I spent thirty years reading behavior for a living, first as a financial statement auditor, then as a forensic accountant investigating white-collar crime. That training taught me to spot the exact point where a person’s effort stops producing results and starts producing errors. I could see it in my team from across a room. I…

Overfunctioning in leadership rarely announces itself as a problem. It looks like the person everyone wants running the meeting: composed, tireless, always the one with a plan. That is exactly what let Jeff Johnston run a wealth management practice, eventually managing hundreds of millions of dollars in client assets, for over three decades while carrying…

I spent thirty-two years building a career that proved my expertise. Credentials, cases that headlined the news, a repeat client who came back specifically asking for me to lead the next investigation, a firm whose own tagline was Experts with Impact. And for almost all of it, I could not say the word “expert” about…

There is a version of survival mode leadership that looks nothing like struggling. It looks like calm. It looks like competence. It looks like the person everyone calls when things fall apart — and who answers every time, dispatches the right people, notifies the right chain, and holds the room together. From the outside: completely…

I spent thirty years reading behavior under pressure, first as a forensic investigator tracing evidence back to a root cause, later as a leader turning that same lens on myself. What I learned applies directly to how organizations try to develop the leaders who cost them the most: the ones who can’t delegate, the ones…

A woman sits across from her boss in his first week of trusting her with the truth. He says, “I need someone to be honest with me.” And in her head, before she can stop it, a different sentence forms: there is no way in hell I am going to be honest with this man.…

Most leadership behavior problems are diagnosed where they appear: in the room. In the meeting. In the 360 feedback. In the team dynamics that don’t work. What rarely gets examined is where those behaviors came from — and why the work environment so reliably makes them worse. This post explores two leadership patterns I observed…

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…