This is not weakness. It is a structural reality of leadership that most organizations never address and most leaders never name.

As responsibility increases, the nature of relationships changes. People begin to filter what they share with you. Candor decreases. The informal conversations that used to happen naturally become more guarded. You are still surrounded by people, but the number of people you can speak to freely, honestly, and without consequence shrinks significantly. And most leaders respond to that shift by pushing through, assuming that needing connection is somehow incompatible with being in charge.

It is not. And the leaders who treat isolation as a badge of toughness eventually pay for it in ways they do not see coming.

Isolated leaders make worse decisions. Not because they lack intelligence or experience, but because they lack the honest input that good decisions require. They begin to lose touch with what is actually happening inside their organizations because the feedback they receive has been filtered through layers of caution. They drift from their values without realizing it because there is no one close enough to name the gap. And they burn out faster because they are carrying weight that was never meant to be carried alone.

In Leadership Is Tough, Mary Kelly and I write that isolation does not make leaders tougher. It makes them more vulnerable to blind spots. The leaders who sustain their effectiveness over time are not the ones who need the least support. They are the ones who are most intentional about building and maintaining the relationships that keep their judgment sharp.

How to lead well without leading alone.

Build a small circle of truth. Every leader needs at least one or two people outside their organization who will tell them what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear. A peer, a mentor, or an executive advisor who has no stake in managing the relationship can provide the kind of honest perspective that is almost impossible to get from inside.

Distinguish privacy from isolation. Some information must stay with the leader. That is appropriate and necessary. But there is a meaningful difference between discretion and disconnection. Leaders who confuse the two often find themselves entirely alone at exactly the moment they need perspective most.

Schedule reflection deliberately. When every hour is reactive, leaders lose the ability to process what is happening around them. Protect time each week for thinking, not planning or responding, just thinking. That space is where judgment recovers.

Watch for the warning signs. Irritability, overcontrol, withdrawal, and emotional flatness are not personality flaws. They are signals that capacity is running low. Leaders who notice them early can recalibrate. Those who ignore them burn out quietly and often damage their teams in the process.

Leadership was never meant to be a solitary practice. The leaders who last are not the ones who need the least. They are the ones who are honest enough to admit what they need and intentional enough to build it.

The post The Part of Leadership Nobody Talks About appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

And yet accountability is one of the most avoided leadership responsibilities we encounter in our work.

The reason why is understandable. Leaders want to be liked and fear damaging relationships. They hope issues will resolve on their own. They worry that holding someone to a standard will feel harsh or personal. These concerns come from a good place. But avoidance has a cost that most leaders underestimate until it is too late.

When accountability is inconsistent, high performers carry more than their share and eventually resent it. Standards become unclear, and employees fill the gap with their own interpretations of what is acceptable. Trust erodes as people watch different rules apply to different people. And the leader, who was trying to protect morale, ends up undermining it. Avoiding accountability does not feel supportive to the team. It feels inconsistent.

Here is the reframe that changes everything: holding someone accountable is an act of respect. It communicates that you believe they can meet the standard. It signals that their contribution matters enough to take seriously. It tells the team that effort and results are real here, not just a stated value. Accountability done well is not harsh. It is clear, timely, and focused on improvement rather than blame.

We see this most clearly when leaders finally address a performance issue they have been avoiding. Almost without exception, the rest of the team notices. And what they feel is not fear. It is relief. Because they have been watching the standard slip, carrying the extra weight, and waiting to see whether their leader would do anything about it. When accountability shows up consistently, belonging and culture strengthen because the habits match the values. The system works.

How to practice accountability as a leadership habit.

Set clear expectations upfront. Accountability starts before the conversation. If people do not know what success looks like, holding them to it feels arbitrary. Be specific about outcomes, timelines, and standards so there are no surprises on either side.

Address issues early. The longer a performance gap goes unaddressed, the harder the conversation becomes and the more damage accumulates. Early feedback is easier to receive and easier to deliver. It also signals that you are paying attention.

Apply standards consistently. Nothing erodes trust faster than selective accountability. When the same behavior produces different consequences depending on who is involved, people learn that fairness is conditional. Consistent standards applied to everyone protect both culture and belonging.

