Bring me your hardest problem

A finance team at a large pharma company had high turnover and people who didn't seem to take ownership of their work. The team leader thought the problem was a lack of training and weak performance management.

I interviewed every leader, manager, and supervisor. Underneath the symptoms there was one habit: when a manager saw that someone couldn't do a task well, they did it themselves instead of teaching the person how. So the team never got more capable, and the managers stayed overloaded.

I ran two workshops on how to delegate and teach instead of taking over, using their own real situations. Their managers got better at it, and they started meeting weekly to keep working through problems together.

A major bank had a group of young managers in a program to become its future leaders. They had been promoted and given more responsibility, but something was missing.

Their training had been in finance, sales, and project management. Almost none of it was about managing people. So they were handling difficult situations with their teams every day without ever having been taught how.

I ran a workshop built around the situations they actually faced and weren't sure how to handle. We worked through them with hypotheticals and role plays. They left knowing how to handle the moments they used to improvise through.

A serial entrepreneur was running several things at once (new hires, hard conversations, big decisions) with no one to think them through before acting.

Many of the risks weren't in the strategy. They were in the people: how a change would land with the team, whether a new hire was set up to succeed, where a planned conversation might go wrong. Those are hard to see from the inside.

We have a call every two weeks before the decisions and conversations that matter. I help him spot the risk he hasn't accounted for, pressure-test the plan, and build the skill so the same problem doesn't come back.