentions; then a gentle repositioning of what he meant versus what actually happened. It was a lot. He was articulate, calm, and had been completely effective at shutting the whole thing down. His peer didn't argue or push back, and the conversation just wrapped itself up. From his perspective, it was a good exchange. From hers, it wasn’t worth pushing any further - or doing in the future.

This is where the real issue lies: we each have our own special relationship to feedback, a unique pattern of reactions that show up in the first few seconds after we hear it. That relationship determines whether the conversation opens up or closes down. While we’re looking for clear, useful input, our team and colleagues are asking themselves how much of this is actually safe to say.

Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard Business School has shown that when people sense even a small interpersonal risk, they adjust by softening their message, rounding off the edges, and removing the parts that might upset or land poorly. The feedback doesn’t disappear, but it loses its teeth, sometimes becoming so neutral and mushy that it's unrecognizable - and unusable as a result.

There’s another layer that shows up before feedback is even given: the way most leaders ask for feedback makes it harder to offer anything useful. “Is there anything I could do differently?” sounds generous, but it leaves the other person with too much space and not enough direction. The brain stalls. There’s nothing concrete to grab onto.

Now compare that to, “What’s one thing I could do differently in our next client meeting?” That question gives the other person somewhere to start. It’s specific, focused, and much easier to answer. This small shift can create a big difference.

Now layer that with what happens after the feedback lands, because this is where our relationship to feedback shows up in full colour. We rarely receive feedback as 'neutral data'. Most often, we see it as someone's interpretation of something they saw us say or do. It brushes up against our identity, competence, and reputation, and it pokes the part of us that wants to be seen as credible, valued, and in control. That means we're not just hearing the feedback; we're reacting to what we think it says about us as a person.

Our brains are wired to react fast. Research in social neuroscience by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA shows that perceived social threats, including criticism, can activate the same neural pathways as physical pain. Think about that: our brains interpret both as pain! So the urge to explain, clarify, or straighten the record isn’t a personality flaw; it's a hard-wired reflex. The issue shows up when we're not aware that the reflex has taken us over.

Our teams watch those micro-moments closely. They notice how long we stay with a hard comment, whether we get curious or defensive, and whether the conversation opens up or closes down. Over time, they adjust and bring us the version of feedback that keeps things moving, avoids friction, and sounds useful without creating risk.

And just like that, our access to deeper insights about ourselves narrows. Meetings still happen, conversations still feel productive, and we still believe we’re open to feedback. We just don’t realize how much of it never makes it to us.

Think about the last time someone offered you feedback. What did you do in the first few seconds after you heard it? Was there something that didn’t sit well? Was your instinct to move to resolve it? Did you stay open and curious with it? Did you explain? Did you have the urge to tidy the moment, or did you let it breathe? These are some common reactions to feedback in the moment. What's yours typically?

One leader I worked with ran a simple experiment. Every time he received feedback, he had to ask one more question about their observation. Not a deep dive series of questions that would feel like an interrogation, just one genuine question intended to help him understand what the other person was seeing. At first, it felt awkward and slower than his usual pace, and he worried it made him look unsure.

What actually happened was different. People started giving more details without being asked, offering examples, and staying in genuine conversation longer. The feedback became sharper and more useful because his stance in the moment had changed.

This is where stance matters. In feedback conversations, our job as the receiver is simple (but not easy): receive the feedback, thank the person for offering it, ask a clarifying question if something isn’t clear, and then reflect. Not defend; not explain; reflect. That reflection is where we close blind spots and gaps we can’t see on our own, and it’s the part most of us skip because it can be uncomfortable.

Nothing about the feedback itself had changed. His relationship to it had. We don’t need to agree with every piece of feedback we receive, and we don’t need to suppress our reactions. We do need to notice them and resist acting on them too quickly. Staying in the moment a little longer and asking a genuine question changes what becomes available to us. It also changes how people experience us, and that ultimately determines whether they will tell us what we need to hear.

YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE

Think about the last piece of feedback that stayed with you; the one that lingered, and felt genuinely uncomfortable. What happened in your head in the first few seconds?

