Two Kinds of High Performance
There is a sustainable version of high performance and an unsustainable one. They look the same from outside over the short term. The difference is what the performance is organized around.
Read articleBehavioral Health at Work Isn't Just an EAP Problem
EAPs were not designed for senior leaders — and the structural features that make them appropriate for general employee populations make them poorly suited for executive-level clinical situations.
Read articleWhat a Psychological Evaluation Adds to Executive Assessment
What clinical-grade psychological evaluation provides that 360s, personality inventories, and coaching conversations cannot — and when it belongs in the toolkit for high-stakes leadership decisions.
Read articleWhen Coaching Isn't Enough
Some executive coaching engagements surface questions that coaching alone cannot answer. Knowing when to route to clinical evaluation is not a failure of coaching — it is what good assessment looks like.
Read articleThe Meeting That Runs Instead of the Work
Meeting proliferation is not a time management problem. It is a displacement problem — the meeting-as-activity substituting for the work-as-activity when the real task has become too uncomfortable to approach directly.
Read articleRoles, Shadows, and Who Really Decides
Most interpersonal conflict in organizations is structural. Role ambiguity, shadow authority, and informal veto generate the same fights repeatedly — and they will continue until the structure is addressed.
Read articleWhy Succession Keeps Not Completing
Succession appears on the agenda with regularity in most professional services firms. And then the cycle completes without completing. The reason is not what it appears to be.
Read articleWhen the Founder Can't Let Go
When a founder can't complete their own departure, the explanation is usually 'they won't let go.' That's not wrong about the behavior. But it's wrong about what's generating it.
Read articleRevenue Isn't the Same as Readiness
In professional services firms, revenue production is what gets someone considered for leadership. But the capacity to produce revenue and the capacity to lead are genuinely different things.
Read articleThe Generational Bargain No One Wrote Down
Every professional services firm runs on a generational bargain that nobody wrote down. When the two cohorts have different readings of the same unwritten agreement, succession stalls.
Read articleThe Org Chart Says One Thing. The Authority Says Another.
Jaques spent fifty years on a deceptively simple question: why do organizations so reliably put people in the wrong jobs? His answer was structural, and it still holds.
Read articleWhen the Group Waits for Someone to Save It
Bion's dependency assumption: when a group organizes around waiting for someone to rescue it. It doesn't look like passivity. It looks like escalation, consultation, and stalled decisions.
Read articleWhat Your Team Is Actually Organized Around
Bion observed that any group operates at two levels simultaneously: one organized around its real task, one organized around something else entirely. The question is which is dominant.
Read articleWhat Happens to the Person After the Title Changes
Identity and role fuse across a long career. When the title changes — promotion, transition, retirement, ouster — the disruption isn't just professional.
Read articleThe Leader Who Can't Be Wrong
Some executives organize their authority around infallibility. The pattern works until it doesn't — and by the time it stops working, the cost to the team is already substantial.
Read articleImposter Syndrome Is the Wrong Frame
What gets labeled imposter syndrome in high performers is usually something structurally different — and the distinction matters for what to do about it.
Read articleThe Dream That Organized Everything
Levinson called it the Dream — the animating vision a person builds a career around. What happens when you achieve it and it doesn't resolve the question it was supposed to?
Read articleWhat a Plateau Actually Means
Most career plateaus are not skill deficits. They are mismatches between where someone is developmentally and what the role is demanding. Treating them as the same thing produces the wrong intervention.
Read articleThe Expert Who Gets Promoted
The transition from individual contributor to leader is a developmental loss, not just a role change. Most organizations treat it as neither.
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