Thank you for joining us to explore a critical inflection point in how we define leadership. Our readers would like to get to know you better. What was a defining moment that shaped who you are as a leader?
I once visited a franchisee whose retail product sales were weirdly low compared to other stores. I gave him some business advice, and a few weeks later his retail sales had nearly tripled.
Would you like a copy of the sales strategy deck I used to empower him? Happy to oblige.
I told him three words: “Sell more toys.”
That was it. That’s what it took.
Here’s what I think happened: He used to greet every customer with an explosion of enthusiasm: “Welcome to Zoom Room! We’ve got agility and puppy classes, we have birthday parties, and dog treats, leashes, collars, Pup-lates, water bowls!” It sounded like an old deli menu.
All I really did was give him permission to focus on one clear priority. Suddenly, his brain re-sorted itself around that. The team got it. The energy shifted immediately, and the numbers followed fast on its heels.
Psychologists have shown that fewer, clearer options often spur action; one salient target reduces decision cost. “Sell more toys” did exactly that.
That moment surfaced something I’d been doing instinctively for years: intentionally forgetting what I know. Behavioral economists call it the curse of knowledge — the idea that once you understand something, you lose access to the feeling of not understanding it. Your brain rewires, and you can’t get back.
Most leaders assume coaching means sharing what they know, but the real work is noticing what they can no longer see — the invisible gap between their expertise and someone else’s confusion.
My franchisee didn’t need more information. He needed a direction.
That’s when it clicked: If you don’t compensate for your own expertise, it becomes a liability. Intelligence without translation doesn’t scale; it confuses. And sometimes it kills clarity altogether.
John C. Maxwell is credited with saying, “A leader is someone who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” How do you embody that quote as a leader?
Most leaders have no trouble knowing the way or going the way. Strategy, modeling behavior — that part’s easy.
Where it falls apart is “showing the way.” The classic error is showing from one’s own vantage point and not from where the other person is standing.
When my son was little and needed to learn something — brushing his teeth, tying his shoes — I’d tell him to pretend he was the dad and his kid didn’t know how to do it. How would he show him?
He’d slow down, think it through. First get the toothbrush wet, then just a tiny dot of toothpaste…
And this quickly grew from a parenting hack to a systems insight.
That’s how we teach at Zoom Room. We show franchisees with zero background in dog training how to teach trainers with zero instruction experience how to teach clients who’ve never trained a dog, and somehow it works. But only if we teach backward from ignorance, not forward from expertise.
I’m not a dog trainer. I went through our program cold and ended up writing the bestselling dog training book in the country. I didn’t become a master trainer; I learned to design systems that work without mastery.
To show the way, you have to ask two things constantly: What are they seeing that I’m not? And what am I seeing that they can’t?
That’s where coaching sets up shop.
How do you define the differences between a leader as a manager and a leader as a coach?
A manager maintains the machine. A coach asks if it’s the right machine.
That’s the distinction that matters now. Managers optimize for compliance with known standards. Coaches develop capability under shifting conditions. One preserves value. The other creates it.
I watched this inside our company. A former head of operations ran the network like a school district. She answered underperformance with surveillance: if a KPI dipped, another meeting; if one store slipped, everyone got another checklist. The intent to raise standards wasn’t wrong. The method was managerial: push from the top, assume the process is sound, correct the people. Complexity grew, and so did resentment. Franchisees weren’t developing; they were disengaging.
Her successor took a different path. He’s simplifying: fewer steps, fewer meetings, clearer priorities. More important, he leads through alignment rather than fiat. He starts with two questions: “What’s actually helping you succeed?” and “Where is the system making your job harder than it needs to be?” The result is leaner operations and renewed engagement. People aren’t resisting change; they’re driving it.
A manager works from institutional memory and fixes behavior.
A coach works from institutional curiosity and fixes the context that created the behavior.
So the questions change: “Why aren’t people following the process?” becomes “What is the process preventing them from doing?”
You don’t choose one forever; you choose based on the moment. Manage when safety, compliance, or brand standards are at risk — protect the system. Coach when signals get weird, workarounds multiply, or outcomes wobble — interrogate the system.
For a quick compass, notice your first move when a problem shows up: do you tighten control, or ask what the variance is trying to teach you? That beat tells you which hat to wear.
We started our conversation by noting that improved coaching is the number one leadership initiative in any organization today. What are some essential skills and competencies that leaders must have now to be better coaches?
First skill: Recognize when metrics stop measuring what matters.
Treat metrics like boomerangs. Throw them too hard, and they come back at your head.