Now imagine that moment again, but this time, you take on a deliberate stance as the receiver.

First, receive it fully. No interruption, no correction, no facial gymnastics. Just take it in without judgment or defense.

Second, acknowledge the person. Not just a quick “thanks,” but a genuine appreciation for both the perspective and the courage it took to offer it. Feedback, especially upward or sideways, feels risky. When we recognize that, we create the psychological safety for honesty in the future.

Third, get curious. Ask one question that helps you understand what they saw, heard, or experienced. Stay out of defending your intent and lean into understanding their reality. For example: “Can you say a bit more about what you noticed in that moment?” or “What impact did that have for you?”

Then, thank them for their feedback.

Lastly, and this is the part most people miss: reflect. Take time after the conversation to sit with it. Consider what might be true, even if it’s only partially true. Look for patterns, examples, and evidence of what others might be seeing that you’re not.

Reflect on these questions:

• What part of this feedback felt most uncomfortable, and why?

• What story did I start telling myself about what this means about me?

• What pieces might be valid here, even if I don’t fully agree?

• Where have I seen a version of this before?

• If I took this seriously, what would I experiment with doing differently?

After your reflection, take some time to close the loop. Let the person know what you took from the conversation and what you’re thinking about doing with their feedback. This builds trust and reinforces that their voice matters.

Try this once this week. Not perfectly, just deliberately. That’s where the shift starts.

If this surfaced a blind spot, or you want to deepen your relationship to feedback, reach out for a free exploratory Executive Coaching conversation at www.leslierohonczy.com.

AM I COACHABLE? A 5-Step Self-Assessment For Leaders Considering Executive Coaching

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Are you coachable? How do you actually know?

Have you received feedback about something you know you should work on, but you’re not fully convinced you’ll be able to shift it? Are you curious about executive coaching, but unsure whether you have what it takes to do the work well? Does having coaching support sound appealing, but you’re not sure this is even the right time to take the leap with a qualified coach?

Here’s what may already feel familiar to you. You’re not lacking in capability or motivation, but there’s likely something you can’t yet see clearly: a blind spot, a limiting belief, or a habitual response that’s shaping your behaviour. You’re thoughtful, competent, and you’ve likely spent a great deal of time analysing your situation, and still, something feels stuck.

You may have replayed the feedback conversation, talked it through with trusted people, read the latest trending books, attended the workshops, or listened to the podcasts. On paper, you may even know what you should do next. Yet when the moment arrives, the behaviour doesn’t quite shift, the decision doesn’t land, or the same pattern shows up again. Sometimes awareness is enough to be able to change a behaviour. But when insight doesn’t translate into different choices or behaviours, and you’re not sure how to work with that gap or blind spot, that’s where coaching can make a meaningful difference. 

If any of this sounds familiar, you’re in good company. Many people wrestle with the vulnerability it takes to seek this kind of support. When curiosity about coaching appears, it’s typically because you want greater awareness and traction. The question becomes: are you ready?

Over the years, I’ve worked with hundreds of leaders across sectors, levels, and personalities, and one thing has become very clear: executive coaching can be powerful, practical, and genuinely transformative. It can also be frustrating, circular, and expensive when the timing or focus is off. That difference often gets described as coachability, but it’s worth pausing here to name a distinction that will shape how you read the rest of this article.

This article’s designed to help you assess that for yourself with honesty and without judgement, while also helping you separate two things that are often blurred together: coachability and readiness. It isn’t meant to convince you to hire me or to position executive coaching as a cure-all. Its purpose is to help you decide whether this is the right conversation for you, right now.

WHAT COACHABILITY IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT

Before diving in, one important clarification. Coachability and readiness are related, but they’re not the same thing.

Coachability speaks to how you typically relate to feedback, uncertainty, and personal change. Readiness speaks to timing, context, and capacity, including what else is happening in your life and in the system around you.

You can be deeply coachable and still not ready. You can also feel ready for support, but struggle with some of the habits that make coaching effective. This assessment’s designed to help you notice both.

