Here's what I've learned after 30+ years in executive leadership and 6,000+ hours of coaching — the thing holding a leader back is almost never what they think it is.

 

The VP who's sure the problem is her team's execution? It's usually how she runs the room. The director who feels stuck? He's optimizing for the role he has, not the one he wants. The leadership team that can't get aligned? They've never had a conversation honest enough to name what's actually in the way.

 

I see these patterns because I've lived them. Before I coached full time, I spent three decades in operating roles — COO, EVP, and senior leadership at Disney, Universal, and Gateway Ticketing. I built teams, restructured organizations, drove 300% revenue growth, and made the kind of calls where the stakes are real and the politics are thick. I know what "good" looks like at the executive level because I had to deliver it. And I know what derails leaders because I've watched it happen — in the people I led, and in myself.

 

When I moved into coaching, I brought all of that into the room. Not as war stories — as pattern recognition. Since then I've worked with more than 1,000 leaders and teams: VPs and C-suite executives, founders, and leadership groups inside large, complex organizations — the kind where one decision moves a lot of people and a lot of money.

 

Most of them come to me at an inflection point. A bigger role. A team that isn't performing. A version of themselves they've outgrown and can't quite name. My job isn't to hand them a playbook — it's to help them see clearly, then build something that holds up when the pressure is real.

 

Over the years I built all of that into a system of my own — the Altitude Flight System. It maps how a leader's influence actually lands across seven dimensions, and surfaces the patterns underneath — the ones other people can already see, but you can't. It's the spine of how I work, one-on-one and with teams: we get a clear picture first, then we get to work.

 

When an outside assessment sharpens that picture, I'll use it — Hogan, DiSC, Five Behaviors, the Highlands Ability Battery. But I don't lean on them, and the instrument is never the point. It shows you the pattern. The work is deciding what to do about it.

 

My clients describe me as a thinking partner, not a cheerleader. I'll tell you what I see — directly, and with empathy. There's a difference between honest and blunt, and I've spent a long time learning to stay on the right side of it. Then we get practical, and we don't stop until the change actually sticks.

 

Everything I've watched make and break leaders over those years, I put into a book — The Right Altitude, and the Field Guide series that followed. It's the same pattern recognition I bring to a coaching room, on the page: the things nobody tells you about stepping up, and what to do about them.