Measure call center employees on “average call time” and watch customer service crater. They’re not solving problems anymore; they’re just trying to get you off the phone. The moment a measurement becomes the mission, it stops being a good measurement.
There’s a name for this: Goodhart’s Law.
We learned it the hard way. In Huntington Beach, one franchisee had unusually high customer lifetime value. I found the pattern: he encouraged clients to burn through their packages quickly. High attendance velocity predicted long-term spend.
The data was solid. So in Austin, we forced it by giving clients only eight weeks to take eight classes. The ticking clock would drive urgency and, we assumed, retention.
It worked. Then it broke.
Classes overfilled. Waitlists ballooned. Clients panicked about expiration dates. Complaints flooded in. We had to readjust this lever by dialing back the intensity.
The insight about early attendance velocity was real. But the behavior we triggered wasn’t loyalty. It was calendar panic. We’d turned a measurement into a mandate, and it stopped measuring anything useful.
Here’s what’s worse: We almost didn’t catch it. The Austin team was hitting their velocity targets so consistently, they started believing velocity was retention. Not a predictor of it, but the thing itself. That’s surrogation: when you forget the number was just a proxy and start worshipping it as the goal.
The antidote? Two simple guardrails: keep asking “Is this number still pointing at what we actually want?” and pair every proxy with a balancing signal that catches distortions. In Austin, for example, pair attendance velocity with week-four client satisfaction so speed doesn’t crowd out experience.
Second skill: Assume you’ll be misunderstood.
We have a document called “Stellar Customer Service” that teaches behavioral economics through stories, not definitions.
“Picture a client leaving puppy class…” is how one section begins, introducing the principle of reciprocity through narrative. The concept lands because the story does.
If you think your message is clear, test it. Have someone new explain it back to you. If they stumble, the problem’s in the message, not the person.
Third skill: Stop designing for heroes.
Most orgs survive on people who intuitively “get it,” those glue people who compensate for every broken process. That’s not a system. That’s luck.
Ironically, the franchisees who struggle most are often the smartest. They move too fast, skip “obvious” steps, explain from ten rungs up the ladder with no one below them.
Coaching means building processes that work when the genius is on vacation. When absence causes collapse, it wasn’t a system. It was choreography, and you were the only one who knew the steps.
Write for the least context, make the next step visible, and confirm a newcomer can run it quickly and safely.
We’re all familiar with the adage, “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” How are you inspiring — rather than mandating — leaders to invest in upskilling and reskilling?
I’ll leave inspiration to the kitty cats hanging from branches. That’s not what moves people.
Google spent years studying great teams in Project Aristotle. They tested talent, workload, team structure, leadership style. One factor overshadowed the rest: psychological safety, the ability to take a risk without being punished.
In a franchise system, safety doesn’t mean freedom to reinvent the model. You can’t just decide to paint the Golden Arches green because you think it’s festive.
At the franchisor level we track spectacular misses when we’re building new programs. For our franchisees we track something different: honest struggle with the proven system. When a franchisee says, “I can’t get this to work,” that’s gold. Not because we want improvisation, but because now we can coach the exact steps that work.
Most people don’t like being pushed. Psychologists call that reactance. In class we teach the same pattern as oppositional reflex. A trainer gently pushes a client’s shoulder; the client pushes back. The trainer pulls an arm; the client resists. That’s the hard-wired response to force.
Same on a leash. Pull and the dog pulls. Not defiance: reflex. So, we teach loose-leash walking. The leash stays slack, more seatbelt than steering wheel. The leash is not the lead. You are.
Learning works the same way. Mandates create resistance. Make it safer to move forward than to stand still and people choose forward. We design training that reveals complexity in layers, with immediate practice and feedback.
Where, then, does experimentation live if not in every unit? With the franchisor. Our core team collects ideas from the field — many brilliant, some bizarre — and turns the best into pilots. Then we proof them.
In dog training, proofing means a cue learned in a quiet kitchen must also work on a noisy sidewalk. Different contexts, different distractions. Only then is it solid.
We run our pilots the same way. Not in one company store where we control everything. That’s n=1, and n=1 proves nothing. We pilot across multiple markets, different demographics, veteran and newer owners. We don’t generalize from success. We proof for it.
When a franchisee’s idea doesn’t pan out in pilot, we back the bet, log the miss, and keep the bettor in the game.
Franchisees don’t have to take wild risks to benefit from innovation. They bring the sparks; we handle the fireproofing.