Coachability isn’t about being agreeable, positive, or easy to work with. Some of my most coachable clients are sceptical, analytical, and openly challenging, while some of the least coachable are polite, enthusiastic, and highly articulate about why nothing can really change.

Coachability also isn’t about having a clear goal perfectly defined right out of the gate. Many people start coaching with a vague sense of discomfort rather than a neat objective, and that isn’t a problem. In fact, it’s often a strong starting point for the coach and client to begin exploring and then crystallising the coaching topic.

Coachability’s about how you relate to yourself, your patterns, personality wiring, and defence mechanisms, and the possibility that your current way of operating, however successful it’s been in the past, may now be limiting you.

The most reliable way to assess coachability isn’t through labels or personality types, but through how you respond to a small set of very specific questions.

A SELF-ASSESSMENT YOU CAN ACTUALLY USE

Read the prompts below slowly and resist the urge to “perform insight,” meaning the temptation to sound self-aware rather than notice what’s actually happening for you in real time. Pay attention to your internal reactions as much as your answers, because irritation, resistance, relief, and curiosity are all useful data.

To make this more practical, I invite you to use a simple rating scale alongside each question. This isn’t a scorecard, and it isn’t a pass or fail test. It’s a way to notice patterns in how you typically respond.

After each question, rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 5 based on which description fits you most often.

1 = I’m protective or defensive by nature, even if I understand the feedback or situation intellectually

2 = I can occasionally stay open at first, but I close down when things start to feel uncomfortable

3 = I can sometimes stay open and reflective, but when the pressure builds, I revert to familiar patterns

4 = I can usually stay open and reflective, even when challenged, though certain situations still test me

5 = I can almost always stay curious, grounded, and willing to learn, even when the feedback or situation feels uncomfortable

There are no good or bad numbers here. The purpose is to notice where openness comes easily for you, and where it reliably gets harder.

1. HOW DO YOU RELATE TO FEEDBACK THAT DOES NOT MATCH YOUR SELF-IMAGE?

Think about the last piece of feedback that genuinely caught you off guard, not the kind you expected and not the kind you politely dismissed. What happened internally? Did you feel curious, even briefly, about what the feedback might be pointing to, or did your energy go immediately into explaining context, questioning the feedback giver’s intent, or coming up with reasons why the feedback was technically inaccurate?

Your self-assessment score: _____

Coachability doesn’t require you to agree with feedback, but it does require a willingness to stay present long enough to learn something from it. When feedback reliably triggers defensiveness, justification, or a strong need to be seen as right, coaching often feels uncomfortable very quickly. That doesn’t signal failure; it signals that the work will require a level of self-honesty you may or may not be ready to engage.

2. ARE YOU MORE INTERESTED IN EXPLAINING YOUR PATTERNS OR EXPLORING THEM?

Many leaders are excellent narrators of their own behaviour. They can explain why they react the way they do, how their background shaped them, and what pressures they’re under. This level of insight is valuable, and it’s also where progress often stalls.

Your self-assessment score: _____

Coachability shows up when someone’s willing to move beyond explanation into experimentation. Instead of staying with the question of why they’re like this, they become willing to ask what happens if they try something different.

When analysis consistently replaces action, coaching can feel repetitive. When experimentation’s allowed, even imperfectly, coaching tends to gain momentum.

3. HOW DO YOU HANDLE NOT KNOWING?

Executive roles reward decisiveness, expertise, and confidence, while coaching asks for something slightly different. It asks you to sit, at least temporarily, in uncertainty.

Your self-assessment score: _____

The question isn’t whether you enjoy not knowing, but whether you can tolerate it long enough to observe yourself in action. Leaders who are highly coachable aren’t less intelligent or decisive; they’re simply willing to slow their thinking long enough to notice what emerges.

When not knowing feels intolerable, or when ambiguity immediately reads as incompetence, coaching may feel destabilising rather than supportive.