Focus on improvement, not blame. Accountability conversations are most effective when they are forward-looking. Name the gap, explain the impact, and ask what the person will do differently. The goal is change, not punishment. When you dwell on the past, blame sets in.

Follow through. A conversation without follow-through is not accountability. It is documentation. You need to check back in. Recognize improvement when it happens. Address it again if it doesn’t. Follow-through is what makes accountability real rather than superficial.

Culture, belonging, and accountability are not three separate initiatives. They are one system, sustained by the same daily leadership behaviors: clarity, consistency, and follow-through. In the final blog of this series, we bring all three together and look at what it means to lead in a way that allows people and performance to thrive.

This is the third blog in a four-part series on how culture, belonging, and accountability work together as one leadership system. Next week we will have a summary blog that ties all three together to see the full picture of how culture, belonging, and accountability all rise and fall together. To read the prior blogs by clicking here.

The post Culture Series Part 3: Accountability Is Not Harsh. It’s Respect appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

Isolation is a decision quality problem. And it is one of the least discussed risks in senior leadership.

When leaders become isolated, either by circumstance or by choice, the information they receive gets filtered. People tell them what they think they want to hear. Problems get managed before they reach the top. Dissent softens into silence. And the leader, operating on a version of reality that has been carefully curated by everyone around them, makes decisions based on incomplete and often distorted information. They are not making bad decisions because they are bad leaders. They are making bad decisions because they have lost access to the truth.

The pattern accelerates as authority increases. The more power a leader holds, the more people filter what they share. A junior employee will challenge a peer. They will rarely challenge a CEO. A direct report will raise a concern in private. They will rarely contradict a senior leader in a meeting. The feedback loops that help leaders course-correct quietly disappear, and the leader, who appears confident and in control, is actually operating with less honest input than almost anyone else in the organization.

In Leadership Is Tough, Mary Kelly and I write about what we call the trust gap that leaders don’t see coming. As leaders rise, trust becomes harder to read. People edit their feedback. They soften disagreement. They wait for direction rather than offering perspective. Leaders interpret this as alignment. It is almost always caution.

The cost shows up in decisions that miss what everyone else already knew, strategies that ignore ground-level reality, and cultures where problems surface only after they have become crises. By then, the damage is done.

How to make better decisions by breaking out of isolation.

Create structured truth-telling. Build explicit mechanisms for honest input. Regular one-on-ones where candor is expected and rewarded. Anonymous feedback channels that surface what people will not say directly. External advisors who have no incentive to manage the relationship.

Reward the messenger. Leaders who visibly appreciate difficult feedback, who thank people for raising concerns rather than minimizing them, gradually rebuild the candor that isolation destroys. It takes time, but the signal matters immediately.

Test your assumptions before you act. Before making a significant decision, actively seek out the perspective most likely to challenge your thinking. Not to be talked out of the decision, but to stress-test it against a reality you may not be seeing clearly.

Get out of the building. Some of the most valuable information available to senior leaders exists on the front line of their organizations. Walk the floor. Visit locations. Talk to customers. The further a leader gets from the work, the more distorted their picture of it becomes.

Isolated leaders do not fail because they stop caring. They fail because they stop hearing the truth. And by the time that becomes visible, the decisions that could have gone differently are already behind them.

The post How Isolated Leaders Make Worse Decisions appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

When we dug into what was happening, the pattern was clear. He never said good morning. He never said thank you. He issued directives and moved on. He treated the people who supported him as invisible unless he needed something. His explanation was simple: “I’m busy. I don’t have time for small talk.”

What he failed to understand is that those are not small moments. They are defining ones.

Leadership is not performed in boardrooms and all-hands meetings. It shows up in hallways, parking lots, and coffee lines. It shows up in how you respond to an email from someone three levels below you, how you treat a vendor who has no leverage over you, and how you speak to the person who cleans your office. Those moments feel inconsequential. To everyone watching them, they are anything but.

People are always watching their leaders, and not just for the big decisions. They are watching to see who you are when there is nothing to gain from being decent. When the audience is small. When no one important is in the room. What they observe in those moments tells them more about your character than any speech you will ever give. And what they learn shapes how they behave, what they’re willing to do for the organization, and how much of themselves they’re willing to bring to work.

