Some of the most effective leaders I know share a skill that no business school taught them: the ability to walk into a room and feel everything. Every tension, every unspoken frustration, every shift in mood. It reads as emotional intelligence. It gets praised in performance reviews. And it was learned in an environment where…
A framework for understanding why some leaders’ reactions feel disproportionate to the moment, and what it costs everyone around them. Summary Emotional triggers at work show up in leadership as reactions that don’t match the size of the situation in front of them. A missed deadline produces anger that belongs to something much older than…
What does leadership look like when a leader has done their own work? Not the theoretical version. Not the version that shows up in leadership development programs. The version that changes how people experience being in the room with you. Laura Roach is a partner at McCathern and one of the most recognized family law…
Every organization has a tone. It is not the values statement on the website or the leadership principles on the conference room wall. It lives in actual leadership behavior: the decisions made when no one is watching, how mistakes are handled, whether employees are seen as human beings or reduced to functions. I spent nearly…
Most conversations about unconscious bias in the workplace stay at the surface: acknowledge it exists, commit to doing better, move on. What those conversations rarely reach is the survival conditioning underlying the bias, the patterns that formed before anyone entered the workforce, and the organizational cost of leaders who cannot see what drives their decisions.…
Most organizations treat unconscious bias as a training gap. The answer to close the gap is a workshop or an awareness session that checks the box, giving leaders general knowledge, but no pathway to the root cause.The root cause is survival conditioning and that’s hard to help anyone identify when, but definition, we’re talking about…
Most leaders who operate from survival patterns in leadership do not know they are doing it. They know something feels off. They may have been told they are too intense, too controlling, or too hard on themselves. But they attribute it to the pressure of the role, not to a wound that predates the job…
The leader who insists on their way is one of the most common and most rewarded patterns in professional settings. Teams execute at a high level. Standards hold. Results land. But beneath the performance metrics, a different story is unfolding: creativity stifles, the best people leave because they feel undervalued, and the organization absorbs a…
This conversation with Chason Forehand on survival mode leadership starts where most leadership discussions never go: not with strategy or skill gaps, but with what was happening underneath. For years, Forehand led teams in the restaurant and hospitality industry while unresolved trauma from childhood abuse quietly shaped every interaction. Trust issues became harshness. Emotional walls…
Most organizations treat leadership failures as strategic problems. Wrong hire, wrong market, wrong read on the data. And sometimes that is exactly what happened. But the leadership failures that do the most damage, the ones that erode trust in leadership, drive top talent out the door, and reshape team performance for years, rarely start with…