You’re the strategist. The HR department. The culture. The brand. The budget. And somewhere in between the payroll runs and the client calls and the team check-ins, you’re supposed to be the leader too.

Most leadership development content isn’t built for you. It’s built for the Fortune 500 executive with a chief of staff, a learning and development budget, and the luxury of a two-day offsite. You get a podcast episode in the car and a business book you keep meaning to finish. This article is for you.

I want to make the case that Inquisitive Leadership and The CAPPP Advantage™, the framework I’ve spent years developing and the philosophy at the heart of my work, is not only relevant for SMB owners, it just may be the most important leadership shift you’ll ever make.

The myth of the all-knowing owner

From the moment you stepped into business ownership, whether you built the business yourself or inherited its reins, an unspoken agreement took hold: you were the one with the answers. Uncertainty is weakness. Your job was to radiate confidence, have all the answers, point the direction, and drive results.

That belief is exhausting you…and it’s capping your growth.

I’ve worked with hundreds of leaders across industries, and the pattern I see in SMB owners is consistent: they are deeply capable, genuinely devoted to their people, and stuck in a loop of reactive decision-making because they never trained themselves to slow down and ask.

“High team performance is driven by connection, not control. And connection begins with a question.”

This is the central premise of Inquisitive Leadership: that the leaders who unlock the most from their teams, and from themselves, are not the ones with all the answers. They are the ones who ask the best questions. Who lean into what they don’t know. Who practice, what I call Courageous Curiosity: the discipline of asking about what you don’t understand, including the uncomfortable things, and genuinely listening before you form an opinion.

For SMB owners, this shift isn’t just philosophically compelling, it’s operationally necessary.

Your team can see what you can’t

Here’s something I’ve observed across decades of coaching leaders: the people closest to the day-to-day work almost always know what needs to change before the person at the top does. They see the inefficiencies; they feel the friction with customers; they know which processes are broken and which relationships are fraying.

Frankly, in most organizations, especially small ones, they never say anything. Not because they don’t care, but because no one asked; or the last time someone offered a hard truth, it didn’t land well; or the culture, unconsciously, rewards agreement over insight.

As a small business owner, you may have four people on your team, or forty. Either way, that team holds an enormous amount of intelligence that you are either accessing or leaving on the table. Inquisitive Leadership and The CAPPP Advantage™ performance framework, is about building the kind of culture where that intelligence surfaces, where people feel safe enough to tell you what’s actually going on.

THE CAPPP ADVANTAGE™ MODEL

The five elements that drive high performance in teams, particularly important at the SMB scale where every person’s contribution is felt.

C Connection — The foundation. Performance follows relationships, not the other way around. In a small team, weak connection is immediately felt by everyone, including your customers.

A Assessing — Continuously reading your people, your environment, and yourself. Not assuming; observing.

P Valuing People — Treating each person as a unique contributor with their own motivations, strengths, and growth edges. Not managing headcount; knowing the people behind the role.

P Purpose — Keeping the why visible. In small businesses, purpose is one of your greatest advantages over large competitors, but only if you actively cultivate it.

P Performance — The result, not the starting point. When the first four elements are present, performance tends to follow.

Notice where performance sits in the model. It’s the outcome, not the driver. Most business owners lead with performance pressure — hit the numbers, close the deals, meet the deadline, and then wonder why engagement is low, turnover is high, and the team seems perpetually stuck in second gear.

Inquisitive Leadership reverses that sequence. Start with connection. Build the relationship. Value the person in front of you. Ground the work in something that matters. This is where performance - real, sustainable, energized performance tends to follow.

You don’t have the margin for bad leadership

Big companies have cushion built in — redundant roles, layers of management, and buffer to absorb the unexpected. When a senior leader makes a poor decision or fails to develop their team, the impact gets absorbed somewhere in the system. The organization keeps moving.

You don’t have that.

In a small business, leadership quality is felt immediately and personally. If you’re not creating psychological safety, people shut down and stop contributing ideas. If you’re not listening, your best people leave, and they don’t always tell you why. If you’re not connecting with your team on a human level, the culture becomes transactional, and transactional cultures don’t attract or retain the people who could take your business to the next level.

“How your people feel at work is how your customers feel doing business with you.”

I use a metaphor in my work that I refer to as the garden. One gardener follows a schedule. The other follows the garden, noticing what each plant needs and responding to what’s actually there. The second gardener doesn’t work harder. They work with more awareness, and their garden flourishes in ways the first gardener can’t understand, because they’ve stopped assuming and started paying attention.

That’s what Inquisitive Leadership looks like at the team level. Not treating your people identically. Not assuming that what motivated one person will motivate another. Asking. Watching. Adjusting. Treating each person as the unique individual they are.

The advantage you have over big companies

Here’s the truth that doesn’t get said enough in conversations about SMB leadership: you have an advantage that no Fortune 500 company can replicate.

Proximity.

You are close to your people. You know their names, their stories, often their families. You’re accessible in a way that a CEO with five layers of management between them and the front line will never be. That proximity, when used well, is one of the most powerful leadership assets in existence.

Inquisitive Leadership is built for proximity. It doesn’t require a formal 360-degree review process or a multi-day leadership offsite (though those have their place). It requires the practice of asking genuine questions in everyday moments. Sharing questions with your team before your one-on-ones, the way I did when I first became a leader and inherited a team harboring some resentment and uncertainty. Listening not just for what people say, but for what they’re not saying. Building a culture where curiosity is modeled at the top and rewarded throughout.

I am still in touch with a couple of members of that first team,more than 25 years later. The foundation we built together wasn’t built on directives. It was built on questions, on genuine interest in each person, on the willingness to sit in ambiguity long enough to find out what was actually true.

From probable outcomes to possible ones

One of the distinctions I return to again and again in my work is the difference between probable outcomes and possible outcomes.

Probable outcomes are what you get when you lead from what you already know. You draw on your experience, your assumptions, your past patterns. You know exactly what you’ll get, and exactly how far it will take you. Your knowledge sets the limit.

Possible outcomes are what emerge when you stay genuinely curious. When you ask your team what they see that you might be missing. When you question your own assumptions. When you stay open to the idea that someone on your team, maybe someone who’s been quiet, has a perspective that could fundamentally change how you’re thinking about a problem.

SMB owners often operate in survival mode, which narrows the aperture. You make the call that’s good enough, move on, and deal with the next crisis. That’s understandable, but it’s not leadership, it’s triage. Over time, it costs you the very thing you need most: the untapped potential of the people around you.

Inquisitive Leadership is the practice of expanding that aperture, even when you’re busy. Especially when you’re busy.

This is not soft leadership

I want to name something directly, because it comes up often when I work with business owners: the concern that curiosity-based leadership is too “soft.” That slowing down to listen is a luxury. That asking questions signals indecision.

It doesn’t. The research says otherwise, and so does decades of practical evidence.

Leaders who ask better questions make better decisions because they have better information. Teams that feel heard perform at higher levels, because engagement isn’t manufactured by incentive programs, it’s built through genuine connection. Organizations where people speak up catch problems earlier and solve them faster, because the intelligence that prevents catastrophe isn’t locked in the leader’s head; it’s distributed across the whole team.

Inquisitive Leadership is grounded in neuroscience and behavioral science. It is rigorous, practical, and built for the real conditions of running a business. It is also, yes, deeply human. Those two things are not in tension. In fact, at the SMB level — where culture is made or broken by the behavior of a handful of people — the human dimension of leadership is the competitive advantage.

Where do you start?

If you’ve read this far, you may be thinking: this resonates, but I don’t know where to begin. The idea of shifting my leadership approach feels big when I’m already stretched thin.

Here’s what I’d offer: start small and start genuine. Before your next one-on-one, write down two questions that you genuinely don’t know the answer to. Not “how’s the project going?” That’s not a question, it’s a formality. Ask real questions. Questions that open something up.

After you ask them, listen. Not to formulate your response, but to actually hear what the person in front of you is saying.

That’s the beginning of Inquisitive Leadership. A single question, asked with real curiosity, in the middle of a normal Tuesday. The practice grows from there.

“You don’t need everything figured out before you begin. You just need a real question and an open ear.”

Your team is waiting for it. And if my experience is any guide, you will be surprised, pleasantly and repeatedly, by what you find when you start asking.

Frederica Peterson is a leadership consultant, executive coach, author, and professional speaker. She is the author of Inquisitive Leadership: A New Approach to Cultivating High Performance Teams and creator of The CAPPP Advantage™ Performance model. Learn more and join the membership community at fredericapeterson.com.

A leader comes back from a workshop, a retreat, a training program and is genuinely moved, genuinely motivated. They would tell me about the insights they had and the things they were going to do differently. I would be encouraged for them, because the content was good and their intentions were real.

Then I would check in a month later and the old patterns were back. Not because they didn’t care or weren’t capable but because insight without reflection doesn’t inspire change. It just becomes a memory of a good day.

I’ve learned this through my experience being a leader and years of working with leaders: if you want to change a behavior, you have to do more than learn about it. You have to recognize the behaviors in the moments they surface, sometimes without even realizing they are happening. It requires you to slow down long enough to ask yourself: Did I behave the way I intended? If yes, what made that possible? If not, what was actually going on, and what will I do differently next time?

That kind of honest, regular reflection is not a nice-to-have, it is the work and how transformation actually happens.

That’s why I created the journal. Not as a companion to the ideas, but as the practice itself — an exercise in the reflection that change requires.

Why 30 days? Why not 7, or 21?

I developed this tool after witnessing a recurring cycle with most leaders. They often return from professional development events feeling deeply inspired, yet within a month, they find themselves pulled back into familiar, uneffective habits. The reality is that true behavioral change requires more than just learning; it demands that we recognize our actions in real-time and pause to evaluate if they align with our intentions. This journal isn’t just a supplement to leadership theories—it is the daily practice of honest reflection that makes transformation possible. Leadership transformation has a wall, and it usually shows up around Day 5 or 6.

That’s when the reflection questions start to feel repetitive; honest self-examination gets uncomfortable; and when the pull back to familiar patterns gets loudest.

Seven days isn’t enough to push through that wall. Thirty days means you are committed to work through it, and keep going — long enough to encounter yourself as a leader across a real range of circumstances: conflict, pressure, good weeks, hard weeks, the team members who energize you and the ones who exhaust you.

By Day 30, something has shifted. Not because of any single insight, but because of the accumulation of daily noticing and reflection.