The executive I described eventually lost two of his strongest managers. Not for more money. Not for a better title. Because they watched how people were treated and decided they didn’t want to work in that environment. Culture is not what leaders say it is. It is what leaders model, especially when they think no one is paying attention.

In Leadership Is Tough, Mary Kelly and I write about courtesy not as a nicety but as a strategic discipline. Leaders who are consistent in how they treat people, regardless of title or proximity to power, build environments where people feel safe contributing, speaking up, and taking ownership. Leaders who are courteous upward and dismissive downward build something else entirely. They build cultures in which people protect themselves, manage impressions, and do the bare minimum to stay out of trouble.

The math on this is straightforward. People remember how you made them feel long after they’ve forgotten what you accomplished. A leader can have an outstanding track record and still leave behind an organization that quietly exhales when they walk out the door. That is not a legacy worth building toward.

The leaders I most respect are the ones who are the same person in every room. They greet people by name. They listen when someone speaks to them. They say “please” and “thank you” not because someone is watching, but because that is who they are. That consistency, practiced daily across every interaction regardless of audience, is what earns the kind of trust that no performance review can manufacture.

You are always on stage as a leader. The question is not whether people are watching. They are. The question is whether what they’re seeing is the leader you intend to be.

The post How You Treat People When No One Is Watching Defines Your Leadership appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

When we conducted a 360-degree assessment, the truth was very different. His team wasn’t aligned. They were careful. One senior leader put it plainly: “I stopped offering input because every time I did, he explained why I was wrong. Eventually, I realized it was easier to stay quiet.”

The CEO had no idea. He thought he was educating his team. They experienced it as dismissal. And over time, that pattern had taught everyone around him that speaking up wasn’t worth the cost.

This is one of the most common and most damaging communication failures I see in senior leaders. Not dishonesty. Not cruelty. Just a consistent pattern of small behaviors that, over time, makes candor feel risky. And once people learn that candor is risky, leaders lose access to the one thing they need most: the truth about what is actually happening in their organization.

Trust doesn’t break in a single moment. It erodes through repetition. The leader who routinely dismisses ideas before fully hearing them. The one who makes commitments in meetings and quietly forgets them. The one who shares information selectively, always waiting for the right moment that never quite arrives. The one who holds some people to standards that others are allowed to ignore. None of these behaviors feels catastrophic in isolation. But people are keeping score, and the cumulative effect is a team that has learned to manage their leader rather than level with them.

Research consistently shows that more than half of employees trust a complete stranger more than they trust their own manager. That number reflects something real about how most leadership communication actually lands. Leaders talk. People filter. And the gap between what a leader believes they’re communicating and what their team actually receives widens the more authority the leader holds back.

In Leadership Is Tough, Mary Kelly and I identify the specific behaviors that quietly destroy trust over time. Being consistently late signals that other people’s time doesn’t matter. Withholding information to control the narrative signals that people can’t handle reality. Taking credit for team results signals that loyalty only flows one direction. Tolerating poor behavior from high performers signals that standards are negotiable. Each of these is a communication, whether the leader intends it as one or not. And each one makes the next honest conversation harder to have.

The fix is not a communication training program. It is a leadership habit.

1. Following through – do what you say you will do, every time, not most of the time.
2. Sharing information – earlier rather than later, even when the picture is incomplete.
3. Respond with curiosity – It requires responding to pushback with curiosity instead of correction.
4. Consistency – hold the same standards for everyone regardless of their performance level or their relationship to you.

The CEO I mentioned eventually made those changes. It took time for his team to believe they were real. That is always how trust recovery works. People don’t respond to the announcement of change. They respond to the pattern, repeating it long enough that they stop waiting for it to revert.

Your team is watching how you communicate every day. Not just in what you say but in what you do after you say it. The gap between those two things is where trust either builds or quietly disappears.

The question worth asking is not whether your team trusts you. It’s whether you’ve made it safe enough for them to tell you if they don’t.

The post The Communication Habit That Is Slowly Destroying Your Team’s Trust appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

When we sat down with the employees, the answer came quickly. Their leader regularly talked about the company’s values. He referenced standards in team meetings. He was vocal about what the culture stood for. And then he showed up late to work almost every day.

