A Seeming Contradiction
A highly experienced and deeply successful CEO is confused. On paper, his organization is thriving: from the brink of financial ruin, the company is profitable for the first time in years; from decades of neglecting technology, their systems are now current, safe, and efficient; from uncertainty, the employees now share the success as raises and new benefits. In reality, the mood in the organization is worse than it was in the times of decline. Morale declines rapidly, while resistance to his leadership mounts. The very mood seems dark.
The CEO had succeeded by every traditional business metric. He did not understand how it was possible for the people of the organization to feel anything other than hope. Through coaching, he discovered that his profound competence had a blind spot.
Meeting Thomas
Our CEO, Thomas, came to coaching unable to decide if he was more confused or frustrated by the situation he faced. Now in his early 60s, he had an impressive record of professional achievement stretching back decades. He entered the business world with an Ivy League undergraduate degree and an MBA from the top business school in his field. Working largely in the Financial Services industry, Thomas had led teams and later organizations through significant upheavals, including the technology booms of the late 20th century and the economic collapses of the early 21st century. Noted by his leaders, peers and employees for his strategic thinking, financial acumen, operational efficiency, decisive action, and especially his strong work ethic, he has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to rescue teams and companies from ruin.
Thomas has rather traditional views of work and the workplace. He treats everything in a business as rational, results-driven, and meritocratic. Good work produces good results and good rewards. Feelings are private matters, not workplace concerns. This logical, empirical approach to business has led to considerable success: he has numerous successful organizational turnarounds to his credit.
He comes to a small financial services organization to succeed a long-tenured, well-liked CEO who was affable and caring but neglected the business itself. It is important to note that Thomas is not the antithesis of the old CEO: he is not harsh where the old CEO was kind, or misanthropic where the old CEO was affable. Thomas is a competent, ethical, and hardworking CEO, and he genuinely cares about the success of his company and his people.
Thomas must rectify the declining revenue, operational inefficiencies, technological deficit, and lack of direction.
The Good and the Inexplicable
Thomas had already achieved profound success in his first 12 months as CEO. Revenue first stabilized then increased markedly. New technologies reduced costs and attracted fresh clients. Thomas established a new leadership team and a new strategic direction to carry the organization through the retirement that he envisioned in about 10 years. From a business perspective, Thomas was already successful, and the trajectory was improving daily.
In the midst of these positive and unlooked for developments, a different trend began to emerge that surprised and confused Thomas. His employees, who now had more job security and more financial reward than had been at all possible even the year before, seemed blind to the positive developments. If anything, they behaved as though the company was still doomed. Though Thomas had been there a relatively short time, he saw signs of change in his employees that caused significant concern.
The new behavior broke down into four rough types: transactional, fearful, secretive, and resistant. The transactional behavior appeared as a dull lack of initiative and curiosity; people did what was asked and not a bit more. Fearful behavior went further than transactional, manifesting as reluctance or refusal to bring problems or ideas to leadership. Secretive behavior naturally followed as employees withdrew from the organizational structure and worked as independently as possible. Finally, resistant behavior emerged, where the fear and secrecy gave way to open resistance and significant insubordination.
These behavioral changes created a new set of problems. Under the previous CEO, employees were, in their own words, treated more like family than as workers. Collaboration and cooperation were certainly not excellent, but it felt more natural to trust and speak openly about feelings and uncertainties. For Thomas, that informal, familial atmosphere was one of the major contributors to the organization’s near-collapse. A company cannot exist without financial success; all of the camaraderie and paternal affection in the world will not sustain an organization that cannot pay its employees.
A Blind Spot Revealed
Thomas was honestly confused. He had been fair and consistent, he paid well, and he provided clear direction, and yet his company was in danger of dissolving in the midst of its first successes. From his perspective, he had done everything a good CEO should do: restored financial health, modernized operations, established strategic direction. The business metrics proved his competence. He did not understand how the culture could possibly deteriorate under these conditions.
An unexpected answer came when Thomas turned to one of the longest-tenured employees, the interim head of HR, for insight into the deteriorating culture. She had worked under both CEOs and understood the organization’s history in ways Thomas could not. In their conversation, she gently juxtaposed the paternal and familiar style of the previous CEO with Thomas’s practical, results-focused approach. “People felt like more than just employees under him,” she said. “They feel like mere employees under you.”
Thomas’s first reaction was indignation. He did not accept the idea of running a business as a social club, and he certainly did not approve of a CEO seeking popularity instead of achieving measurable success. “Yes, the previous leader was beloved,” he told her, “and he nearly bankrupted us. I saved this organization. That should matter more than whether I’m liked.” The HR employee listened, then said, “This isn’t about your ability to lead; you’re an excellent business leader. This is about leading people who are not used to being “just employees” in an organizational machine.” She then said something that surprised Thomas considerably: “You might benefit from working with a leadership coach.”