What the 30 days actually look like

The journal is built around the CAPPP Advantage™ performance framework — Connect, Assess, Valuing People, Purpose, and Performance — with each week deepening the one before it.

Week 1 is about Connection. Not networking. Not relationship-building as a strategy. Real presence with your team. You’ll start noticing how often you’re listening to respond versus listening to understand. That awareness alone changes things.

Week 2 moves into Assessing. This is where it gets interesting. You’ll be asked to look at how you’re seeing your team members — and whether you’re leading the actual person in front of you or a fixed version of them you decided on months ago. A lot of leaders find quiet revelations here.

Week 3 is about Valuing People. How well do you actually know what matters to the people on your team — what drives them, what drains them, what makes them feel seen? This week’s reflections invite you to lead with genuine interest in the whole person, not just the role they fill.

Week 4 brings it home with Purpose and Performance. How clearly are you connecting your team’s daily work to something that matters? What are the conditions you’re creating for sustainable, engaged performance? Not just output, but the environment that makes it possible? What are you tolerating? What are you missing because you’re moving too fast to notice?

And then there are 5 bonus days

The 30 days of reflection will show you things about yourself that you can’t unsee.

These five bonus days are not about tasks, team dynamics, or organizational challenges. They are about you — the leader underneath the role. This is your invitation to pause, look inward honestly, and ask the harder questions about who you are becoming and who you still want to be.

These five days are designed to help you assess yourself with courage and clarity. Not to arrive at perfection, but to move forward with greater intention. Leaders who change the people around them are always the ones who are first willing to change themselves.

These final five days invite you to look inward. Not for perfection — but for progress.

What Leaders experience at the end

The feedback I hear isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet and specific.

“I started actually listening in my 1:1s.”

“I gave someone a chance I would have written off before.”

“I stopped waiting for things to escalate.”

Small shifts. Daily practice. Lasting results.

Before you decide if this is for you

Sit with these four questions honestly:

• In the last week, how many of your 1:1s were driven by your agenda rather than theirs? Did you have a 1:1 with your team this week, this month?

• When did you last change your mind about a team member based on something they showed you?

• Can you clearly articulate why your team’s work matters beyond the deadline?

• What performance issue are you currently tolerating that you know needs a direct conversation?

If one of those landed, you already know where your work is.

The journal is the intention to become a more inquisitive leader. The reflection is what gets you there.

Start with the free 5-Day Mini-Journal to experience the practice before committing to the full journey. If you’ve already done the five days — the 30-Day Journal is the next step.

📘 Buy the book → 📊 Take the self-assessment → 📓 Grab the journal → 📅 Book a Clarity Session → 🏛️ Join the Membership

Questions or reflections? I’d love to hear from you — frederica@fredericapeterson.com

They receive their results. They read through them. They feel a flicker of recognition, some combination of “yes, that’s right” and “hm, I didn’t expect that.” They put the report down.

They go back to leading exactly the way they were leading before.

Not because they didn’t care about the results. Not because the assessment wasn’t accurate, but because a score, even an honest, well-constructed one, doesn’t tell you what to do next. It tells you where you are. It doesn’t show you the path forward.

That gap between the assessment data and the action it should inspire is one of the most consistent and costly missed opportunities in leadership development.

Through my experience, I have learned that leaders possess the answers within themselves; coaching simply serves to harness that internal wisdom. It provides a strategic blend of highlighting the risks associated with stagnation, illustrating the advantages of taking decisive action, and establishing the accountability necessary to ensure progress is made.

It is exactly what the Inquisitive Leadership Clarity Session is designed to accomplish.

“The true answers lie within the leader themself.”

— Frederica Peterson

Information by itself has never shifted a single leadership habit; self-awareness lacking clear direction remains merely data.

The true catalyst for changing habits is the depth of perspective and understanding that only a real conversation, not a static report, can provide.

~

Why Reading Your Results Alone Is Never Enough

When a leader attempts to interpret their assessment results in isolation, there is a cost.

They see a high score on one dimension and feel validated. They see a low score on another and feel defensive, confused or dismiss it as situational. Without a concrete understanding of how to implement change, leaders often simply resolve to “improve” their low-scoring dimensions, yet remain uncertain about what that actually entails.

In some cases, they misread their results entirely. A leader who scores low on Connection and Rapport might interpret it as “I’m not warm enough” when the real story is something more specific, more actionable, and far less personal: they haven’t created the consistent, low-stakes opportunities for honest conversation that Stage 1 of The CAPPP Advantage™ requires.

Rather than viewing a singular low score as a standalone problem to be solved, leaders find more value in examining the collective pattern emerging across all five dimensions.

Almost universally, leaders who read their results alone miss the most important thing the assessment is trying to show them: the connection between their scores and the specific team behaviors and outcomes they are observing in real time.

A score is a starting point, not a verdict.

Determining how these insights translate to your unique leadership style, team dynamics, and current professional challenges is essential. Navigating this requires more than just data; it demands meaningful dialogue and a partner capable of bridging the gap between the theoretical framework and your actual day-to-day realities.

~

What the Inquisitive Leader Assessment Actually Measures

To understand the true meaning of your results, it is first necessary to define the specific areas this assessment evaluates.

Comprised of 25 targeted questions, the Inquisitive Leader Self-Assessment is structured around the five distinct phases of The CAPPP Advantage™ Performance Model. By evaluating each stage as an independent dimension, the tool provides unique insights into your specific leadership presence and behaviors.

Connection & Rapport

“How genuinely do I know the people I lead — beyond their professional role and daily output?”

This stage measures the quality and depth of your relational foundation. Not whether you’re likable, but whether you have built the kind of trust that allows people to show you who they really are. A low score here doesn’t mean you don’t care about your team. Instead, it suggests a disconnect between your genuine desire to connect and the actual frequency or purposefulness of your outreach.

Assessing the Team

“How accurately am I seeing the full capabilities and potential of the people I lead?”

This stage measures the quality of your team assessment. Specifically, whether it is relationship-informed or assumption-based. A leader who scores well here has created the conditions in which people feel safe showing their real capabilities, not just their managed performance. A low score here is often a signal that the assessment is happening before the trust has been built.

Valuing People

“Am I actively identifying and removing the barriers that are preventing each of my team members from contributing fully?”

This stage measures inclusion, psychological safety, and the degree to which a leader understands and honors the individual differences on their team. A low score here often reveals blind spots around who feels seen and understood on the team and who doesn’t.

Understanding Purpose

“Have I uncovered the personal motivations of my team members and tied them directly to our shared objectives?”

This stage evaluates how well individual efforts align with the broader organization. It looks at whether team members recognize the link between their daily tasks and the company’s strategic vision, mission, and key goals. When scores are low in this dimension, it typically signifies a form of disengagement where apparent motivation is masked by a fundamental lack of connection to the work.

Cultivating Performance

“Am I creating the environment where sustained high performance is possible — or am I demanding it?”

This stage measures the degree to which a leader’s behavior across the first four stages is translating into the conditions for high performance. A low score here is rarely about execution. It is almost always a downstream reflection of gaps in one or more of the earlier stages.

The compilation of your scores for each stage categorizes you into one of four Inquisitive Leadership profiles: The Exemplary Inquisitor, The Practicing Inquisitor, The Developing Inquisitor, or The Task-Focused Leader. The label itself is secondary. What truly matters is the overarching pattern revealed across all five dimensions and the story it tells about your current leadership impact.

~

The Three Most Common Insights Leaders Have in a Clarity Session

In my work debriefing assessment results with leaders, three insights come up with remarkable consistency. Not because every leader’s situation is the same but because these particular patterns show up across industries, leadership levels, and organizational contexts.

These are the insights that almost never emerge from reading a report alone.

Insight 1: My lowest score isn’t where I thought it was.

Almost every leader who completes the assessment arrives at their Clarity Session with a hypothesis about where they’ll score lowest. They’ve identified where they believe their development area is, which is usually based on feedback they’ve received before or a challenge they’re currently navigating. In a significant number of cases, that hypothesis is wrong. Not wildly wrong but wrong in ways that matter.

What the debrief reveals: The dimension a leader believes is their weakness is often not the root cause of the performance or relationship challenges they’re experiencing. A leader who thinks they need to work on performance management (because their team isn’t hitting numbers) frequently discovers in the debrief that their lowest score is in Connection and Rapport. The numbers aren’t the problem, the trust is; and no amount of improved performance management addresses a trust deficit.

What changes as a result: The leader stops trying to fix the symptom and begins addressing the root cause. In most cases, this alone reorients their entire development focus producing faster, more sustainable results than anything they had been working on before.

Insight 2: My high scores are masking something important.

Here is a counterintuitive truth about assessment results: a very high score on one dimension can sometimes be as revealing as a very low score on another. When a leader scores exceptionally high on Assessing the Team but significantly lower on Valuing People, that gap tells a specific story. This leader is highly observant and comfortable reading their team. However, there may be some unconscious barriers getting in the way of fully assessing the value of each team member as people not just as productivity bots. This in turn may cause the leader to create an environment that does not allow the full diversity of each team member’s capabilities to actually surface. Their view is limited, which may not be building the conditions for what they’re looking for to exist.

What the debrief reveals: The pattern across dimensions, not just the lowest number, reveals the most important developmental information. High scores in some areas can compensate for gaps in others in ways that look like strength but quietly limit the ceiling of what’s possible. A guide who knows the framework can identify these compensatory patterns in a way that a leader reading their own results almost never can.

What changes as a result: The leader develops a more nuanced understanding of their strengths. Not just as things to be proud of, but as lenses that may be shaping what they see and what they miss. This kind of sophistication about one’s own leadership is rare. It is also the kind of self-awareness that produces the most durable growth.

Insight 3: I can see my team clearly in my results.

This is perhaps the most powerful moment in any Clarity Session; and the one that most consistently produces an immediate shift in a leader’s perspective. When a leader looks at their scores through the lens of their actual team, the specific people, the current dynamics, the recent challenges, the results stop being abstract data and become a mirror.

What the debrief reveals: A leader who has been frustrated by a team member’s resistance looks at their Connection and Rapport score and recognizes, often for the first time, that the resistance may have nothing to do with the team member’s attitude and everything to do with the relationship context they haven’t yet built. A leader dealing with a disengaged team looks at their Purpose Alignment score and realizes they have never explicitly asked their people what matters to them about their work. The assessment doesn’t diagnose the team member. It illuminates the leader’s role in the dynamic, which is the only place real change can start.