It had become a running joke among the team. When someone was heading out the door in the morning, a coworker would call after them, “Don’t be late,” and they would both laugh. Seems harmless, but it was the way the employees processed their frustration over the situation – a leader who expected standards of them but couldn’t hold himself to them. That leader had lost his team’s respect, and he had no idea.

This is not an uncommon finding in our survey work. Culture problems rarely show up uniformly across an entire organization. They show up in pockets, in specific departments or locations, and when we trace them back to their source, they almost always lead to a single leader whose behavior has created a gap between what the organization says it stands for and what employees actually experience every day.

The gap is rarely dramatic. It doesn’t usually start with a leader who openly defies the values. It starts with smaller contradictions. A leader who talks about accountability but never holds anyone to a standard. One who champions collaboration in all-hands meetings but hoards information and operates in silos. One who emphasizes respect but interrupts, dismisses, and speaks over people in their own team meetings. Each of these contradictions sends a message louder than any value statement on a wall ever could.

Culture is not what leaders say. It is what leaders model, and the moment a leader stops living up to the standards they expect of others, those standards begin to lose their meaning for everyone watching. Employees are perceptive. They notice the gap quickly, and once they do, cynicism sets in. The most engaged employees, the ones with the highest standards for themselves and the lowest tolerance for double standards, are usually the first to leave. What remains is a team that has learned to go through the motions, say the right things in the right settings, and quietly disengage from any real investment in the culture they no longer believe in.

The most important thing leaders at every level need to understand is this: you do not get to choose your team’s culture. You get the culture you model, value, and reward. If you are late, lateness becomes acceptable. If you avoid accountability, your team learns that accountability is optional. If you operate in silos while preaching collaboration, your team will collaborate only when someone is watching.

Walking the talk is not a leadership nicety. It is the foundation on which everything else is built. No culture initiative, no values workshop, and no engagement survey follow-through will close the gap between what a leader says and what a leader does. Only the leader’s own behavior can do that.

The employees at that location didn’t need a new culture program. They needed a leader who showed up on time – who walked the talk.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post When Your Culture Says One Thing and Your Leaders Do Another appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

Being liked and being trusted are not the same thing. Leaders who confuse the two almost always find out the hard way.

A leader who needs to be liked will soften feedback that needs to be direct. They will avoid the performance conversation that has been overdue for months. They will make exceptions for people they care about that they would never make for others. Over time, the team learns that standards are negotiable, that effort is optional, and that the leader’s warmth is more reliable than their follow-through. The employees who were already inclined to coast take full advantage of a leader who has a high need to be liked. The employees who came to work to contribute and grow start looking for somewhere they’ll be held to a higher standard.

Trust is built differently than likability. Likability comes from making people feel comfortable. Trust comes from making people feel certain. Certain that the leader means what they say. Certain that the standards apply to everyone. Certain that when something isn’t working, the leader will say so directly rather than let it linger. A team that trusts their leader may not always feel comfortable, but they always know where they stand. That clarity is what high performers are actually looking for, and it’s what a likable-but-not-trusted leader can never quite provide.

The shift happens when a leader begins enforcing standards consistently. It is rarely comfortable at first. The employees who had been taking advantage of the leader’s reluctance to hold the line will push back. Some will complain. Some will test whether the new standard is real or temporary. But the top performers, the ones the organization most needs to keep, will notice. And what they notice is that the leader finally respects the work enough to protect it.

How to lead from trust, not from likability.

Separate care from comfort. Genuinely caring about your people and keeping them comfortable are not the same thing. The most caring thing a leader can do is give honest feedback, hold the line on standards, and invest in people’s growth even when that investment is uncomfortable. Care shows up in clarity, not in leniency.

Hold the standard for everyone. The fastest way to lose the trust of your best people is to make exceptions for your least accountable. When standards apply selectively, the message is clear: effort doesn’t matter here. Consistent accountability is not harshness. It is fairness.

Deliver feedback early and often. Leaders who avoid difficult feedback are not protecting their relationships. They are eroding them. When feedback is delayed or softened beyond recognition, it is usually not even heard, or respected. Direct, timely feedback signals that the leader respects the person enough to tell them the truth.