Thomas initially dismissed the suggestion. Coaching felt like an admission of failure, and he had spent his career succeeding without it. But over the following days, as he watched talented employees disengage and felt the undercurrent of resistance and even defeat in every meeting, he recognized a genuine risk. Despite the massive business improvements in his first year, he might lose the company, not through financial collapse, but through cultural disintegration. Reluctantly, he agreed to explore coaching.
Enter the Coach
Though he was initially resistant, Thomas chose coaching because he saw a genuine risk of losing the company despite the massive business improvements in his first year. He knew almost nothing about what to expect, but assumed that a coach would handle the interpersonal, emotional challenges plaguing the organization. In Thomas’ mind, he had stumbled onto a uniquely emotional organization—something foreign to his considerable experience—that would benefit from an outside expert who specialized in such things.
In my first conversation with Thomas, it quickly became clear that he saw the coach’s role as that of a problem-solver. He had an ill-defined problem with some overly emotional employees, and he expected that the coach would diagnose and solve that problem. “I need help managing the emotional volatility here,” he explained. “People are upset despite having every reason to be optimistic. I hope that you can help them see the situation more rationally.”
I began by explaining coaching to Thomas. The power of coaching in this case did not rest in other people, but rather in him. Given his experience in development and transformations, I used Organizational Change Management as an example. Leadership coaching is similar to Organizational Change Management in that both rely on sponsors for success: if a change needs to happen at a company, but the leader does not publicly lead that change, it will more than likely fail. Even if he had unluckily inherited an entire organization of dysfunctional employees (which I admitted to him that I doubted) the coaching process would still begin with him as their leader. When an organization is falling apart, the cure must come from the leader’s willingness to examine and adapt his own approach.
Thomas agreed in principle, albeit with marked skepticism. “I understand the concept,” he said, “but I truly cannot see what more I could do. I’ve already done so much to turn this place around.” This was not defensiveness, but rather honest confusion. He had fulfilled every leadership responsibility that he knew.
As with any new client, Thomas and I began with the Energy Leadership Index Assessment (ELI). The ELI is a present-state evaluation that measures a client’s emotional and energetic patterns at a specific moment in time. Given what I already knew about Thomas, his organization, and the intensifying problems, I expected results indicating a leader strong in strategic and analytical thinking but limited in emotional awareness.
The results confirmed my hypothesis, though they surprised Thomas. The assessment revealed a man who excelled at rational analysis and decisive action but who operated almost entirely in what the ELI framework calls “catabolic” energy when it came to interpersonal dynamics—energy characterized by judgment, conflict, and emotional disconnection. His scores showed virtually no awareness of or engagement with the emotional landscape of his organization.
Thomas’ surprise came, not from the content of the results, but rather from seeing his patterns quantified and displayed so starkly. “I recognized that I don’t value emotions in the workplace,” he admitted later. “I’ve never considered that a weakness—it’s how business works. Or at least, how it’s supposed to work.” He looked at the assessment results again. “What I wanted from coaching was a way around emotions, not a way through them.”
That admission became the foundation of our work together. Thomas had operated in this framework successfully for decades. When he entered business, emotional engagement was not merely undervalued, but was considered unprofessional. Importantly, Thomas had seen this unemotional approach to business produce consistent success, both for himself and for his peers, throughout his career. He did not see any weaknesses in his approach and thought, quite reasonably, that bringing emotions into the workplace would unnecessarily complicate and distract from the tasks at hand.
The question was whether he could recognize that the business world itself had changed, and whether he was willing to develop a competency he had never imagined.
The Reframe
Part of my role as a coach is to help my clients see their blind spots, and the first step in that process is to point out that blind spots are rarely the individual’s fault. In Thomas’ case, he vaguely understood that the rules of the business world had changed, but he did not see the need. He assumed that the change towards a more emotionally connected workplace had more to do with generational differences than deeper human needs for meaning and validation. For Thomas, the emotional component felt like additional, unrelated work, complicating something that should be straightforward employment.
Coaches help their clients challenge entrenched perspectives. Business itself had evolved while Thomas, and many people like him, did not notice. As he neared the end of his career, the inescapable development was that operational excellence is unsustainable without relational health. People need connection and are no longer willing to leave that need aside during work hours. In order to be an exemplary CEO in the 21st century, emotion is not optional. The language of emotions, once relegated to soft skills, had taken on new vitality and new terminology: Emotional Intelligence (EI). Thomas slowly recognized a previously unconsidered possibility: he might become a better leader and better businessman if he actually embraced emotions.