What changes as a result: The leader stops asking “what’s wrong with my team?” and starts asking “what is my role in what’s happening?” In my experience that shift is the most reliable predictor of whether a leader will grow. Leaders who can ask that question and sit honestly with the answer almost always do.

~

What a Clarity Session Actually Is

A Clarity Session is not a coaching program. It is not a therapy session. It is not a performance review or a strategic planning meeting.

It is a focused, one-hour, 1:1 conversation with me designed to do one thing: help you understand what your Inquisitive Leader Assessment results are actually telling you about your leadership, in the context of your real situation, and give you a clear, specific, actionable path forward.

Here is what happens in a Clarity Session:

We review your scores together.

We look at the pattern across all five dimensions, not just the lowest score.

We connect your results to your actual team, your current challenges, and the specific leadership dynamics you’re navigating right now.

We identify your most important developmental priority, the one that will have the greatest downstream impact on everything else.

We build a concrete, specific action plan based on your profile and your context, not a generic prescription.

You leave with clarity. Not more information. Not a longer reading list. Clarity about who you are as a leader right now, where your greatest growth opportunity is, and what you’re going to do about it.

That clarity session is what makes the assessment worth taking. Without it, the score is just a number. With it, the score becomes a turning point.

~

What Changes When You Actually Understand Your Results

I want to be honest with you about something.

I have watched leaders take assessments, receive compelling results, and do absolutely nothing with them. Not because they didn’t want to grow. Not because the results weren’t accurate but because awareness without a clear next step is one of the most frustrating experiences in leadership development. You can see the gap. You just can’t quite figure out how to close it…and making the time to understand those next steps can add to the frustration when you don’t know where to begin.

Conversely, I have watched those same kinds of leaders at the same starting point, with similar results take a completely different path when they had someone to help them understand what they were looking at.

The leader who understood that her low Connection score was driving her team’s disengagement stopped adjusting her performance management strategy and started having different one-on-one conversations with her team. Within six weeks, two team members she had been about to put on performance plans became two of her strongest contributors.

The leader who discovered that his high Assessment score was masking a significant gap in Valuing People started paying attention to who was and wasn’t speaking up in his team meetings. What he found surprised him, and changed how he ran every meeting from that point forward.

The SMB owner who saw the connection between her Purpose Alignment score and her team’s turnover problem stopped trying to fix compensation and started having the conversations she had been avoiding about what mattered to each person on her team. The turnover stopped.

None of these leaders had a talent problem. None of them needed a new strategy.

They needed to understand what their results were actually telling them.

~

Your Next Step Is Simpler Than You Think

If you haven’t taken the Inquisitive Leader Self-Assessment yet, it is at the end of my book Inquisitive Leadership: A New Approach to Cultivating High Performance. It takes approximately 15 minutes and it will give you the most honest perspective of your current leadership that you’ve probably ever had.

Once you have your results, don’t put the report down.

Book a Clarity Session.

One hour. One conversation. A clear path forward built specifically around your results, your team, and your leadership right now.

Consider this, the greatest leadership development tool in the world is useless if it stays on a shelf.

You deserve more than a score.

If this article raised a question or surfaced something you’re sitting with, leave a comment or share it with a leader who needs to read it. If you would like more content like this, subscribe to The Inquiry — my free bi-weekly newsletter built for leaders who want more than motivation. [https://fredericapeterson.myflodesk.com/newsletter]

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A Final Thought

There is a reason I named this service a Clarity Session and not a coaching session, a feedback session, or a results review.

What every leader I have ever worked with actually needs, more than information, more than frameworks, more than even the most sophisticated assessment tool is clarity.

Clarity about who they are right now.

Clarity about what is actually happening on their team.

Clarity about the one thing that, if they changed it, would change everything else.

“Awareness is not the destination. It’s the doorway. What you do on the other side of it, is where your leadership transforms.”

— Frederica Peterson

The assessment opens the door.

The Clarity Session shows you what’s on the other side.

The rest is yours to build.

~

Frederica Peterson, MA, CPC, ACC

Leadership Architect | Creator of The CAPPP Advantage™

Best-Selling Author, Inquisitive Leadership: A New Approach to Cultivating High Performance

Ready to apply what you just read? Here’s where to start:

🔍 Take the Assessment + Book a Clarity Session

Complete the self-assessment at the end of the book, then book a Clarity Session. A dedicated 1:1 debrief with me where we unpack your results together, explore what they mean in the context of your real leadership situation, and build a clear, personalized path forward, exactly what this article is about.

My new book is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org

💡 Executive Coaching

For any leader who wants consistent, expert support to be more effective in their role, regardless of title or tenure. Over 600 hours delivered. ICF certified. Built on The CAPPP Advantage™ framework. fredericapeterson.com/executivecoaching

📋 Inquisitive Leadership Training Programs

If you’ve ever invested in a leadership training program and watched the results fade within weeks, you already know the problem: most programs teach concepts without building habits. That’s why every Inquisitive Leadership training experience is built differently. From a focused 60-minute introduction to Courageous Curiosity, to a 90-minute full framework exploration, a half-day skills application workshop, a full-day behavioral mastery immersion, and a 2-day executive program designed for C-suite and senior leaders: Inquisitive Leadership for Executives — Architecting High-Performing Cultures. The Certified Inquisitive Leadership Trainer Program is coming soon for L&D professionals and consultants ready to license and deliver this curriculum. fredericapeterson.com/programs

🤝 Join the Inquisitive Leader Membership

Monthly live sessions, a growing community of leaders doing this work, practical tools, first access to new resources, and a network that understands what you’re building. fredericapeterson.com/membership

“I don’t understand it. We have the strategy. We have the talent. We have the goals and the resources and the structure. And we still can’t get where we need to go.”

This is not a story about bad leadership. These were thoughtful, driven, genuinely committed people. They weren’t cutting corners or coasting on their authority. They were doing everything they had been taught a high-performing leader should do.

And they were still falling short.

In almost every one of those conversations — after we had talked through the strategy and the structure and the talent inventory and the KPIs — I would ask a question that almost always changed the direction of the entire discussion:

“How safe do the people on your team feel telling you something you don’t want to hear?”

The pause that followed that question was, in most cases, longer than any other pause in the conversation.

Because the leaders who were struggling almost always knew the answer. They just hadn’t connected it to the performance gap they were trying to solve.

“The greatest gift a leader can give themself is self-awareness.”

— Frederica Peterson

And one of the most consequential things a leader can become aware of is whether the environment they have created feels safe — or whether, underneath all the talent and strategy and resources, the hidden variable working against them is fear.

~

The High-Performance Paradox

Here is the paradox that sits at the heart of so much leadership frustration:

The behaviors that most reliably produce high performance — speaking up about problems early, challenging flawed assumptions, taking creative risks, bringing your full thinking to a difficult decision — are exactly the behaviors that feel most dangerous in a low-trust environment.

And the behaviors that feel safest in a low-trust environment — staying quiet, telling leaders what they want to hear, doing exactly what’s asked and nothing more — are exactly the behaviors that quietly kill team performance over time.

This means that a leader who has not intentionally built psychological safety is, without meaning to, creating a system that selects against the very behaviors they need.

The talent is there.

The capability is there.

But the conditions that allow talent and capability to translate into performance — those are not there.

This is the hidden variable. Not a skills gap. Not a strategy problem. Not a talent deficit.

A safety deficit.

And until it is addressed, no amount of restructuring, goal-setting, or performance management will produce the sustained results the team is capable of.

~

What Psychological Safety Actually Is — And What It Isn’t

Before we go further, I want to be precise about what psychological safety means in the context of Inquisitive Leadership. Because the term has been used in so many different ways that its meaning has been diluted — and in some organizations, it has been reduced to something so watered down it has lost its power entirely.

Psychological safety is not:

A requirement that everyone always feels comfortable.

A ban on difficult conversations or high standards.

A guarantee that no one will ever be challenged or held accountable.

A culture where anything goes and nothing is ever questioned.

Psychological safety is the belief, held by each person on the team, that they can speak up — with an idea, a concern, a mistake, a disagreement, or an inconvenient truth — without fearing punishment, humiliation, or exclusion.

That distinction matters enormously. A psychologically safe team is not a comfortable team. In fact, some of the most psychologically safe teams I have ever worked with are also the most candid, the most willing to challenge each other, and the most demanding of high standards.

The difference is that the challenge and the candor flow from a foundation of genuine respect and genuine trust. People can push hard on ideas precisely because they are not afraid of what will happen to them if they are wrong.

“Psychological safety is not the absence of challenge. It is the presence of trust strong enough to survive it.”

— Frederica Peterson

This is why it is the hidden variable behind every high-performing team — not because it makes teams gentler, but because it makes them more honest. And honesty, at scale, is one of the most powerful performance accelerators any leader can cultivate.

~

The Three Signals That Tell You Your Team Doesn’t Feel Safe

Psychological safety is invisible until it’s absent — and even then, it rarely announces itself directly. No team member is going to walk into your office and say, “I don’t feel psychologically safe.” What they will do is exhibit a set of behaviors that, once you know what to look for, tell you everything you need to know.

Here are the three most consistent signals I have seen across organizations, industries, and leadership levels.

Signal 1

Everyone agrees in the room. Dissent happens in the hallway.

What it looks like: Meetings move smoothly. Decisions are made without friction. Heads nod. And then, within minutes of the meeting ending, the real conversation begins — in side conversations, in messages, in the quiet resistance that shows up in execution. Ideas that should have been challenged in the room never were. Problems that could have been named in the discussion surface later, after they’ve grown. The meeting was efficient. The outcome was not.

What it costs you: You are making decisions with incomplete information. The concerns your team is not voicing in the room are the exact concerns that will derail your execution. A team that can’t disagree with you safely will agree with you publicly and undermine you privately — not out of malice, but because that is the only path available to them.

Signal 2

Mistakes are hidden rather than surfaced.

What it looks like: Problems are escalated late — or not at all. Team members work around issues rather than flagging them. When something goes wrong, the first instinct is to manage the information rather than address the situation. You often find out about problems after they’ve compounded. When you ask why something wasn’t raised earlier, the answers are vague: “I didn’t think it was a big deal yet,” or “I was trying to handle it.”

What it costs you: The earlier a problem is surfaced, the cheaper it is to solve. Every day a problem goes unspoken in your team is a day it grows. A culture where mistakes are hidden is not a culture of accountability — it is a culture of self-protection. And self-protection, at scale, is one of the most expensive operational costs any team carries.