Let respect be the goal, not approval. Leaders who need approval will always struggle with accountability because accountability risks disapproval. Shifting the internal measure from “do they like me” to “do they respect me” changes what decisions feel possible. Respect is earned through consistency, honesty, and follow-through. Approval is earned through agreement, and it disappears the moment you stop giving people what they want.

Being liked is not a leadership flaw. The problem is when it becomes the goal. Leaders who need their team’s approval to feel effective will always find a reason to avoid the conversation that needs to happen.

Trust outlasts likability every time, and is what actually moves teams forward.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post The Difference Between Being Liked and Being Trusted appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

That’s not an indictment. It’s a structural reality. As leaders rise, the feedback they receive gets filtered. People stop saying what they actually think. Disagreement gets softened. Problems get managed before they reach the top. Leaders interpret the absence of pushback as alignment. It usually isn’t. It’s caution.

Trust doesn’t disappear in dramatic moments. It erodes into small ones. The meeting where the leader dismissed an idea without really hearing it. The commitment that was made and quietly forgotten. The decision was announced without explanation. The feedback that never came until the annual review. None of these feels catastrophic in isolation. But people are keeping score, and the cumulative effect of those moments is a team that has learned to be careful around their leader rather than candid with them.

In my work coaching CEOs, I’ve found that the leaders most surprised by a trust problem are almost always the ones who confuse silence with safety. When nobody is challenging you, it doesn’t mean everyone agrees. It often means they’ve learned that challenging you isn’t worth it. That dynamic is invisible from the top, which is precisely what makes it so dangerous.

Research shows that more than half of employees trust a complete stranger more than they trust their own manager. That number should stop every leader cold. It means that in most organizations, the default relationship between leaders and their teams is one of managed distance rather than genuine connection. People do what’s required. They protect themselves. They wait to see what’s safe before they offer what’s real.

The behaviors that erode trust are rarely dramatic. They are ordinary. Being consistently late to meetings signals that other people’s time doesn’t matter. Withholding information because “the timing isn’t right” signals that people can’t be trusted with reality. Taking credit for a team’s work signals that loyalty is a one-way street. Tolerating poor behavior from a high performer signals that standards are negotiable. As Mary Kelly and I write in Leadership Is Tough, trust is built through patterns, not moments. And it is broken the same way, quietly, predictably, and usually long before the leader realizes it’s happening.

The good news is that trust is recoverable. But recovery requires leaders to do something most find uncomfortable: ask directly whether it exists. Not in a survey. Not in a group setting. In a one-on-one conversation, the leader makes it genuinely safe for someone to tell them the truth. That kind of conversation is rare precisely because it requires the leader to be willing to hear something they may not want to know.

The leaders I’ve watched rebuild trust successfully share one characteristic. They stopped assuming it was there and started behaving as though it had to be earned every day. They followed through on commitments. They communicated early rather than late. They gave credit generously and took accountability directly. They stayed consistent when consistency was inconvenient.

Trust is not a feeling. It is a track record. And in most organizations, that track record is more fragile than leaders think.

The question worth asking today is not whether your team trusts you. It’s whether you’ve given them enough consistent reasons to.

The post The Trust Your Team Has in You Is More Fragile Than You Think appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

Your strongest leaders are the ones absorbing the most pressure. They take on the hardest problems. They cover the gaps around them. They show up prepared, stay late, and rarely complain. And because they keep delivering, most CEOs assume they’re fine. That assumption is one of the most expensive mistakes I see in organizations today.

Burnout in senior leaders rarely looks dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as shortened patience in meetings that used to be productive. Decisions that take longer than they should. A leader who used to push back constructively is going quiet. Emotional flatness where there used to be energy. By the time those signals are visible enough to act on, the damage is usually well underway. In many cases, by the time a CEO notices, the leader has already started looking for a way out.

What makes this particularly costly is the ripple effect. When a senior leader burns out, it doesn’t stay contained to that person. Research shows that burned-out leaders drive a significant drop in team engagement. Their people pick up on the flatness, the irritability, the withdrawal, and they respond in kind. The leader who was once your strongest cultural asset becomes, quietly and without intention, a drag on the people around them. And because it happens gradually, most organizations don’t connect the drop in team performance to the leader’s depletion until long after the fact.

