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CASE STUDY 01
The Name He Left Off the
Whiteboard
When a company stalls, owners are quick to point at everyone else. This CEO had a full whiteboard and a blind spot the size of a mirror.
The Situation
The coach could tell something was wrong before he sat down. His client — the owner and CEO of a growing company — was already pacing. The moment the pleasantries ended, the CEO gestured at the whiteboard covering most of one wall.
On it were names. More than twenty of them. Employees. A few suppliers. An executive or two. Every person, according to the CEO, who had failed him. The business was behind on its numbers. Morale was shaky. And no one, it seemed, was carrying their weight.
Then the coach noticed something. His own name was at the bottom of the list.
“Everyone is letting me down.
I've been here since 6am, and I made a list
of everyone who has failed to do their job.”
The Coaching Intervention
The coach said nothing about the list — not yet. Instead, after letting the CEO finish venting, he asked a simple question: "Would you go for a walk with me?"
The CEO resisted. The coach held firm: "If you come with me, I think I can help you."
They walked out of the office, down the hall, and into the men's room. The coach led his client to the mirror above the sinks and let the silence settle. Then: "On your whiteboard, I noticed you'd forgotten one person who has let you down. He's looking at you right now."
There was a long pause. Then the CEO smiled — a real one. "You know, I could fire you for that."
"I thought I already was," the coach replied.
The CEO shook his head. "Of course not. I just need help."
That was the opening. The coach shifted from the blame list to root causes. He proposed three moves: the CEO had to own the problem, not distribute it; he had to invite his best people to share in diagnosing it; and he had to genuinely listen to what they surfaced — not just seek ratification for his own conclusions.
What the coach had observed over many sessions was a pattern: the CEO came to team meetings with his own diagnosis and his own solutions pre-loaded. His team nodded. He called it agreement. It wasn't. It was compliance — with no real ownership, no real buy-in, and no one to catch him when his assumptions were wrong. The whiteboard was the result.
The Outcome
The company reversed its performance decline. That was the immediate win. But the more lasting result was a CEO who learned to lead differently. He stopped hoarding the hard problems and started sharing them. He stopped arriving at his team's table with answers and started arriving with questions. Over time, his team began to bring him solutions he wouldn't have found alone.
The loneliness at the top — the kind that makes a leader fill a whiteboard with other people's failures — largely disappeared. Because he had chosen to let others in.
The PACER Principle
The PACER Action Model's Evaluate stage asks a demanding question: Are our results matching our plan — and if not, why not? For owner-operators, the instinct under pressure is to evaluate outward: who failed, what went wrong, who let me down. The harder and more productive evaluation is inward. The whiteboard was a symptom. The root cause was a leadership style that isolated the CEO from his own team's best thinking.
Evaluate honestly. Including yourself.
That's where the real leverage is.
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