Coach Me! Your Personal Board of Directors

1 Great Leaders Are Confident, Connected, Committed, and Courageous

Peter Bregman

Peter Bregman is the CEO of Bregman Partners. He coaches, writes, teaches, and speaks mostly about leadership. His sweet spot is as a strategic thought partner to successful people who care about being exceptional leaders and stellar human beings. He is recognized as the #1 executive coach in the world.

Sanjay (I have changed his name and some details to protect privacy) was founder and CEO of a technology startup that grew rapidly to $50 million.

Then it stalled out.

Sanjay had not previously grown a company past that stage, and he was unsure what was wrong. He was hoping his team would pull together and figure it out but that had not happened yet.

“I think I need to change out my leadership team,” he said to me, in anger and frustration.

“Or,” I countered, “maybe you need to scale your leadership in order to scale the company.”

Sanjay had not, to this point, done much leadership development work. He had ideas, told people what to do, and micromanaged the execution. He was impatient, angered quickly, and not very trusting. Turnover was high, employees felt unappreciated, and even the leadership team was unwilling to take risks for fear of the consequences.

Which meant that Sanjay was out of the communication loop (nobody was willing to disagree with him or bring him bad news for fear of his reaction).

In order to lead, you have to get your most important work done, have hard conversations, ...