Signal 3

New ideas arrive pre-defended or not at all.

What it looks like: When team members share ideas, they over-qualify them: “This is probably not the right time, but...” or “I know this might not fit our approach, but I was just thinking...” Or they don’t share them at all — they wait to be asked, they hold back in group settings, or they share their thinking only with peers they trust rather than in spaces where it could actually be acted on. The quality of ideas surfaced in your team meetings is almost always lower than the quality of thinking your team members are actually capable of.

What it costs you: Innovation does not come from the ideas people are willing to risk in low-trust environments. It comes from the ideas people have been quietly holding back because they didn’t believe they would be received well. Every idea your team member pre-defends or withholds is a potential solution, improvement, or insight that never reached you. The accumulation of those withheld contributions is the ceiling on your team’s innovative capacity.

~

What Inquisitive Leaders Do Differently

Psychological safety is not built through a single conversation or a team-building event or a policy change. It is built through the accumulated weight of small, consistent behaviors that demonstrate — over and over again — that it is safe to be honest here.

Here is what Inquisitive Leaders do differently, drawn directly from the principles of The CAPPP Advantage™ framework:

1. They respond to honesty with curiosity, not defensiveness.

This is the single most powerful psychological safety practice available to any leader — and the hardest. When a team member brings you bad news, a dissenting opinion, or a problem you didn’t see coming, your response in that moment either builds safety or erodes it. A defensive response — even a subtle one, even just a shift in energy or a quick dismissal — teaches every person in the room that honesty has a cost. An Inquisitive Leader’s default response is a question: “Tell me more about what you’re seeing.” Or: “What do you think we should do about it?” That question communicates that the information was valuable, not threatening. And that communication, repeated consistently over time, is how a culture of psychological safety is built.

2. They make it safe to not know and to be wrong.

In many teams, the implicit norm is expertise — you are supposed to have the answers, you are supposed to have solved the problem before you raise it, you are supposed to project confidence at all times. This norm is enormously expensive, because it means that the questions people most need to ask go unasked, and the problems people are least certain about go unnamed longest. Inquisitive Leaders actively model intellectual humility. They say, out loud, in front of their teams: “I don’t know.” They ask for help. They acknowledge when they were wrong. They treat uncertainty as a normal and productive state rather than a leadership failure. Each time they do this, they give every person on their team explicit permission to do the same.

3. They create consistent, low-stakes opportunities for honest input.

One of the structural realities of psychological safety is that trust is built in small moments, not large ones. A leader who holds one vulnerability-requiring all-hands per year and otherwise runs a conventional operation is not building psychological safety — they are having a periodic event inside an otherwise unchanged culture. Inquisitive Leaders build the practice of honest input into the regular rhythm of their team: they ask, in every one-on-one, what is getting in the way; they invite dissent before closing a decision; they end meetings by asking who held something back; they follow up privately with the team members who stayed quiet publicly. They make it easy to be honest before big moments arise, so that when big moments come, honesty is already the established norm.

4. They separate the person from the performance.

One of the most damaging dynamics in low-safety teams is the conflation of feedback on work with judgment of the person. When team members believe that criticism of their idea is criticism of their value, they will defend their ideas rather than explore them. They will perform rather than learn. They will protect themselves rather than take the risks that lead to growth. Inquisitive Leaders are explicit and consistent about this distinction: the idea and the person are not the same thing. High standards for the work coexist with genuine respect for the individual. A leader who can hold both of those things simultaneously — without collapsing one into the other — creates the conditions where people can receive hard feedback without shutting down.

5. They follow through on what they hear.

Nothing destroys psychological safety faster than a leader who asks for honest input and then does nothing with it. Team members do not need to see their every suggestion implemented. But they do need to see that what they shared was genuinely received and genuinely considered. An Inquisitive Leader closes the loop: “You mentioned last week that the approval process was creating friction for your team. I’ve been thinking about that — here’s what I’m going to do.” Or, when the answer is no: “I hear you on this. I’m not going to be able to change it right now, and here’s why.” That kind of response — transparent, direct, respectful — communicates that speaking up is worth the effort. Which is precisely what makes people willing to do it again.

~

An Honest Inventory for Leaders

Before you move on from this article, I want to give you something concrete to sit with.

Read each of these statements and answer as honestly as you can — not as the leader you want to be, but as the leader you currently are:

When a team member brings me bad news or a dissenting opinion, my honest first reaction is to listen with genuine curiosity — not to defend, dismiss, or explain.

My team members know, from experience and not just from what I’ve said, that they will not be penalized for raising a problem early.

The ideas and concerns my team shares in meetings are representative of what they actually think — not a filtered, safe version of it.

When I make a mistake, I name it clearly and directly, without minimizing or deflecting.

The people on my team who are quietest in group settings have clear, consistent opportunities to share their thinking with me directly.

Every statement where your honest answer is “not consistently” or “I’m not sure” is a signal. Not a verdict on your leadership — but a specific, actionable place to begin building something that will change your team’s performance more reliably than any strategy adjustment you could make.

~

How This Connects to The CAPPP Advantage™

In Inquisitive Leadership, psychological safety is not treated as a standalone initiative. It is a natural outcome of the first three stages of The CAPPP Advantage™ Performance Model, applied with consistency.

When a leader genuinely builds Connection and Rapport — Stage 1 — they create the relational foundation upon which safety can be built. When they Assess their team accurately and generously — Stage 2 — they signal that they see their team members as full people, not just performers. When they actively Value People — Stage 3 — removing barriers, honoring differences, and creating genuine inclusion, they build the lived experience of safety rather than simply declaring it.

Psychological safety is not a program. It is a by-product of the consistent, courageous, curiosity-driven behavior of the leader.

Which means it begins and ends with you.

Not with your team’s willingness to be open.

Not with your organization’s culture.

With the choices you make, in ordinary moments, about how you respond to the people who are brave enough to be honest with you.

~

Your Next Step This Week

Choose one of the five practices above — the one that resonates most, or the one that makes you most uncomfortable. Those are often the same one.

Practice it in your next three interactions with your team. Not because you’ve transformed your leadership culture in a week — but because psychological safety is built in exactly this way: one small, consistent, trustworthy response at a time.

Then notice what changes.

Because here is what I can tell you with confidence after over 500 hours of coaching and decades of leading teams:

“When people feel safe, they don’t just perform better. They become the team you always believed they were capable of being.”

— Frederica Peterson

That team has been there all along.

The hidden variable was never their capability.

It was whether you had created the conditions that made it safe for them to show you.

If this article opened something up for you — a recognition, a question, an uncomfortable truth about your own team culture — I’d love to hear about it. Leave a comment or hit reply. I read every one.

~

A Final Word

The leaders who build the highest-performing teams are not the ones with the best strategies or the most rigorous processes or the sharpest performance management systems.

They are the ones whose teams trust them enough to be honest.

That trust is not given. It is built — slowly, deliberately, through the daily accumulation of choices that say: your honesty is safe here. Your real thinking is welcome here. Your mistakes will not define you here.

Build that environment, and the strategy will work.

Build it, and the talent you already have will begin performing at the level you always suspected it could.

Build it, and the hidden variable will stop working against you — and start working for you.

~

If this article resonated, here’s how to go deeper:

📚 Get the Book

Inquisitive Leadership: A New Approach to Cultivating High Performance gives you the full CAPPP Advantage™ framework — including the methodology for building the psychological safety that makes sustained high performance possible. The self-assessment at the end reveals your Inquisitive Leadership profile and your personalized path forward. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org

💡 Executive Coaching

For any leader who wants consistent, expert support to be more effective in their role. Over 500 hours delivered. ICF certified. Built on The CAPPP Advantage™ framework.

📋 Inquisitive Leadership Training Programs

If you’ve ever invested in a leadership training program and watched the results fade within weeks, you already know the problem: most programs teach concepts without building habits. That’s why every Inquisitive Leadership training experience is built differently — from a focused 60-minute introduction to Courageous Curiosity, to a 90-minute full framework exploration, a half-day skills application workshop, a full-day behavioral mastery immersion, and a 2-day executive program designed for C-suite and senior leaders: Inquisitive Leadership for Executives — Architecting High-Performing Cultures. The Certified Inquisitive Leadership Trainer Program is coming soon for L&D professionals and consultants ready to license and deliver this curriculum.

🔧 Also Available: Everything DiSC® Catalyst & The Five Behaviors®

As a certified practitioner in both Everything DiSC® Catalyst and The Five Behaviors®, I offer these as separate, standalone development programs. Powerful tools for building self-awareness, team trust, and behavioral agility — on their own or alongside your Inquisitive Leadership journey.

🤝 Join the Inquisitive Leader Membership

Monthly live sessions, a growing community of leaders doing this work, practical tools, and first access to new resources. A network that understands what you’re building.

Frederica Peterson, MA, CPC, ACC

Leadership Architect | Creator of The CAPPP Advantage™

Best-Selling Author, Inquisitive Leadership: A New Approach to Cultivating High Performance

You’ve been leading a team for six months. You’ve observed closely. You’ve run your evaluation processes. You’ve formed a clear picture of who’s performing, who has potential, and who’s coasting.

And then something happens — a high-pressure project, a sudden org change, a moment of real crisis — and the team you see in that moment looks nothing like the team you’ve been assessing.

The person you wrote off as disengaged suddenly demonstrates a level of creative problem-solving that stops you mid-thought.

The team member you identified as your top performer freezes when the stakes are highest and someone else steps in.

The quiet one — the one whose name never appeared at the top of any list — turns out to be the person everyone actually trusts when things get hard.

If you’ve ever experienced a moment like this, you’ve brushed up against the central problem with how most leaders assess their teams.

The assessment wasn’t wrong because you weren’t paying attention.

It was wrong because you were measuring behavior without understanding the environment that was producing it.

“The greatest gift a leader can give themself is self-awareness.”

— Frederica Peterson

And one of the most powerful forms of self-awareness a leader can develop is the ability to recognize when their read of another person is being shaped more by their own assumptions than by reality.

~

The Problem With How Most Leaders Assess Their Teams

Let me be direct: most team assessment processes are structurally flawed. Not because the people running them aren’t skilled. Not because the data they collect isn’t real.

But because they measure output without examining the conditions that either enable or suppress it.

Think about how a standard performance evaluation works. A leader observes a team member’s behavior over a period of time, usually in structured settings — meetings, deliverables, project outcomes, KPIs. They apply a rating. They write their observations. They identify strengths and development areas.