Leaders don’t need pep talks. They need a path that is safe and visible. When the path has been proofed and the first step is clear, they take it. The path becomes the incentive.
No pulling required.
How do you coach someone to do their best work? How can leaders coach for peak performance in our current context? What are your “Top 5 Ways That Leaders and Managers Can Be Effective Coaches?”
1. Simplify the target. Don’t over-explain the complexity.
That franchisee with low toy sales? He didn’t need a retail strategy. He needed three words. He needed help focusing. Chew toys didn’t drive his growth. Increased focus did. Good coaching helped him experience the benefits of tighter discipline without the need for a “less is more” lecture.
It sounds reductive. It is. Sometimes coaching means giving someone permission to focus narrowly, even artificially.
Smart leaders often assume their job is to transmit depth. But depth without direction leaves you with a well with no water. If you see someone drowning in options, drop them a line — a mercifully thin single line.
2. Build for misunderstanding.
Every time we write a new SOP, we test it by asking someone fresh to explain it back. If they stumble, we don’t “clarify” the wording. We rewrite it from scratch.
The fault isn’t theirs. The document is wrong.
This should be obvious, but most companies write policies for people who already get it — then blame the outliers when those systems fail.
Coaching means assuming confusion is the default, not the exception.
If someone doesn’t understand you, take that as feedback on your explanation.
3. Make experiments feelable, not theoretical.
We don’t tell our staff that customers respond more to hearing their own name than their dog’s. That would be a lecture about the cocktail party effect — how we orient to our names even in noise.
Instead, we say: “Try using the owner’s name three times during class. See what happens.”
They do it. They feel the shift. Now the insight is theirs.
This is how we teach everything that matters: with activities they can do and experiences they can feel in their fingers.
That’s when adoption occurs without force, and the experiment becomes the teacher.
4. Create rituals that surface what’s real.
Every week, our locations send in a “Three Things” report: What worked, what didn’t, and what surprised them. No data, mind you, only stories.
I remember one franchisee submitting: “A client cried during puppy class. Her last dog died six months ago, and this was the first time she felt ready to love again.”
There isn’t a dashboard that could show that. The narrative tells you more than any number.
We ritualized this because rituals run without motivation. They don’t need hype. They happen.
And when truth-telling becomes routine, coaching has something to work with.
The key rule is to never be taken aback by honesty. If you punish truth, you won’t see it again. Meet it with calm, and the system starts to self-correct.
Rituals also shape memory.
People don’t remember experiences holistically: they remember the peaks and the endings. That’s why we intentionally conclude our classes with showmanship, a celebration of gloriously tiny achievements marked by bestowing colorful milestone rings that clients collect.
After hundreds of thousands of sessions, we know which moments land, so we architect at least one jaw drop or belly laugh into every class, too. It’s Kahneman’s Peak–End rule in action. Spontaneity is overrated: engineer the magic.
5. Turn Every Employee into a Teacher.
When my son learned to teach toothbrushing, he internalized the steps and became a better brusher. That’s a powerful cognitive phenomenon that researchers call the protégé effect.
The science is clear: the act of preparing to teach reorganizes knowledge in your own brain. One Stanford study found that spending just 30 minutes preparing to teach someone else improved one’s own understanding more than many hours of studying would have.
Give a cashier thirty minutes to show a new hire how to close the till. Ask a line cook to teach a station reset. Have a dockworker teach safe strapping to a rookie. The simple act of explaining forces them to deconstruct their own intuitive genius into a repeatable process.
Teaching is not a separate function; it’s our primary mechanism for learning. It slows experts down, forcing them to see what beginners actually see. It exposes where the logic skips a step — where the curse of knowledge hides.
That’s the difference between genius and wisdom. Genius remembers everything. Wisdom forgets just enough to be useful.
When someone struggles, don’t take over. Ask them to teach it to you. Their explanation shows where the understanding breaks.
And that’s where the coaching starts.
We’re leading and coaching in increasingly diverse organizations. And one aspect of workforce diversity on the rise is generational diversity. What advice would you offer about how to effectively coach a multi-generational workforce? And how do you activate the collective potential of a multi-generational workforce?
The moment you think “millennials need this” or “boomers don’t get that,” you’ve stopped seeing individuals.
We’ve had 22-year-olds ask for printed manuals and 65-year-olds ask for Loom videos.
What varies isn’t age; it’s context.
A younger trainer might know how to run Instagram ads but have no clue why someone would write a check. An older trainer might be a customer service savant and still find it baffling that someone would post about their dog online.
Instead of making assumptions based on any demographics, we do “assumed context audits.”
