A senior leader I coached last year at a leading technology firm started one of our sessions by telling me he was thinking about leaving his company. He had been there for more than two decades. Highly respected. Important accounts.
He said, “I don’t know if I’m working for the right company.”
I asked: “What is the feeling that is causing that thinking?”
He paused. Then he said, “They don’t value their people.”
I went deeper. “What does that mean?” He gave me a few examples. Decisions that seemed to treat people as ‘interchangeable’. Policies that ‘felt one-sided’. Small things that added up to a larger feeling.
We went deeper still. “What does that mean to you?” He said it meant the company did not see him as a person. Only as a resource.
One more level. “What does it mean when the company sees you as a resource?” He went quiet for a long time. Then he said, “It means I do not matter.”
Seven levels deep. That is where the real work lives. The policies were the trigger. The feeling underneath them was the problem.
A generic process would have given him five steps to address the policies. An AI tool would have summarized his options and listed the pros and cons. Neither would have found the real issue.
In that same session, the leader told me about something he had been practicing. He had been trying to observe himself as a third person. Stepping outside himself in conversations and watching how he reacted.
He noticed something. When his daughter spoke to him, his first response was a judgment. A judgment about whether she was right or wrong. He had more experience than her, so he assumed his judgment was correct.
Then he noticed the same pattern at work. When he interviewed someone for a job, he judged them before he understood how they thought. When a team member brought him a problem, he judged the problem before seeking to understand.
Judgment was his default. It was so automatic he did not know it was happening.
I asked him to try something between our sessions. When someone came to him with a problem, wait three seconds before responding. Count to three. Then ask one question before saying anything else.
He came back two weeks later and told me those three seconds really changed his relationships with his team. His direct reports started bringing him problems they had been sitting on for months. They told him he seemed more approachable. He had not changed his mind about anything. He had just stopped leading with judgment.
This is what avoidance looks like when you are a high performing and very busy senior leader. You are not hiding under a desk or refusing to show up. You are doing your job well and avoiding the very thing underneath your job that needs attention.
The leader I coached was covering the real issue with complaints about company policies, with good performance, with judgment of everyone around him. The covering was working. Nobody could see it. He could barely see it himself.
Six months into our work, this leader stopped talking about the company policies. He stopped talking about leaving. He started talking about what he wanted to build with his team. He started having the conversations he had been avoiding with his own boss.
He told me, “I was not running from the company. I was running from myself.”
Here is where we went. “What you are avoiding is the thing running your career. Every decision you make is filtered through it. Your reactions are shaped by it. You can change companies. You can get a better title. Your avoidance carries with you. Same pattern, new office.”
I see this with most leaders I coach at IT services firms. They are avoiding a conversation, a decision, a feeling, a truth about themselves. The avoidance looks like competence. They are busy. They are productive. They are reliable. And underneath all of it, there is something they are not dealing with.
The real question: what are you not doing about it?
I spent 18 years at Morgan Stanley, the last six as Managing Director. I watched smart, capable leaders do the same thing this leader did. They kept “high-performing”. They kept avoiding. And the thing they were avoiding kept running the show.
The leaders who changed were the ones who stopped long enough to ask themselves one honest question. Just one question.
I invite you to:
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Raju Panjwani
Founder of Live Masterminds, Inc.
I was at Morgan Stanley for 18 years, Managing Director. | I now work with senior leaders in IT services and technology consulting, on becoming the leader the business now needs.