4. DO YOU SEE YOURSELF AS PART OF THE PATTERN, EVEN WHEN OTHERS ARE INVOLVED?

Most leadership challenges involve other people, whether a peer, a boss, a team, or a system that genuinely makes things harder. Coachability doesn’t mean taking responsibility for everything, but it does involve examining how you’re participating in the pattern, even when others are clearly contributing.

Your self-assessment score: _____

It’s also important to name something explicitly here. Even highly coachable leaders can struggle to make progress if the system around them is misaligned. Organisational culture, role clarity, sponsorship, workload, and political dynamics all matter.

Coaching works best when there’s enough room in the system for reflection, experimentation, and learning. If your environment consistently punishes candour, vulnerability, or thoughtful pacing, that doesn’t mean you’re not coachable. It means readiness may depend as much on context as on personal willingness.

When your energy’s consistently focused on how to get others to change, coaching may feel limited. When curiosity extends to what’s within your control, including how you show up under pressure, and when the system allows some space to work with that, coaching has room to work.

5. ARE YOU WILLING TO EXPERIENCE DISCOMFORT IN SERVICE OF GROWTH?

Effective coaching isn’t confrontational, but it isn’t always comfortable. It surfaces habits you rely on, questions assumptions that’ve served you well, and invites you to experiment with behaviours that may feel awkward at first.

Your self-assessment score: _____

Coachable leaders aren’t fearless. They’re willing to feel mildly incompetent for a short period of time while learning something new. When discomfort consistently registers as danger, coaching may feel more threatening than helpful, which makes readiness an important consideration rather than a character judgement.

HOW TO MAKE SENSE OF YOUR RATINGS

Before moving on, pause and look across your ratings as a whole. Don’t add them up yet or average them. This isn’t about a score. What matters most is the pattern.

Notice where your ratings tend to cluster. Are there one or two questions where openness comes more easily for you, and one or two where defensiveness or hesitation reliably shows up? Those areas often point to the exact places where coaching does its most useful work.

If most of your ratings fall in the 4 to 5 range, coaching often feels like a stretch that’s energising rather than destabilising. You’re likely able to stay curious under pressure and to work productively with challenge.

If your ratings tend to cluster around 2 to 3, coaching can still be highly effective, but it may require a bit more time and patience as you build tolerance for uncertainty, feedback, or discomfort.

If several of your ratings are consistently at 1 or 2, that doesn’t mean coaching won’t work. It does suggest that timing, scope, or support structure matter greatly, and that naming this openly with a coach would be essential.

The goal of this assessment isn’t to decide whether you’re good enough for coaching. It’s to help you decide whether you’re ready to engage the work honestly, with support that fits where you are right now.

WHEN COACHING IS PROBABLY NOT THE RIGHT FIT

Coaching may not be the best investment at this moment if you’re primarily seeking advice or expert direction, if validation feels more important than challenge, if you hope a coach will fix a situation without requiring you to change how you operate within it, or if you’re navigating acute crisis, burnout, or mental health concerns that’d be better supported through therapy or medical care.

These aren’t character flaws; they’re signals about timing and fit.

WHEN COACHING TENDS TO WORK EXTREMELY WELL

Coaching’s often most effective when you sense that your current success is built on patterns that may not scale, when you’re willing to examine how your impact differs from your intent, when you want greater internal steadiness alongside external performance, and when you’re open to being surprised by what you discover about yourself.

This is often the point at which leaders move from doing leadership to inhabiting it more fully.

A FINAL REFLECTION BEFORE YOU DECIDE

The most coachable people I work with aren’t the ones who feel ready, confident, or certain. They’re the ones who are willing to tell the truth to themselves about where they are, without dramatizing it or minimising it.

If this article stirred defensiveness, curiosity, recognition, or resistance, that response matters more than whether you liked what you read.

YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE

At this point, you’ve taken an honest look at how you tend to relate to feedback, uncertainty, discomfort, and change.

Rather than treating this as a standalone exercise, I invite you to use what you’ve noticed to clarify your potential coaching topic.

Look back at your ratings and reflections and ask yourself:

• Where did I feel the most friction or defensiveness?

• Which question felt closest to a live issue in my leadership right now?