What that process almost never asks is the question that would make every other data point more accurate:

“Does this team member feel safe enough, trusted enough, and seen enough to actually show me who they are?”

Because here is what I have observed without exception across decades of leadership and coaching:

What people show you is not a fixed reflection of their capabilities.

It is a direct function of how safe they feel showing it.

A team member in a low-trust environment will perform to the minimum required to protect themselves — not because that’s the limit of their ability, but because showing more feels risky. A team member who doesn’t believe their leader genuinely sees them will not invest the discretionary effort that produces exceptional results. A person who suspects they are being evaluated before they are being understood will manage their performance — presenting the version of themselves most likely to be approved of, not the version most likely to be useful.

This is not a motivation problem. It is not a talent problem.

It is a relationship problem. And traditional assessment frameworks have no way to account for it.

~

The Variable Most Assessments Leave Out

In The CAPPP Advantage™ Performance Model, Stage 2 is Assessing the Team. And it sits in a very specific place in the sequence: after Building Connection and Rapport, and never before it.

That placement is not arbitrary. It is the central argument of Inquisitive Leadership applied directly to the assessment process.

The quality of your assessment is a direct function of the quality of your relationship.

This has a practical consequence that most leaders have never been explicitly told: if you assess your team before building genuine trust, you are not measuring their capabilities. You are measuring their performance under conditions of uncertainty. You are measuring how well they present themselves to someone whose judgment of them is not yet known to be safe.

Those are two very different data sets.

What you see before trust is built:

Managed behavior. Protective instincts. The version of themselves most likely to be evaluated favorably. Effort calibrated to what appears expected, not what is possible.

What you see after trust is built:

Authentic behavior. Real problem-solving. Creative risk-taking. Honest communication about challenges. Discretionary effort. The actual ceiling of what this person can contribute.

This is why I tell every leader I work with: your first read of a team member is a hypothesis, not a conclusion. Treat it that way.

The Inquisitive Leader’s assessment process doesn’t begin with observation. It begins with relationship. And the observation that follows is always filtered through one essential question: am I seeing who this person actually is, or am I seeing who they believe I want them to be?

~

What Inquisitive Leaders Assess Differently

When a leader has built genuine trust with their team, the assessment process opens up in ways that simply aren’t available before it. Here is what Inquisitive Leaders look for — and how it differs from conventional evaluation:

1. Behavior under pressure vs. behavior under observation

Most assessments capture how a team member performs when they know they’re being evaluated. An Inquisitive Leader watches for how someone behaves when the stakes are genuinely high — when a project goes sideways, when a difficult conversation must happen, when resources are scarce. That’s when character, values, and real capability surface. The leader who has built a trusting relationship will see this behavior because the team member trusts them enough to be authentic in the hard moments, rather than managing their performance through it.

2. Hidden strengths vs. presented strengths

There is a consistent and underappreciated gap between the skills a team member presents on the surface and the skills they actually possess. People downplay capabilities they don’t believe are valued. They hide strengths that haven’t yet been called upon. They carry expertise from previous experience, from life outside of work, from interests their manager has never asked about. The Inquisitive Leader actively seeks these out — not because it is nice to be interested in people, but because every hidden strength represents unrealized performance potential.

3. Motivation vs. compliance

Compliance and motivation can look nearly identical on a performance dashboard. Both produce output. But compliance is fragile — it depends on external monitoring, clear incentives, and a steady stream of direction. Motivation is self-sustaining. It produces the extra effort, the innovative idea, the willingness to flag a problem early rather than hoping it resolves itself. An accurate assessment tells a leader not just what a person is producing, but why. The ‘why’ determines whether the output is sustainable — and whether it will survive a change in conditions.

4. Barriers vs. limitations

This distinction is one of the most important — and most consistently overlooked — in all of leadership. A limitation is something a person genuinely cannot do. A barrier is something preventing them from doing what they actually can. When a team member underperforms, the default assumption in most organizations is limitation: this person doesn’t have what it takes. The Inquisitive Leader’s default assumption is barrier: something is getting in the way of what this person is capable of. That barrier might be a relationship conflict on the team. It might be a process that creates unnecessary friction. It might be a mental health challenge, a communication style mismatch, an unclear expectation, or a culture that doesn’t yet feel safe. Identifying and removing barriers is not soft leadership. It is the most direct path to performance improvement available to any leader.

5. Unmanaged biases in the assessor

The most honest and often the most uncomfortable element of an accurate assessment is the leader’s examination of their own biases. Every leader has preferences — for communication styles, for work approaches, for the way people present ideas and navigate relationships. When those preferences are unexamined, they become filters that distort assessment. A leader who prefers “quick on their feet” thinking will consistently underestimate the value of the thoughtful, deliberate team member who needs processing time. A leader who values relational warmth may overlook the contributions of someone who is reserved but analytically brilliant. The CAPPP Advantage™ requires leaders to regularly and explicitly challenge their own evaluations: Is my assessment of this person based on their capabilities — or on how much they remind me of someone I’ve already decided to trust?

~

Three Questions That Reveal Untapped Potential in Any Team Member

These are not interview questions. They are not performance review prompts. They are questions for the ongoing, trust-based conversations that Inquisitive Leaders have with their team members — the kind of conversations that are only possible once the relationship context has been established.

Each one is designed to surface something a traditional assessment process will almost never reach.

Question 1

“What’s something you’re good at that you feel like you rarely get to use in this role?”

Why it works: This question cuts directly to the gap between presented strengths and actual capabilities. Most people have skills, experiences, and ways of thinking that their current role doesn’t call on — and they’ve stopped mentioning them because no one has asked. The answers to this question frequently reveal capabilities a leader never would have discovered through observation or performance review alone.

What to listen for: Pay attention to the energy shift. When someone describes a capability they rarely get to use, you’ll often see a genuine change in their engagement — more animation, more specificity, more investment in the conversation. That energy is data. It is telling you where this person’s discretionary effort lives. A leader who finds a way to connect that capability to the team’s work has just unlocked something that no performance incentive could have produced.

Question 2

“What’s something about working in this environment that makes it harder for you to do your best work?”

Why it works: This is the barrier question — and it requires genuine trust to answer honestly. Asked too early in a relationship, before safety is established, most people will give a safe, diplomatic non-answer. Asked after trust has been built, this question can surface the single most valuable piece of information a leader can have: what is actually getting in the way of this person’s full contribution.

What to listen for: Listen for specificity. Vague answers (“I just need more clarity on priorities”) often signal that the person doesn’t yet feel safe being direct. Specific answers (“I find it hard to contribute in large group meetings when the conversation moves fast because I process better in writing”) are gold. They give you actionable information you can actually use to redesign the environment, adjust the workflow, or change how you run your team interactions — and in doing so, unlock performance that was previously suppressed.

Question 3

“If you could change one thing about how this team operates, what would have the biggest impact on your ability to contribute?”

Why it works: This question does several things at once. It communicates that you see this person as a stakeholder in the team’s effectiveness, not just an executor of your decisions. It surfaces systemic issues you may not be able to see from your vantage point. And it reveals how this person thinks — whether they are focused on individual experience, team dynamics, process, culture, or something else entirely. That thinking style is itself valuable data for how to deploy this person most effectively.

What to listen for: The answers you receive will often surprise you — not because the issues are hidden, but because no one has previously created space to name them. And what you do with those answers matters at least as much as the question itself. When leaders act visibly on what they hear — even in small ways — it demonstrates that the assessment was genuine, not performative. That demonstration is what deepens the trust that makes the next honest conversation possible.

~

An Honest Reckoning

I want to give you something concrete before you leave this article.

Think about someone on your team whose performance has been disappointing, flat, or hard to read.

Now ask yourself these four questions — honestly:

Does this person trust me enough to show me who they really are?

Have I ever directly asked them what gets in the way of their best work?

Am I assessing their capability — or am I assessing their behavior under conditions of low trust?

Is there a bias in how I evaluate people that might be causing me to underestimate this person?

If your honest answers leave you uncertain — that uncertainty is not a failure. It is the beginning of a more accurate assessment.

The leaders I work with who apply this approach consistently tell me the same thing: they discover that team members they had written off become some of their most valuable contributors once the relationship context changes. Not because those people changed. But because the leader finally created the conditions in which those people could show up fully.

That is not a small thing.

That is the difference between a team that performs to its assessed potential and a team that blows past it.

~

Your Next Step

This week, choose one person on your team whose assessment feels incomplete or uncertain to you.

Don’t run another evaluation. Don’t review their metrics again.

Schedule 20 minutes with them. Use one of the three questions above. Listen without agenda. And then notice what shifts — both in your understanding of them, and in your awareness of what your assessment has been missing.

One honest conversation, with genuine curiosity behind it, will tell you more than months of observation from a distance.

That’s not a coaching technique. That’s Inquisitive Leadership in practice.

If this article surfaced something — a recognition, a team member who came to mind, a question you’re sitting with — I’d love to hear about it. Leave a comment or hit reply. I read every one.

~

A Final Thought on Assessment

There is a profound and underappreciated truth at the heart of the Inquisitive Leadership approach to team assessment:

“Your team’s potential is not fixed. It expands in proportion to the trust you build.”

— Frederica Peterson

The most talented leaders I have ever worked with are not the ones who are best at identifying talent.

They are the ones who are best at creating the conditions in which talent reveals itself.

That is a skill. It can be developed. And it begins — as almost everything in Inquisitive Leadership does — with a willingness to ask before you conclude.

~

If this article resonated, here’s how to go deeper:

📚 Get the Book

Inquisitive Leadership: A New Approach to Cultivating High Performance walks you through all five stages of The CAPPP Advantage™ — including the full methodology for accurate, relationship-informed team assessment. The self-assessment at the end reveals your own Inquisitive Leadership profile and gives you a personalized path forward. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org

🔍 Take the Inquisitive Leader Assessment + Book a Clarity Session

The self-assessment is at the end of the book. Once you complete it, a Clarity Session is a dedicated 1:1 debrief with me — we unpack your results together and build a clear, tailored path forward based on exactly where you are right now.

💡 Executive Coaching

For any leader who wants consistent, expert support to be more effective in their role — regardless of title or tenure. Over 500 hours delivered. ICF certified. Built on The CAPPP Advantage™ framework.

🤝 Join the Inquisitive Leader Membership

Monthly live sessions, a growing community of leaders doing this work, practical tools, and first access to new resources. A network that understands what you’re building.

