This Will Break Us

Eleven months.

That's how long a CEO I worked with had been avoiding one conversation with his COO. Not because he didn't know what to say. He knew exactly what to say. He'd written it out. Rehearsed it. Role-played it with an advisor.

But every time he imagined being in the room, the same sentence came back: This will break us.

So he waited. And here's what the waiting cost, none of which showed up on a P&L. Decisions got routed around the COO. The exec team felt the tension and started managing it instead of the business. Two initiatives stalled because moving them forward meant the two of them agreeing on something they weren't talking about.

When we worked on it, we didn't touch the script. The script was fine. It had been fine for eleven months.

We named what he was actually protecting. It wasn't the content of the conversation. It was the fear of what it would feel like to be in the room. That is Composure, and it's the one the leadership books skip, because it can't be fixed with better words.

Once it had a name, the conversation happened in six days. And here's the part he didn't expect. The COO's first response was: "I've been waiting for you to bring this up."

Eleven months of imagined breakage. The room held it in forty minutes.

But that conversation isn't the transformation. This is:The Leadership Gap, the space between noticing something and saying it, used to run at months for him. Now it runs at days. Different tension, same speed. His company works differently now, not because he learned new words, but because truth arrives while it's still small.

That's what changed. Not one conversation. The gap.

Most leadership problems are not strategy problems. They are conversations that never happened.

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In all that we do, let us seek wisdom, discipline, courage & justice.

Be well,

Keita

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