When we’re ready to roll something out, we challenge ourselves to name out loud what we’re assuming the audience already knows.
I have a bit of an advantage here; in my past, I wrote a lot of instruction manuals, including ones for kids that accompanied educational toys. Or for parents and guardians to step in to teach a class, when they had no prior experience or subject knowledge. I’ve made curse of knowledge into a bit of a religion, but I’ll admit it takes practice to bonk yourself on the head enough times until you can wipe your own slate clean.
Here’s an example from my software company: when we introduce a change to our user interface, we don’t run separate trainings by age group. We look at the interface and ask: Does everyone know the difference between tapping and pressing? That swiping left deletes? That red means unavailable?
We write it up in guides, and younger staffers reference them just as often as older ones. Digitally people are separated more by Android/iPhone norms than by age bracket, in my experience.
To activate your workforce, stop bridging generations. Start bridging contexts.
We pair people by their complementary blind spots: the trainer who remembers every dog’s birthday with the one who spots inefficiencies from across the room.
Neither sees what the other sees. That’s the point. Let them trade lenses.
Coaching happens in the gaps. That’s how everyone gets sharper.
You’re referring to emotional intelligence, in a sense. What are two steps every leader can take to demonstrate a higher level of emotional intelligence?
Emotions matter. Acknowledge them. Any other questions?
The dominant culture of business has long operated as if the opposite were true. The fantasy is Severance brought to life: you leave your personality, your baggage, your feelings at the door. Your boss gave you a job to do, so do it. If you happen to enjoy it, fine. If not, oh well.
The path to increased efficiency and productivity is not paved by ignoring emotions. If they go unnamed, those homunculi of anxiety, frustration, resentment, grief, and envy will leak into tone, posture, subtext. They begin driving decision making.
To wrest control, see them and say them.
You’re not there to be anyone’s therapist. You’re not there to judge, to coddle, or to fix.
You are there to coach and lead. So make factual stoic acknowledgement of what you feel is in the air. “I can tell people are anxious about this.” “I felt frustrated by how this rolled out.” That’s it. You’re not solving or repairing anyone. But the minute you name it, the whole room exhales. Everyone feels human again.
I remember reviewing a presentation written by one of my employees. On the surface it looked fine. But after every mention of a success, the next line seemed to undercut it. Self-erasure threaded through the whole thing. I could have just marked it up with notes and sent it back. Instead, I asked him to tell me what it was like to write it, to describe the physical experience. Soon he admitted how nervous he felt, how much was riding on the outcome, and how inadequate he worried he might be.
What happened next? Does it matter? Maybe the presentation succeeded, maybe it didn’t. That wasn’t the point. Deals are won and lost. What mattered was that the workplace endured, and that within it, he felt a little safer. Safer to risk, safer to fail, safer to say out loud what was true. Work gets better when everyone is listening.
Psychologists call this affect labeling. At UCLA, researchers put people in an fMRI scanner and showed them images designed to spark fear — snarling dogs, threatening faces. As expected, the amygdala lit up. Then the subjects were asked to name what they saw: “anger,” “fear.” Instantly, activity in the prefrontal cortex spiked, and the amygdala calmed down. The act of putting the feeling into words shifted brain chemistry. As the cool kids say: “Name it to tame it.”
But there is one nuance worth keeping in mind. Other research at Columbia and Harvard found that if you fixate too long on labeling the emotion, you can get stuck in it. Naming absorbs cognitive resources, and if you dwell on the label, it clogs up the mental bandwidth you need for reappraisal, for moving forward. The discipline is to notice, name, and then return. Just like in meditation: acknowledge the thought, then come back to the breath. At work, you come back to the work.
Emotions are the elephant in the room. That elephant has a name, bub.
Words matter. And we’re collectively creating a new leadership language right now. What are the most important words for leaders to use now?
I once watched an entrepreneur pitch an investor with her leadership team sitting right beside her. These were people who had built the systems, taken the hits, carried the load. But in her pitch it was all “I decided,” “I discovered,” “I made it happen.” Her team’s faces hollowed. The investor passed, but it wasn’t her numbers — it was her words. It was because of the erasure.
Language does more than communicate: it reveals. Here are some incantations that prick my ears:
“What are you seeing that I’m not?”
A manager says, “Here’s the data.” A coach says, “What am I missing?” This phrase flips hierarchy into curiosity. People stop defending themselves and start showing you their true perspective.
“What would need to be true?”
When a team is stuck in disagreement, this question pulls them out of debate class and into a design sprint. It creates a conditional future everyone can test, instead of a duel over who’s right in the present.