Frederica Peterson, MA, CPC, ACC

Leadership Architect | Creator of The CAPPP Advantage™ Performance Model

Best-Selling Author, Inquisitive Leadership: A New Approach to Cultivating High Performance

A leader inherits a challenge. Or steps into a new role. Or watches a team that once performed well begin to quietly stall.

They are smart. They are committed. They work hard. And so they do what every instinct, every training program, and every performance review has conditioned them to do:

They get to work on the solution.

They analyze the data. They set new goals. They restructure the approach. They communicate the plan with clarity and confidence.

And sometimes it works — for a while.

But more often, the results plateau. The team disengages in ways that are hard to name. The leader pushes harder. And the gap between what the team is capable of and what it’s actually producing quietly widens.

The leader looks at the output and asks: what’s wrong with this team?

The question they almost never ask is the only one that would actually help them:

“What don’t I know about the people I’m leading — that I haven’t thought to ask?”

That gap — between the assumptions leaders operate from and the reality their teams are actually living — is the blind spot. And in my experience, it is the single most common reason talented leaders consistently fall short of the results they are fully capable of creating.

~

The Moment It Changed For Me

I didn’t discover this principle in a classroom or a leadership book. I discovered it in the middle of one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my early career.

When I stepped into my first functional leadership role, I inherited a team of experienced managers — several of whom had applied for the very job I’d just been given. The resentment was palpable. And underneath the professional surface, each person had already formed a set of assumptions about me: about what kind of leader I would be, and whether I was worth their trust.

My instinct — and believe me, it was strong — was to prove myself. To lead from authority. To demonstrate, through certainty and competence, that I had earned the role.

Instead, I made a different choice.

I leaned into curiosity.

I asked questions before I offered opinions. I shared my questions ahead of our one-on-ones so team members could prepare. I used humor when the professional distance felt too wide to bridge any other way. I listened — really listened — before drawing any conclusions about who these people were or what they were capable of.

And something unexpected happened.

The more I knew them as people — their histories, their frustrations, their strengths, the way they processed challenges, what made them feel seen and what made them shut down — the less I led from assumption. My decisions became more accurate. My relationships became more real. And the team’s performance began to reflect something I hadn’t engineered with a strategy: genuine trust.

Twenty-five years later, I’m still in contact with two members of that team.

That experience was the seed of everything I now teach. Because I realized — slowly at first, then with absolute clarity — that the thing separating good leaders from truly exceptional ones isn’t intelligence or drive or vision.

“The greatest gift a leader can give themself is self-awareness.”

— Frederica Peterson

And self-awareness begins with asking — not assuming.

~

What the Blind Spot Actually Is

Let me be precise about what I mean by “blind spot,” because in leadership development the term gets used loosely.

The blind spot I’m describing isn’t a gap in technical skill or strategic thinking. And it isn’t a lack of caring about your people.

It is the gap between how you believe you’re showing up as a leader and how you are actually landing with your team.

It is the assumption that you know what motivates each person on your team — when you’ve never directly asked.

It is the belief that you have an accurate read on each person’s capabilities — when the relationship hasn’t yet created the safety required for them to fully show you.

It is leading from the data you have — without questioning whether that data is complete.

In my work with leaders across industries, this blind spot is almost never conscious. These are not careless people. They are deeply committed leaders. And the more senior they become, the more difficult the blind spot becomes to identify — because seniority tends to reduce the honest feedback that might reveal it.

Here’s the hard truth:

The higher you climb, the less likely you are to hear what your team is actually experiencing. Not because they don’t have opinions — but because the higher the stakes, the fewer people feel safe enough to share them honestly.

This is why Courageous Curiosity — the foundational mindset of Inquisitive Leadership — is not optional. It is the practice that keeps a leader’s self-image honest.

Without it, you are leading from a story you have told yourself about your team.

With it, you begin leading from reality.

~

Why Most Organizations Get the Order Wrong

Here’s where I want to challenge something that is nearly universal in organizational leadership development.

Most companies, when they onboard a new leader or respond to a performance gap, follow a predictable sequence:

1. Communicate the strategy.

2. Set the goals and metrics.

3. Assess team performance against those metrics.

4. Identify gaps and address them.

Do you see what’s missing?

There is no step that asks: who are these people? What do they value? What do they bring that I haven’t yet discovered? What is the existing dynamic in this group — and what does it tell me about where trust actually stands?

The relationship comes last — if it comes at all. It is treated as a byproduct of good management rather than the foundation upon which effective management is built.

In my book Inquisitive Leadership, I introduce The CAPPP Advantage™ Performance Model: a five-stage framework that deliberately inverts the conventional approach. It insists that before a leader can accurately assess capabilities, align a team around purpose, or cultivate sustainable high performance — they must first build genuine connection.

Not because connection is a nice-to-have. Because without it, everything that follows is built on incomplete information.

~

The Five Stages of The CAPPP Advantage™

Let me walk you through each stage — and specifically, what gets missed when leaders skip or shortcut the ones that come first.

Stage 1: Connection & Rapport

You cannot lead people you don’t know.

This stage is about building genuine relationships with your team — not surface-level professionalism, but real human understanding. Who is this person beyond their job title? What do they care about? How do they process stress? What makes them feel seen? Until you know the answers to these questions, your leadership is operating on assumption. And here is the critical insight: the quality of your relationships in Stage 1 directly determines the accuracy of everything that follows. A team member who doesn’t trust you will not show you who they really are — which means your assessment of their capabilities will be incomplete, and your strategy for developing them will miss the mark. Connection isn’t Stage 1 because it feels good. It’s Stage 1 because nothing else works without it.

Stage 2: Assessing the Team

Your first read of any team member is provisional, not final.

Once genuine trust is established, a leader can begin to assess their team with real accuracy. Not based on performance reviews, first impressions, or what a predecessor said — but based on direct, curious observation of the whole person. This includes understanding each team member’s actual strengths and undiscovered potential, their motivations and what gets in their way, the dynamics between team members, and the biases a leader brings to their own evaluation. The CAPPP Advantage™ teaches leaders to constantly challenge their own assessments. The question is never just “what can this person do?” It’s “what am I missing about what this person can do — because I haven’t yet created the environment where they can fully show me?”

Stage 3: Valuing People

Diversity of thought, approach, and experience is not a challenge to manage. It is the source of your team’s greatest advantage.

This stage goes beyond knowing your team members. It is about actively understanding the unique value each individual brings — and removing the barriers preventing them from contributing fully. Those barriers are often invisible to leaders. They include psychological safety issues that make people hesitant to speak up, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that operate below the surface of team meetings, and the emotional labor some team members carry simply to fit the culture as it currently exists. An Inquisitive Leader doesn’t just tolerate difference. They actively seek it out, learn to leverage it, and build a culture where every person’s unique contribution is understood and genuinely valued.

Stage 4: Understanding Purpose

A team that doesn’t understand the ‘why’ behind their work will never give you their best.

This stage is where the leader connects the team’s work to something larger than the deliverable. But here is where most purpose-driven leadership efforts fall short: they communicate the organizational ‘why’ without ever exploring the personal ‘why’ of each individual on the team. The CAPPP Advantage™ asks leaders to do both. What is the collective purpose that drives this team’s work? And how does each person’s individual motivation connect to it? When those two things align, something remarkable happens. People stop working for a paycheck and start working toward something that matters to them. That shift is not engineered by a strategy. It is cultivated by a leader who took the time to understand the person first.

Stage 5: Cultivating Performance

High performance is not demanded. It is grown.

This is where the results appear. And the central insight of The CAPPP Advantage™ is this: the level of performance you achieve in Stage 5 is a direct function of how well you executed Stages 1 through 4. You cannot shortcut your way here. Sustainable, high-level performance — the kind that persists through change, rebounds from setbacks, and produces results beyond what any individual could achieve alone — is the natural outcome of an environment built on genuine connection, accurate understanding, real inclusion, and shared purpose. The leader who cultivates that environment doesn’t chase performance. Performance follows them.

~

The Single Question That Changes Everything

I promised you a single question. Here it is.

It is not complicated. In fact, its power lies in how simple it is — and how rarely leaders actually ask it.

“What don’t I know about the people I’m leading — and what would change if I did?”

Not: what’s wrong with my team? Not: why aren’t they performing? Not: what do I need to change about the strategy?

Those questions all begin with the assumption that you already have the information you need — and that the problem lives somewhere outside of you.

The question above begins from a different place entirely. It begins from Courageous Curiosity. It begins with the recognition that the data you’re working from may be incomplete. That the story you’ve told yourself about your team may not be the full picture. That what you don’t know might matter more than what you do.

When leaders I work with begin asking this question regularly — and then acting on what they discover — several things consistently happen:

Conversations that were surface-level become real.

Team members who were disengaged begin to show up differently.

Performance issues that seemed structural turn out to be relational — and resolve far faster than any strategy could have solved them.

And the leader, often for the first time, begins to feel like they are actually leading — rather than managing around people they don’t fully understand.

~

Your Starting Point: One Honest Inventory

If this article has surfaced something — a recognition, an uncomfortable moment of honesty, a question you’ve been avoiding — I want to give you somewhere concrete to take it.

Before you close this article, try this.

Write down the names of every person on your team. Next to each name, answer these three questions as honestly as you can:

Do I know what genuinely motivates this person beyond their paycheck?

Do I know what they find most challenging about their role right now — and whether any of those challenges are within my power to address?

If this person were to describe how I lead them, in their own words, what would they say?

The names where your honest answer is “I’m not sure” or “I don’t know” — those are your blind spots.

Not a judgment. Not a failure. Just an honest map of where the work of Inquisitive Leadership begins for you.

Because awareness is not the destination. It’s the doorway.

What you do with what you find on the other side of that doorway — that is where your leadership transforms.

~

A Final Word

The leaders I’ve had the privilege of coaching over the past two-plus decades have taught me something I return to again and again:

The gap between a good leader and a truly exceptional one is rarely a gap in strategy, knowledge, or execution.

It is almost always a gap in understanding — of the people they lead, of the impact they’re actually having, and of themselves.

That gap closes when a leader gets curious enough to ask what they don’t know. And courageous enough to stay present with what they hear.

That is the practice of Inquisitive Leadership.

And it begins — always — with a question.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear what it surfaced. Leave a comment or hit reply. I read every one.