In my coach training program, we were told that there are not often epiphanies during coaching sessions. Insights tend to accumulate gradually, building over weeks until a client’s perspective shifts almost unnoticed. When epiphanies do happen, we usually hear about them after the fact, as clients report breakthroughs that occurred between sessions rather than during them.
Thomas’s breakthrough came in exactly that way, during an ordinary hallway conversation that changed everything.
The Turning Point
I had spent weeks working with Thomas on the concepts of emotional intelligence and relational leadership. He showed reluctant openness to these ideas because he was eager to find something that would help the company’s dire situation, but I could sense his deep skepticism. The concepts felt touchy-feely to him, disconnected from the practical realities of running a business.
Then something shifted. After a meeting about an upcoming sales presentation for a potential client, Thomas found himself walking back to his office alongside one of his senior sales specialists, a woman he privately considered one of the worst symptoms of the overall decline in morale. She had been with the company for years, was technically competent, but had become increasingly withdrawn and difficult to read over the past months.
Acting against every business instinct he had, Thomas decided to try one of the practices we had discussed. He stopped in the hallway and asked her, simply, “How are you feeling these days?”
He told me later that she looked positively shocked. Thomas, having tried this coaching technique for the first time, was already wondering whether he had made a mistake. Then, after a long pause, she began to talk. She described how disruptive and disorienting the last year had been for her. Thomas, himself barely knowing what to say, pushed past the discomfort and asked her if she would be willing to share more. She began to speak quickly. Yes, the company was more profitable. Yes, her job was more secure than it had been in years. But she felt like she was working for a completely different organization, one where she no longer understood the unwritten rules or felt confident in her relationships with leadership. She missed the sense of being known, of mattering as a person rather than as a function.
As she talked, Thomas found himself genuinely listening rather than planning his response or defending his decisions. He simply let her share her experience. When she finished, he thanked her for her honesty.
What happened next caught him completely off guard. She thanked him, her eyes filling with tears, for asking her how she was doing. “No one has asked me that in months,” she said. “I thought you didn’t care.”
Thomas came into our next session visibly different. He was not transformed, but he was open in a way he had not been before. “I think I understand now,” he said. “It’s not that emotions are getting in the way of the work. For her, the emotions are part of the work. And I’ve been acting like they don’t exist.” He paused, then added, a bit ruefully, “Maybe there’s something to this after all.”
A New Thomas
Thomas was now far more open to the idea of EI in the workplace. However, he believed that he had to change himself fundamentally in order to succeed; that he would need to leave his experience aside and become a new leader from scratch. Our first effort in coaching, then, was to disabuse him of this idea. His competence, experience, standards, and values were all vital, not only to his professional presence, but to his own identity. This was a matter of expanding, not replacing, his leadership.
Even with his new enthusiasm to try new things, Thomas decided during coaching to begin with small steps. Trying small, deliberate changes allowed Thomas to build confidence and gauge the reaction as he built his new leadership style. Working together, we identified four ways that Thomas could practice this new framework.
Check-ins before business
Given his accustomed leadership style, it was unsurprising that Thomas ran meetings efficiently with a tight agenda. The first emotional practice he adopted was, therefore, one of the most difficult and the most rewarding. He made a habit of beginning each meeting with a check-in about the participants’ wellbeing. Most often, it was a simple, “How are you doing? How are feeling about these changes?” He admitted that this was deeply uncomfortable for him, and he suspected it was at least surprising for some of the people he asked. As he began to relax and ask the check-in questions more naturally, he found that the asking became easier, and the responses became richer. During our first session after he began his check-ins, he happily reported that several employees had approached him outside of meetings, unprompted, to share enthusiasm or concerns about the changes. Even when they were concerned, he reported that they were far more comfortable confiding in him.
Sharing His Own Emotions
To our delighted surprise, Thomas found it easier than he expected to share his own emotions, especially following his success with check-ins. Thomas was already accustomed to expressing concern or excitement about business issues, but until now he had only used such terms as conversational conventions, not as actual emotional discussions. Whereas he would have once said, “I’m concerned about this project” as an introduction to discuss solutions, he would now say it first to express his own emotions, and second to invite his team to share their feelings as well. He told me about an important discovery he made after trying this practice: his old style of jumping straight into solutions gave his team the impression that he already had answers and did not want or need their input. His new approach fostered conversation and often produced useful insights from the discussion.