“Where’s the friction?”
Metrics point to outcomes. Friction points to reality. Ask this and you surface the constraint that’s blocking progress — the sticky patch of sap in the process, not just a delta on a dashboard.
“Even over.”
Priorities aren’t statements; they’re economic tradeoffs. When the CEO of Zoom Room says, “socialization even over obedience,” that forces clarity. It tells the truth about what really matters and gives everyone the same compass when two goods compete.
MIA
Notice what’s missing from my list? “Obviously,” “just,” “simply.” Those words are tells. If it were obvious or simple, they wouldn’t need you.
Good Dog, Charlie
And sometimes it isn’t about the words themselves; it’s the timing that really matters.
In dog training, the trick isn’t what you say. It’s when you say it.
Most people think dog training is about correcting noise like barking, scratching, and whining. They say stop it, which is useless. All it teaches is fear. The real move is counterintuitive: reward the absence of the problem. When your dog scratches at the door and you open it, congratulations, your dog just trained you. But if you ignore the whining, wait for the exact moment she sits quietly, and then open the door, you’ve trained her. For doing nothing. Except it isn’t nothing — it’s exactly what you wanted. Calm. Steady. Quiet. That’s how behavior changes: not by punishing noise, but by noticing silence.
The same principle holds at work. Leaders often reserve praise for two extremes: when someone screws up, or when someone pulls off the heroic one-off. But the most important recognition comes when people are simply doing the work you expect of them. Calls are being made, invoices processed, code shipped. Heads are down; the system is humming. That’s when to say it: “Good work.” “Nicely done.” “You make this look easy.”
Don’t get in the habit of rising only when you hear a commotion in the hallway or when earnings beat expectations. Train yourself to listen for the hum — the white noise of industriousness and productive normalcy. Steady competence is what pays the light bill.
Ignore the hum, and people may slack — their day runs the same whether they’re on task or on Tik Tok.
If you only reward noise, you’ll get more of it. If you wait for calm and acknowledge it, you’ll get more of that instead. The workplace is no different. Praise in the quiet moments and you reinforce reliability, steadiness, and flow.
The discipline is to train yourself to notice not just the fires or the breakthroughs, but the quiet constancy of people doing their jobs. That’s where you place the treat.
I keep inspiring quotes on my desk. What’s your favorite “Life Lesson Quote,” and why does it mean so much to you?
“I teach the way I wish I had been taught.” — Sal Khan
I think often of that line. He imagined being lost and designed from there. Khan Academy made learning enduringly flexible and accessible.
That’s our goal at Zoom Room: to democratize dog training. To prove that anyone can learn it, if you match the pace to the person and build the system around the learner, not the syllabus.
Before Zoom Room, you’d sign up for a six-week obedience course. Some raced ahead, others fell behind; everyone ended up frustrated or bored. The model was designed for the convenience of the business, not the success of the student.
We torched that model. Instead, Zoom Room uses levels, not semesters, and progression on milestones, not elapsed time. We use rolling cohorts so you’re surrounded by peers at a similar stage, with space to loop back without stigma and permission to accelerate the minute you can. There’s no six-week cliff, no false graduation.
Time becomes the variable, mastery the constant. It’s a weekly ritual that meets you where you are.
We teach our classes exactly the way anxious, overwhelmed first-time dog owners need it to happen: small wins, clear steps, nothing assumed.
That approach is grounded in a simple managerial discipline: perspective switching. The curse of knowledge is real. Once you understand something, your brain hides the ladder you climbed. Good coaching forces you to reconstruct that ladder for someone else. Sometimes the next rung is a diagram, sometimes a crisp example, sometimes fifteen seconds of hands-on practice.
Expertise becomes a liability unless you compensate for it. Whenever I’m explaining something, I try to rewind my brain to the moment before I understood it. What would have helped me then? That’s what I try to say now. You can’t unknow what you know, but you can remember the fog you initially felt, and with a little practice, you can help someone else cut a path through their own.
Throughout this interview, I didn’t cite studies or name frameworks. The behavioral science is in the stories. If something landed, we can thank the scaffolding.
My best teachers let me sprint and sat with me when I stalled.
I try to return that favor at scale.
Our readers often like to continue the conversation. What’s the best way for readers to connect with you and to stay current on what you’re discovering?
Connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m not there daily, but I do read and respond. I genuinely enjoy unexpected conversations, and if you mention this interview, I’ll know where to start.
Thank you for sharing your insights. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and good health.