The root cause is almost always the same. Organizations keep adding to their strongest leaders without ever subtracting. Every new initiative, every crisis, every gap in the leadership bench gets handed to the person most likely to handle it. There is no audit of what they’re already carrying. There is no conversation about capacity. There is just another ask, followed by another yes, because that’s what strong leaders do. Until they can’t anymore.

In Leadership Is Tough, Mary Kelly and I write about resilience not as a personality trait but as a capacity that has to be deliberately built and protected. Leaders who treat recovery as optional eventually pay for it in judgment, relationships, and performance. The same is true at the organizational level. CEOs who treat their senior leaders as inexhaustible resources eventually find out, at the worst possible moment, that they aren’t.

The fix is not a wellness program or a reminder to take a vacation. It is a leadership conversation. It starts with the CEO asking, directly and specifically, what the leaders closest to them are carrying and whether that load is sustainable. Not in a performance review. Not in a group setting. One-on-one, with genuine curiosity about the answer.

It also requires CEOs to look honestly at how they distribute work. If the same three or four leaders are on every critical initiative, that’s not a talent strategy. That’s a burnout pipeline. Building bench strength, developing the next tier of leaders, and distributing responsibility more broadly are not just succession planning priorities. They are the most direct protection a CEO has against losing the people they can least afford to lose.

Your best leaders will not tell you they’re burning out. They’ll keep delivering until they stop. The question is whether you’ll see it coming or find out after they’ve already decided to leave.

The leaders who stay and sustain their performance over the long haul are the ones whose CEOs noticed before it became a crisis. That kind of attention is not soft. It is strategic. And right now, in most organizations, it is overdue.

The post Why Your Best Leaders Are Quietly Burning Out appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

When I hear that pattern, I know exactly where we are.

Deflection is one of the most common behaviors we encounter in executive coaching. It isn’t always conscious. Many leaders who deflect responsibility genuinely believe the story they’re telling. What they haven’t examined is their own role in creating or maintaining the conditions around them, and more importantly, what they’re going to do about it, regardless of who caused them.

In our experience, coaching has roughly a 50 percent success rate, and that rate has almost nothing to do with the coach or the process. It has everything to do with how receptive the leader is to examining their own role honestly. Leaders who resist that examination don’t just limit their own growth. They limit everyone around them. A team led by someone who deflects responsibility learns quickly that accountability flows downward but not upward. Trust erodes.  Whether a leader has the courage to own their outcomes determines their success as well as that of their team.

There are typically three reasons leaders resist coaching. Some deflect out of arrogance, a genuine belief that the problem lies with everyone else. Others deflect out of fear of what they might discover if they look honestly at themselves. And some deflect out of distrust, a suspicion that coaching has been arranged not to develop them but to build a case against them. Each requires a different conversation, but all three lead to the same place if left unaddressed.

How to move a resistant leader forward.

Turn the conversation toward response, not fault. The moment a leader begins attributing everything to external factors, redirect to what they control. The question is never whether the situation is fair. The question is what they are going to do about it.

Connect ownership to reputation. Leaders who resist feedback often respond when the stakes become personal. How a leader handles adversity, including adversity they didn’t create, is visible to everyone above and below them. That visibility shapes how they are seen, developed, and ultimately advanced.

Name the pattern directly. Resistant leaders rarely hear honest feedback from anyone in their organization. Part of the coaching relationship is creating the conditions where direct feedback can land. That requires trust, but it also requires the courage to say what others won’t.

Recognize the limits of the process. Not every leader who enters coaching is ready to change. When a leader continues to deflect after repeated sessions, the most honest thing a coach or a senior leader can do is name that reality. Continuing to invest in someone who has no intention of examining themselves or changing is going to stagnate themselves and their team.

Coaching works when leaders are willing to do the hardest part: looking at themselves honestly and deciding that their response to the situation matters more than who caused it. That willingness cannot be manufactured from the outside. No matter how much you try, you can’t motivate someone to change.

The leaders who come out the other side of a difficult coaching engagement stronger are almost never the ones who arrived ready to agree with everything. They were the ones who were eventually willing to stop deflecting and start owning, stop explaining why it wasn’t their fault, and start asking what they were going to do about it anyway.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

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