Acknowledging the Emotions
Even before we began coaching, Thomas did recognize that business decisions could produce emotions. He simply believed that logic should dictate business decisions, and any resultant emotions should be irrelevant. In his new mindset, Thomas took a third practice of directly acknowledging emotional impacts when announcing major changes. When he began coaching, he believed that a leader had to choose between logic and emotion. Now, he deliberately chose to use both. In the midst of difficult and disruptive changes, he would begin by acknowledging the emotions and then justifying the decision with logic, validating feelings and still explaining why the decision was best for the team and the organization.
He reported a particularly successful instance where he had to announce a change in software that he knew was deeply unpopular with the users. He began by acknowledging their unhappiness, then focused on why the change was necessary and especially how it would help. One of the most ardent opponents to the change knocked on his door later to thank him for understanding the employees’ point of view. He did not change the necessary decision, but had changed how his team experienced the change.
Curiosity over Assumption
Because of his traditional, 20th century corporate training, Thomas made certain assumptions if he encountered resistance or struggle. First, giving the person the benefit of the doubt, he would assume misunderstanding and provide additional persuasion or training to prove and support his decision. If the resistance continued, Thomas assumed that the problem was either insubordination or incompetence, and he then moved onto discipline and termination.
By the time this topic arose, Thomas had done so much emotional work that he identified his old assumptions without any prompts in coaching. He reported that when he noticed those old assumptions for the first time, he was tempted to pause the conversation and return after a coaching session. Instead, he decided to do what he thought (correctly) that his coach would have done: he asked questions. Speaking to a resistant but timid employee, Thomas said that he sensed her resistance, and asked for her help to understand what was getting in her way. Although taken aback, the employee shared that was concerned that the planned new system would be too complicated for her staff to use. Thomas then spent 30 minutes with the employee sketching a training plan based on her insights of her team’s abilities and likely points of difficulty.
This was a remarkable achievement for a man who, a few weeks earlier, would have assumed that he had a stubborn or incompetent employee. A simple question led to some vital insight into the employee, her team, and a plan likely to forestall some problems in the system implementation.
I commended Thomas for his burgeoning insight, as well as his willingness to do something unfamiliar and uncomfortable. He readily admitted that it was awkward and difficult for him to be a conversational rather than a didactic leader. He said that he felt drained after the conversation, not because it was difficult per se, but because he felt as though he had just used a weak muscle for the first time. He acknowledged, however, that his first simple attempt at conversational leadership had resulted in some significant gains. The same employee, who previously spoke very little, approached him with a question later that week and reported that her team was openly excited by the fact that their senior leader had a hand in planning their training on the new system.
The Work Continues
Learning new skills takes time. This is especially true of skills like EI that are sometimes difficult to quantify. Even in our earliest sessions together, Thomas recognized that developing EI went beyond learning a new skill because so much of the work depended on changing unconscious habits. His greatest achievement in our time working together was becoming conscious of his old patterns and deciding to choose new patterns.
Thomas is not unique. Many leaders trained in the previous century have this same blind spot; it is not a character flaw, but a competency gap created by how business operated for decades.
The Power of Holistic Leadership
Organizations need what leaders like Thomas provide: operational excellence, strategic thinking, business acumen. They also need relational health—the recognition that employees are people, not automatons. Thomas feared that adding emotional intelligence would undermine his credibility, that he would seem weak or indecisive. In practice, he discovered that tempering his strong leadership with empathy fostered employees who cared more and offered more to him and the company.
The good news for leaders like Thomas is that emotional intelligence is learnable, even from a place of skepticism. It does not require personality change; in fact, that would be counterproductive. It requires developing new skills and challenging old assumptions while continuing to excel as a business leader. EI is not a distraction from leadership—it is an evolution from good leadership to exceptional leadership.
Thomas saved his organization twice. First, he saved it financially, drawing it back from the brink of insolvency. He then faced the unexpected challenge of saving the organization culturally. The first was difficult but well within his abilities. The second was more difficult and stretched him as a leader and a person. The results of the second, however, were ultimately more important. Thomas learned that competence works wonders in the short term, but connection makes an organization truly thrive.
You may recognize some of the challenges that Thomas faced when he came to coaching. You may have the respect of your employees, but not their trust. You may have quiet compliance without a sense of commitment and passion. You are certainly not alone in these challenges. You may also resent the need to change to adopt EI; if so, you are not alone in resentment either. Despite all his expectations, Thomas learned that EI is not an impossible challenge, and he learned that the rewards far outweigh the effort. The question is not whether you, as a leader, have a blind spot–almost all leaders do. The coaching question is whether you are willing to see and address your blind spot.
