CASE STUDY 06
What You're Distributing Every Morning
One CEO had a whiteboard full of people who'd failed him. Another spent his mornings walking the floor. Their results were not comparable.
The Situation
The first CEO was already agitated when his coach walked in. The numbers were bad. His team was underperforming. He'd been in the office since 6am, and by the time the coaching session began, he had filled his whiteboard with the names of every person who had failed him — all 23 employees, several vendors, and at the bottom of the list, his coach.
The second CEO was slightly embarrassed when he shared his time audit. Over two weeks, he'd tracked everything he did with his waking hours. The pattern that stood out: every single workday, he spent the first hour walking the plant floor. Chatting. Connecting. Checking in — not on projects, but on people. By the end of each week, he'd had an informal conversation with nearly every employee.
He was worried this looked like a waste of time. "I know I need to stop doing it," he said. "But I'll miss it."
The Coaching Intervention
The coach handled these two clients very differently.
With the first CEO, the session was ultimately about what his blame posture was doing to his own company. Research from the Creating WE Institute describes cortisol — the stress hormone — as a "sustained-release tablet": when employees face criticism, rejection, or fear from a leader, the cognitive and behavioral effects can last 26 hours or more. The CEO's morning anger wasn't just unpleasant. It was neurochemically impairing the thinking of every person on his team for the rest of that day and into the next. He was, quite literally, making his own people less capable of solving the problems he was frustrated that they couldn't solve.
“Cortisol functions like a sustained-
release tablet. The more we ruminate about
our fear, the longer the impact.”
With the second CEO, the coach asked him to hold off on any changes to his morning routine and bring his time log to the monthly CEO peer forum first. When he did, his fellow CEOs noted something: this was the CEO in the group with the highest employee engagement and the most consistent productivity. His peers — almost universally — left that meeting planning to carve out daily connection time of their own.
What the second CEO had been doing instinctively, the research calls oxytocin distribution. Oxytocin is the trust hormone. It strengthens communication, deepens collaboration, and reframes problems as opportunities rather than threats. His informal floor walks weren't a distraction from leadership. They were leadership — in its most effective form.
The Outcome
The first CEO, once he understood what his stress responses were costing his team, worked to change them. Not overnight, and not perfectly — but the awareness shifted his behavior. He began to manage his own emotional state before walking into rooms. He stopped starting meetings with what had gone wrong and started starting them with what was possible.
The second CEO kept his morning walks. He also became a model for the peer group — an example of what culture-building looks like when it's woven into daily behavior rather than announced in a quarterly all-hands.
The PACER Principle
The Evaluate stage of the PACER Action Model requires a form of self-assessment that most owner-operators resist: turning the analytical lens on their own behavior and asking honestly what results their leadership style is producing. The whiteboard CEO was evaluating his team. He needed to be evaluating himself.
The Revise stage — the final move in the PACER cycle — is where behavioral change lives. For leaders whose default response to pressure is criticism, blame, or fear, revising that response is some of the highest-leverage work available. The research is unambiguous: the emotional chemistry a leader generates in a room shapes the cognitive capacity of everyone in it.