~

If this article resonated, here’s how to go deeper:

📚 Get the Book

Inquisitive Leadership: A New Approach to Cultivating High Performance walks you through all five stages of The CAPPP Advantage™ with case studies, real leadership stories, and the self-assessment at the end that reveals your Inquisitive Leadership profile and gives you a personalized path forward. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org

🔍 Take the Assessment + Book a Clarity Session

The self-assessment is at the end of the book. Once you complete it, a Clarity Session is a dedicated 1:1 debrief with me — we unpack your results together and build a clear, tailored path forward based on exactly where you are.

💡 Executive Coaching

For any leader who wants consistent, expert support to be more effective in their role — regardless of title or tenure. Over 500 hours delivered. ICF certified. Built on The CAPPP Advantage™ framework.

🤝 Join the Inquisitive Leader Membership

A growing community of leaders who are doing this work — monthly live sessions with me, practical tools, first access to new resources including the Manager Toolkit, and a network of leaders who understand exactly what you’re building.

Frederica Peterson, MA, CPC, ACC

Leadership Architect | Creator of The CAPPP Advantage™

Best-Selling Author, Inquisitive Leadership: A New Approach to Cultivating High Performance

It’s a bittersweet win—I’m too exhausted to celebrate properly—but the results are truly phenomenal. In less than 24 hours, the book became the #1 new release on Amazon. Now, just 48 hours later, it is ranked #1 in three categories! We climbed from rankings in the 62,000s yesterday to the 12,000s today. This is a blessing from God.

To my fellow Entreprenista family, I know you value profitability, but I have a message for you: if your leadership is lacking, your revenues will be too. Period.

I believe in this work so strongly—it’s why I persevered—and I wanted to ensure it reached as many people as possible right at launch. That’s why we’ve decided to offer the ebook for just $.99 through Sunday. The paperback and hardcover are also available; in fact, the price on the hardcover has already increased by $5 due to strong sales. Everything is selling well.

Consider this both a plug for the book and a testimony for anyone struggling to get their work into the world. The road is challenging, but I am a firm believer that when you pour so much of yourself into something and face immense opposition, you know you are on the right track. Be active, do your work, and do not be deterred.

I truly appreciate your support. If you find value in my work, please share it with a friend. There is so much more to tell, but you will find all the details when you read the book.

Thank you in advance.

Frederica (Kiki) ♥️

Inquisitive Leadership: A New Approach to Cultivating High Performance

I am sure some of you may want to stop reading this about now, or maybe you are down right angry because it sounds offensive, mean spirited, unsympathetic or uncaring about the plight of others. Maybe this describes you and I have just touched a hot button. Whatever the reason, I respectfully say, get over it! I challenge you to read on.

If you know anything about me, you know that I am committed to helping people live up to their potential. It sounds so positive, so empowering and for some even vigilant. Well, there is a side to this that is not so pretty. Sometimes I have to get dirty, real dirty, down in the dirt and the mud and other “stuff” because that is where people are. I have to help them get up and get out and for me that is by any means necessary and brutal honesty happens to be one of my specialties.

So you may be thinking to yourself, who does she think she is, judging people? It is so easy to judge someone when you haven’t walked in his or her shoes. Ha! Let me tell you something, I have been through my own hell walk and had it not been for the brutal honesty from some brave souls I would not be living…no, thriving, in my life right now. Here’s the thing, having a passion to help others is usually one of the gifts you acquire when you have gone through something. When you have been through the fire and came out carrying buckets of water for others to survive as well.

When you have been through some things you can see some things. You can read people from a different lens. You know what is real and what isn’t. You can see broken when others can’t because you lived it. So what I would say to those of you that don’t understand is that I have a story myself, which might shed some light on my personal knowledge on this subject.

In my early childhood years I lived with my parents but one of them was mentally unstable and suffered with psychotic episodes occasionally. Her fascination with demonic forces and knives almost claimed my life several times. Living in this type of environment caused me to learn to live in “survival mode” always on guard and stressed. As an adult I am able to understand what that means but as a child the reality is that I didn’t understand what was happening I just learned to cope. That was my normal. It is easy to say, well your father should have done this or that but unless you lived it you wouldn’t understand. We were all coping with the situation the best way we knew how. Many of you may think I hated my mother but that was the farthest thing from the truth. I have nothing but love for her. She did the best she could, she was not in her right mind but when she was, there was no doubt in my mind how much she loved me. The funny thing was that even at that young age I tried to understand how her mind was processing things. I was always fascinated with the human psyche, which is why to this day I am very astute with assessing people.

Going through this type of trauma as a young child did a lot of damage to my own psychological health, especially my self-esteem. It was fragile. I was always a little different because I was very sensitive and I got bullied on a regular basis because I stayed as far away from drama as possible. When it came to fight or flight, I ran. My little body could not endure any more unnecessary pain, psychologically or physically. Of course, I could not articulate that but that is what was happening. Kids can be so mean; of course they looked at this as a weakness so I was the target of many. As I got older, this flight mentality remained. I would not fight back when others disrespected me and again was looked at as being weak, when in reality it was a protective mechanism. As you can imagine this made me a target for a lot of abuse because people felt they could get away with it but over time the anger started to build up. There began to be moments of fight but when I came out swinging I usually had a sword (my tongue) and there were casualties. Over time and over the years I finally sought out counseling and was able to really move through that time in my life and the subsequent incidents throughout my life that tried to keep me down.

I really could have used this as an excuse to not evolve. It stunted my emotional growth for many years and I used it as an excuse when I would fail at relationships, personal and professional accomplishments, etc. The excuse was usually what I said to myself. It was the thing that used to fuel that conversation in my head to validate that I wasn’t enough, or that is why this happened or that happened. This literally helped me justify all of the disappointments and hurt in my life. I was miserable and I was holding myself back. I was not living, or thriving in the person that God created me to be. It was the thing that allowed this baby eagle to be placed in the chicken coup for years! But through it all this passion inside me was building. All of the stuff in life that tried to make me a victim didn’t win because I finally made a decision to not let it win. So when I tell you, “I get it, I have been there”; and “It’s ok you will get through this.” I really mean it.

We all have a story, but what are you doing with yours? I only shared mine to give you a sense that I have been through some things myself (and you only heard a small piece of it). I am not just sitting here on my throne passing out judgment on others. I am sitting here on my computer in my office coming up with strategies to help free people from the things that are holding them back from living up to their potential because I believe other people’s lives depend on it.

By stepping out here and doing what I believe I was born to do, I have helped transition some people into their best life and I can’t tell you how amazing that feels! If everything I went through was to equip me to help free some people, then bring it because I know we were built to sustain trials! God literally created us this way. You don’t think he knew that we would have trouble in this life? Yes, he knew it! In fact we cannot reach our full potential without it! So, if you are going through life trying to avoid the pitfalls in the sand, recognize you are not growing or thriving. The really scary part is you are influencing others to do the same whether directly or indirectly. Or, even worse, maybe you are like I was, trying to “hide” all your stuff and look perfect so that you won’t be rejected and use that false sense of security to judge but not be judged? Well, I have a newsflash for you, it will catch up with you eventually and the more you try to hide your stuff the more you will draw attention to yourself.

My final point, it is not pretty, sexy or glamorous walking through life allowing yourself to be a victim. At some point you have to get tired of it. I am sure those that are around you are worn out. Put your big girl or boy shoes on and do something about it so that you can process the pain properly and get on with your life. I assure you, someone is waiting for that new you. The whole world is waiting on that new you. What if someone told you your most brilliant, life-changing moment is at the bottom of your pity bucket? Would you empty that thing or let it sit down there and die?

Sometimes we feel we need to make big moves to see change or feel better about our circumstances, when in reality getting the process started can be as simple as a change in perspective. How many times do we read something that inspires us so much that we can feel the excitement of the possibility and see the potential of what could be, but we don’t take the steps forward to move into action?

If you are stuck, consider what might be holding you back. I suggest doing a simple yet effective exercise I give to many of my clients. First, make a list of all the things you want to do, accomplish, try...if you if I could do anything what would it be? Next, write down all the things you feel are getting in the way of doing these things. Take a good look at that list, are they true barriers or just barriers you have erected in your mind? Do you need to look at things differently, shift your perspective?

Lastly, now that you have worked through your potential barriers, write down a list of things that are possible. It doesn’t mean you can do them right now, but you can start working on them, putting things in place. Consider a flower bloom, it doesn’t go from being planted in the ground today and producing beautiful blooms tomorrow. No, the seed is planted into ground that has the capability to produce the bloom, then you tend to the soil ensuring it is getting enough nutrients from the sun, water, etc. in other words, you are creating the environment for the flower to one day bloom.

That is what I am suggesting you do here. Create the environment for you to bloom, for your dreams to manifest. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. You have to be intentional and consistent. Now that you have a framework of a plan, take action. Small steps. It is the small, consistent effort that gives you the greatest results.

Here’s to your blooms. 🌷

So, embrace the fact that this is a new beginning whether you initiated it or not, new beginnings are often “un-initiated”. Your greatest loss could lead you to your biggest blessing! Think about it, what if Oprah never got fired from her anchor position early in her career?

Don’t misunderstand, I encourage you to feel the pain, the loss and the disappointment, but don’t stay there. Acknowledge it; go eat your Hagan Daz in your PJ’s for a few days and check out. It is needed and necessary, and all part of your healing process. When our brain has been hit with a trauma we have to recover and take the time to heal and gather our thoughts, there is nothing wrong or strange about it. Giving yourself permission to check out will help you reset and gain the strength to move forward, when you’re ready.

Loss is defined as, “the state or feeling of grief when deprived of someone or something of value”. In this context loss can mean several things, loss of a job, loss of a marriage, loss of a loved one, or loss of a home, to name a few. Feelings of grief are usually associated with the loss of a loved one but they are not limited to this. There is nothing more damaging than dealing with unprocessed grief. Some of the symptoms of unprocessed grief can be anger, unexplained health issues, forgetfulness, anxiety, and stress.

Often we only deal with loss in the moment and think, “I’m good” or “I got this” or the famous, “Just keep it moving”, all mantras to reflect how strong we are. Sigh, respectfully I suggest that these are very bad habits we have embraced. Yeah, you need to be strong but being strong doesn’t mean holding it all in, that is not wise, you are creating a luggage terminal and who the heck wants to carry all that baggage around! It is exhausting! Being strong is your ability to pick up the pieces after the devastation and put them back together so you can move forward toward your new beginning (or a new normal)! You may feel like you have no power right now because your circumstances are out of your control but the real power is in the choices you make in the midst of your trial.