• What pattern, belief, or habit seems to sit underneath that reaction?

Those answers often point directly to a meaningful coaching focus, not a vague goal, but a real edge you’re currently navigating.

If you’re noticing a clear theme and you’re curious to explore it with support, an exploratory coaching conversation can help you test whether this is the right time, the right scope, and the right kind of coaching for you. There’s no pressure and no obligation, just a chance to think out loud with someone certified to help you explore yourself and your situation more fully.

Reach out for a free exploratory Executive Coaching conversation at www.leslierohonczy.com.

'SOFT SKILLS' ARE FOR SOFT LEADERS: Skipping the Hardest Part of the Job

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“Soft skills” are for soft leaders. There. I said it.

I know... You probably didn’t expect to hear that from me. When I first typed the title for this article, I thought, “Well, this feels a bit spicy for LinkedIn!” But stay with me.

The phrase “soft skills” has always given me hives. Not because I don't value the things that people usually mean when they say it, or that I think these things are optional or less important than technical skills. It’s because this limiting language massively underplays what relational skills actually bring to and demand from a leader.

And when I refer to “soft leaders”, I mean the ones who intentionally avoid or dismiss the EQ side of their work. By sidestepping, outsourcing, or dismissing them altogether, they're choosing to leave these core leadership skills undeveloped. Which means they’re only doing half their job.

Think about it this way: by the time someone reaches a senior leadership role, technical competence is rarely the hardest part of the job anymore. Most leaders I work with are smart and capable; they know their industry, their numbers, and how to make decisions under pressure. None of that is new territory.

But what many wish they had a playbook for is 'that people stuff', as one senior VP I worked with called it. While I find that phrase rash-inducing, too, it does capture what shows up when the org chart gets taller and the culture stakes get higher.

This is relational leadership work, and it’s not soft, optional, or incidental. It’s the work of leading humans, the ongoing responsibility of building trust, regulating yourself, repairing relationships, and creating the conditions for other people to do great work.

It's things like emotional heavy lifting, relational clean up, continuous self-regulation, and the cognitive load of making consequential decisions while absorbing other people’s anxiety. It's also about holding the dynamic role tension of staying calm, decisive, compassionate, and contained, often all at once, while steadying a room, staying grounded during conflict, and repairing trust after small but consequential cracks appear.

Somehow, we’ve decided to call all of this soft skills, as if they’re a collection of fluffy, nonessential, nice little extras that we can squeeze in after the real work is done. We can't. (Unless, of course, you’ve solved the space-time continuum itself, and if you have, please call me!)

In fact, this relational work doesn't sit alongside leadership. It is the leadership work.

THE PROBLEM WITH THE WORD “SOFT”

The word soft also suggests ease, or something that comes naturally, or implies that if this stuff feels difficult, you must be overthinking it.

That framing does real damage, because the skills required to lead people well are anything but easy. Not because the behaviours themselves require some elusive talent or mysterious art, but because of what they demand in the moment: the ongoing cognitive load, the emotional containment, the internal strain of holding competing expectations while still being watched, interpreted, and responded to in real time.

Some people have strong relational instincts; others don’t. Either way, the work of leadership still requires intention, experimentation, practice, and being able to apply it deliberately, especially when the pressure is on. It takes awareness, repetition, feedback, and a willingness to stay uncomfortable long enough to grow new muscle. If anything, these are strength skills, and while some organisations do track the relational side of leadership behaviours well, many still struggle to name, measure, and invest in them with the same rigour as technical performance. Think of this gap as an opportunity, not an excuse.

WHEN THE ROLE TURNS MORE HUMAN, AND HEAVIER

I hear versions of this in coaching sessions all the time: “I honestly thought this job would be about bigger decisions and clearer priorities. I didn’t realize how much of my day would be taken up by managing emotions, including my own.”

What they’re naming isn’t a gap in competence; it’s a gap in their approach to leadership. As scope increases, complexity follows, and decisions ripple farther. Conversations carry more weight. People pay attention not just to what you decide, but to how you show up while deciding it. The work shifts from doing the job yourself to creating the conditions for other people to do their best work.

