INSIGHTS FOR GROWTH

Talented leaders assume their work speaks for itself, but visibility gaps stem from attention. The Friday Update closes that gap in 5 minutes a week.

How often do you think about your dentist? Only when you need them. There is a leader in every organization who is someone else’s dentist. Brilliant at one thing. Invisible at everything else. Not excluded — just not thought of.

Leaders build monsters without meaning to. The Monster Audit names 4 habits consuming your time, then kills one this week.

One of the people who read The Right Altitude early is Blessing Nnachi — a consulting delivery leader at Google Cloud. I coached her for eight months during a pivotal transition. She wrote something about the book that I keep coming back to: “Don has the ability to gently and persistently dismantle the mindsets that limit our potential.” Gently and persistently. That’s the whole job. Not fixing people. Not telling them what to do. Helping them see what they can’t see on their

Every leader hits the same wall. The moment when the thing that got them promoted stops working. Twelve chapters. Forty-eight tools. Built from 6,000+ hours of coaching. The book is live today.

“The skills that got you here are not the skills that will keep you here.” That’s page one. Twelve chapters. Forty-eight tools. Built from 6,000+ hours of coaching conversations with more than 1,000 leaders.

She did the best work in the building. Nobody knew. Renata delivered every quarter, solved the problems no one else could, and never once raised her hand. She was invisible — and she chose to be.

When something needs to be addressed, you have 48 hours to have the conversation. After that, the details fade, the narrative hardens, and you start building a case instead of having a conversation.

The conversation you're afraid will break the relationship is usually the one that saves it. The tension is already there. The other person already feels it. Having the conversation doesn't create the problem — the problem already exists.

Avoiding a difficult conversation costs more over time. The longer you wait, the more problems compound and affect your team's trust.

Every conversation you avoid has a cost. And the cost compounds. The longer you wait, the harder it gets — not because the conversation changes, but because the resentment and the workarounds build up around it.

The whole idea behind the right altitude is not a metaphor for ambition. It’s a metaphor for fit. The altitude where your natural ability meets the work you’re actually built for. Not too high, not too low. Just right — and nobody can assign it to you from the outside.

Thirty years in executive leadership. Seven years coaching 750 leaders. Six thousand hours. The same twelve patterns kept showing up — and at some point I stopped being surprised and started writing them down. Something is coming in June.

Nobody I’ve ever coached needed me to give them the answer. In seven years, not once. What they needed was someone to ask the question they’d been avoiding, hold the space for them to sit with it, and not let them off the hook when they tried to skip past the hard part. The answers were always already there.

Most people who experience imposter syndrome have extensive evidence that they belong. Performance reviews. Promotions. Results. Team feedback. They’ve accumulated years of proof. They just haven’t looked at it clearly. The problem isn’t the absence of evidence. It’s the habit of discounting it.

750 leaders, 7 years: your old skills won't work at the next level. Identity lag drives the discomfort. Stop being the expert. Start building teams.

Every promotion is an expert-to-beginner transition. The leader who was exceptional at the old role becomes a beginner at the new one. The discomfort people mistake for incompetence is actually just the transition itself. Nobody names this. Everyone goes through it.

Most people expect growth to feel like becoming someone different. It doesn’t. The leaders I’ve worked with who’ve done the most real work don’t describe themselves as transformed. They describe themselves as clearer. Less reactive. Less driven by patterns they couldn’t see before. The same person — just with fewer blind spots.

Leaders often get promoted without preparation. When your old job feels easier than management, you're likely spending too much time on it.

The leaders I’ve worked with who feel most settled — not most successful by external measures, but most settled — are the ones who did two things. They defined what good looked like on their own terms, in concrete and specific language. And then they protected it. Not perfectly. But consistently enough that it held. Most people skip the first step. They never define it. So they can’t protect something they never named.

Even if you have zero intention of leaving your career, brainstorm five businesses you could start or buy. Not as a plan — as a perspective shift. The exercise does three things: it reminds you that your skills are valuable in contexts you haven’t considered, it reveals what’s missing in your current work, and it makes your current path feel like a choice rather than a sentence.

A career built on the total exclusion of everything else isn’t a career. It’s an identity so narrow that one change — a reorg, a layoff, a forced transition — can collapse the whole thing. The leaders who navigate those moments best are the ones who knew who they were before the title, and stay grounded in that when the title changes.

Good across the board beats exceptional in one area. The leader who is exceptional at work and absent at home isn’t winning — they’re making a trade they didn’t consciously choose. The parent who is fully present at home but miserable at work isn’t balanced — they’re in a different kind of survival mode. Good in all three is harder than exceptional in one. And it’s worth more.