After you have mourned the loss and allowed yourself the opportunity to experience the grief, embrace the reality that “this too shall pass.” When you’re ready, rise up and know that it is a new day. Remember, this IS JUST THE BEGINNING! Your best days are ahead of you, I promise!

If you are reading this and finding yourself in a time of unexpected or difficult transition, I will be re-launching an On Demand course that may be just what you need to help you get on the path to your new season. Sign up below for early access and special discount.

👉🏽https://fredericapeterson.myflodesk.com/transitions-waitlist

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Photo by Andrew Eccles

I believe everything happens for a reason so it must be that someone needs to hear this right now. Though written a while ago, the message never gets old.

There is a lot going on in our society at the moment and the ability to cope can be very difficult for some. I hope this is a gentle reminder that boundaries are necessary for a reason. Without them, we give someone else the access to determine our outcomes.

As you read this it may not be for you but for someone you know so pass it on. Sending you healing vibes…❤️‍

Would you ever stay in an abusive relationship for money? Strong words to consider though the many times I have asked this question the response almost always leads to interpretation around domestic violence, which is still relevant in perspective. However, I have posed this question mainly in a professional development workshop to people who are mainly in the workforce. So, in that context, I want you to consider this question again, ”Would you ever stay in an abusive relationship for money?” Before you answer that, let's explore how I even got to a place to consider this as a discussion topic.

One day as I was reflecting on my journey and all the peaks and valleys I traveled through to get me where I am today, I had a revelation about what had really been holding me back from releasing my potential all these years. On that day I realized I had allowed others to define who I was by the titles, labels, limitations and assumptions they placed on me. Not only had I taken on the “identity” that was so readily imposed on me for others convenience, I was also accepting their language toward me and about me which was often disrespectful and inappropriate. I was allowing myself to do things that were outside the scope of my personal value system and at times my personal boundaries but all the while convincing myself, “this is what you need to do, to be…” or, “to have…” or, “to accomplish…” or, “TO BE ACCEPTED.”

I was blinded by the reality of what was really taking place. I was adapting to the truth of my situation all the while convincing myself it was normal because everyone around me was contently working and often thriving in this environment. I viewed my discontent as not being able to “measure up” to some “standard”. The subliminal messages I heard were, “if I wasn’t able to cope with everything I was weak, less than, not enough.” I accepted this to be true even though it was not the TRUTH. Why, because I needed the paycheck; but all the while I was being diminished.

Until one day when I realized I had a choice. No one was holding a gun to my head; the decision to stay was completely up to me. The only choice, really, was giving up the money or in other words, the ability to pay my mortgage, car note, etc. To live in the way I was accustomed to after all these years. Money, the root... I can’t blame any of the people around me for what I was enduring, they were doing what was necessary for their definition of success, I was the one who had let my boundaries down, and compromised my values. People will only do to you what you allow them to. It was a compromise I chose for the money.

What it really came down to was that I did not believe in myself enough to make the right choices for me. So what changed? I realized that I either choose me or I may not wake up to see another day. So I started taking the steps to make right choices for myself and as I did that the things in my life began to change and the resources and people that I needed to make a transition began to enter my life. As my focus and energy evolved so did my life, the transformation process is just that. I liken it to the changing of seasons, because it literally is.

So where are you on your journey? Being held captive in someone else’s truth about you, or making choices that honor you?

I wouldn’t give up any of the experiences I went through for anything! I learned a great deal about myself and about people in general. It gave me my voice! A loud, relevant, relentless, empowering voice!

Sometimes you have to go through some things to shape you into the person you need to be to fulfill your destiny. Every diamond must go through a refining process that can be quite intense but in the end all they see is the brilliance of the diamond.

Perspective is everything!

Which leads me to today. I am excited to share that I am actively in the editing stage for my book entitled "Inquisitive Leadership." It's about helping leaders unlock the valuable potential of their team. This has been in the works for many years. I actually finished the draft early this year, but with all the recent changes happening in DEI, which also affected leadership development, I had to rethink my approach to presenting this work.

Through a pain staking process with an amazing editor, I was able to create a better product than I started with. All of the challenging discussions, rewrites, overwhelm, restructures and mind maps created a beautiful framework that could be a game changer for leaders striving for a high performance team.

In my experience, leaders want to do more to tap into the excitement, enthusiasm and best ideas of every member of their team but keep finding themselves struggling with the same old low engagement. Considering the unstable environment we are in right now as a society, this is more prevalent now than ever. This book unveils a specific, human-centric methodology for unlocking a team's energy, ideas and revenue-generating potential that I've developed over the past three decades advising corporate leaders and working with my own teams. I've seen it help many leaders who were not achieving the results they knew were possible, and I have a strong sense that the timing is right to help many companies improve their cultures and the bottom line simultaneously.

I've drafted a white paper that introduces the methodology. If you'd like to receive a copy, please message me. I'd love to share an early copy with you

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As a leader, this is detrimental to your team's performance. Lack of discomfort removes the ability to coach your team effectively, encourage new ideas and innovation and more importantly gets in the way of your ability to genuinely connect with your team members. If high performance is important to you, you should recognize true high performance does not come from one way communication, a central acceptance of ideas from parties that tend to agree with you, or a team that falls in line with norms that have been established by the leader. That is called a dictatorship and you will never be able to have your team reach its full potential in that type of environment.

As the leader you set the tone for acceptable and unacceptable behavior. As a rule, most employees won’t question or challenge their leader if they feel they will not be tolerated or heard. Understand that this is your team operating from a place of obedience, which may be comfortable for you but very limiting to your team's performance potential. It is ridiculous to waste amazing talent, innovation and leading edge decisions all in the name of your comfort.

Consider all the new innovations that have emerged over the past several decades. This is only possible with leaders that know how to push the edges of their comfort. That understand the brilliance is in the unknown and the strongest teams are those willing to push the edges of the circle.

We see how that played out when Apple came on the scene in the 1980’s, Steve Jobs was masterful at pushing the edges of the circle. Always considering what is possible and encouraging his team to do the same. Imagine if Steve only wanted to stay in the comfort zone? The evolution of the iPhone would have taken on an entirely different form. It wasn’t perfect but it certainly was revolutionary to significant advancement in telecommunications. The playing field will never be the same.

Now let’s explore the relationship between comfort zone and norms. I want you to visualize yourself sitting in the middle of your comfort zone, sitting in the center of your circle. Now picture someone that you work with is also sitting in their comfort zone. They are in the middle of their circle. Your two circles aren’t touching. However, when you start to move out of your comfort zone, toward the edge of your circle, it begins to expand. Now consider your team mate is also moving out of their comfort zone, walking toward the edge of their circle. At some point the circles’ edges will intersect. That point of intersection is the starting point of creating norms. The place where everyone has input, feels valued and feels safe to contribute.

The lesson, if you want to be a high impact leader, that creates an environment of high performance, you must be willing to get comfortable living in the zone of discomfort and always reminding yourself that normal is a construct, ever changing and ever evolving. This is how you move you and your team from mediocrity to high performance

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In my instinctive way, I saw the signs and knew I had to start making moves on my own again, but I also knew, I cannot do this by myself, I need a team. How the heck am I going to find one? I had no idea what kind of support I needed, I just knew I needed support and quickly. I reached out to a dear old friend that is a very successful entrepreneur in her own right for over 30 years and she was able to connect me with a consultant that helps entrepreneurs like myself pull together their business plans. We did some incredible work for the three months we worked together but I had all this great advice and material but no plan to execute. Therein lies my challenge, I need someone to help me execute. I am great at coming up with amazing ideas, but I am terrible at bringing them to life. What I know is I am good at being the talent that can deliver the goods, but plans to execute, that is where I need help…enter my ‘silver lining’.

It was only God that delivered Riz to my inbox. Months before she had reached out to me to see if I needed support and I didn’t at the time, but there was something about her that I remembered. Of all the outreach I get on Linked In, for some reason, I saved her message. I liked her style and thought I may reach out to her in the future if I need her. Well, fast forward three months later, I was frantically looking for sales support for an initiative my former team had started and I remembered that email. I was able to recover it from my LinkedIn inbox and the rest is history. She could not have been a better match for my needs, but I would not have found her if I had not gone through all I went through. The process of learning will take you through some things to help you understand what you need. What I notice is that many of us jump out of the fire before its time because it gets uncomfortable. I have a question for you, if you know you are called or equipped to do something, to be something, are you willing to wait for it? To go through the fire for it?

I meet so many people that will only sustain the course until it gets a little too uncomfortable but it is important to recognize that growth is in the discomfort. I believe we cut off our best life because we settle for something comfortable or give up too soon. Sure, I could have leaned into a more comfortable, predictable life but I would have never been content. It is only recently that I am feeling alive again. I am sleeping well again, I have a purpose again; and with my fire igniting, it is definitely catching other people. That is what fire does, it ignites and catches. Because your gift is not just for you, it is for other people too. We were all created for a purpose which is connected to another purpose. Our journey is meant to take others with us not to travel alone, though it may feel that way sometimes.

Why do I share all this, because someone needs to be encouraged to stay the course. Believe in yourself and the process. There is a lot going on right now and if we are not careful we can become a victim of our circumstances. Believing that things are happening to you is not serving you or your impact. I challenge you to reframe that thinking because in reality things are happening for you. All things will work together for your good, no matter the path it takes to get there. It doesn’t mean it won’t be uncomfortable or even scary sometimes, but if you allow yourself the grace and the space to go through it, you will be better for it. I don’t know anyone that hasn’t gone through something and not come out better on the other side. A demise is something created by leaving the outcome up to someone else. A blessing or new beginning is only possible when you respond to your circumstances in a way that honors your value or your worth, so respond wisely.

Remember, the comfort zone is like standing in the middle of a circle. Staying there keeps your circle small and therefore keeps YOU small. Moving toward the pliable edge, creates space giving you greater impact and the access to endless possibilities. Here’s to your success! 🥂

Picture taken when I first started this journey ten years ago…

Photo credit: Tinnetta Bell

#leadershipperspectives #comfortzone #shiftingtheatmosphere

The human condition- we are wired with 3 basic needs, 1) to be liked 2) to like ourselves 3) to be comfortable.

To tap into our potential we must be intentional, accountable and teachable. These are the basic rules for being a good leader.

Because our basic instinct is to be comfortable, when we are put in situations that make us uncomfortable, whether that be others behavior, unfamiliar people, experiences, etc. we must be committed to having an open mind, challenging our biases and resolute in learning a new narrative to help us evolve into what possible.