GOING SOFT ON THE HARD STUFF IS COSTLY

Let me be very clear here: finding this side of leadership hard doesn’t make someone a weak leader. But avoiding it does.

Leaders who wave off relational work as “that people stuff,” or treat emotional regulation as secondary, are putting themselves and their teams at risk.

Minimizing this work comes at a real cost. Decades of research from organisations like Gallup consistently show that poor management and low trust drive disengagement, burnout, and turnover, all of which carry measurable performance and financial consequences. When leaders avoid or downgrade this part of the role, tension lingers longer, decisions slow down, and issues that could have been addressed early become far more expensive to fix later.

This is where the phrase soft leaders actually belongs, not as a moral judgment, but as a description of what happens when leaders neglect the hardest muscles to build. When authority, intellect, or expertise do all the heavy lifting and the human side stays underdeveloped, trust erodes, performance plateaus, top talent leaves, and the leader’s credibility is damaged. Strong leadership isn’t about being nice. It’s about being able to stay present, steady, and clear when things get messy, which they inevitably do.

Doing this work well means growing your ability to sit in discomfort without rushing to fix. It means giving feedback with clarity and compassion and without shaming. And it means noticing when a relationship needs attention and addressing it before it hardens into something that will need repairs down the road.

The leaders I've seen who do this well invest in developing their people not because it feels warm and fuzzy, but because it works. They understand that performance follows trust, and trust follows consistent, regulated leadership behaviour. There’s nothing soft about that. It’s disciplined, demanding work.

THE RELIEF MANY LEADERS NEED TO HEAR

If you find this relational side of leadership exhausting, demanding, or harder than you expected, nothing has gone wrong. You’re not deficient, and you’re not failing some invisible leadership test. You’ve simply uncovered muscles that this role now requires you to build.

What you do with that discovery can vary. Some lean into the work and start building those muscles deliberately. Some minimize its importance because it feels uncomfortable or inefficient, or they don't know where to start. Others resist it outright, often because it asks for capacities that feel foreign to their innate wiring. Each response says something important about how a leader understands the role, and what they believe leadership is actually for.

Although we're seeing some improvements in corporate leadership training, the fact is that most leaders were never trained on how to grow and use their relational leadership EQ superpowers. Leadership development still tends to prioritize strategy, execution, and frameworks, while expecting leaders to learn the relational work on the fly, often while feeling exposed and underprepared.

Naming this matters. It helps you shift from interpreting the struggle as a personal weakness to simply treating it as your next leadership skill set that deserves intentional investment.

YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE

Over the next week, run a simple self-observation experiment. No fixing. No improving. Just noticing.

STEP 1: TRACK WHERE THE ENERGY GOES

At the end of each day, jot down one or two moments where the people-facing demands of the role required real effort. This might be a conversation you delayed, a meeting that drained you more than expected, or a moment where you had to regulate yourself before responding.

STEP 2: NOTICE YOUR DEFAULT MOVE

For each moment you capture, note what you did next. Did you lean in, smooth it over, push it aside, delegate it, or tell yourself it could wait? There’s no right answer here. You’re simply building awareness of your default response.

STEP 3: NAME WHAT WAS AT STAKE

Ask yourself what really mattered in that moment. Trust? Clarity? Alignment? Psychological safety? Future performance? This step helps separate discomfort from consequence.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS (JOURNAL AFTER THE WEEK)

Once you’ve observed several moments, take 15–20 minutes to reflect in writing:

• Which situations consistently required the most self-regulation or emotional effort?

• When I avoided, minimized, or rushed through the relational work, what did those choices cost me, the team, or the work in the short term?

• What do my default responses to relational work suggest about how I currently define leadership?

• What strength am I being asked to build next as a leader?

This isn’t about judging yourself. It’s about making the invisible work of leadership visible, so you can choose how deliberately you want to engage with it going forward.

If you’d like support developing this side of your leadership, reach out for a free exploratory Executive Coaching conversation at www.leslierohonczy.com.