Professional Development With Lasting Impact (And Some AI), With Todd Holzman

Revolutionizing professional development demands a bold approach to address why conventional programs often miss the mark. This episode features Todd Holzman, founder of Holzman Leadership, who unveils his groundbreaking “real work” process. Todd’s methodology doesn’t just theorize; it empowers leaders at Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies to solve crucial business problems in real time while simultaneously cultivating their leadership capabilities. Tune in to discover how this practical, results-driven framework is transforming organizational cultures and fostering truly capable leaders, moving beyond mere knowing to impactful doing.

Check out the full series of Career Sessions, Career Lessons podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/todd-holzman/.

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Professional Development With Lasting Impact (And Some AI), With Todd Holzman

CEO Of Holzman Leadership

Setting The Stage: Introducing Holzman Leadership’s Mission

This show is brought to you by Pathwise.io. If you want to take control of your career, visit Pathwise and join our community. Basic membership is free. My guest is Todd Holzman. Todd has dedicated his life to improving the conversations that people have with each other. He is the founder of Holzman Leadership, and his real work process is used by CEO, senior leaders, and HR executives at numerous Fortune 500, FTSE 100, and Global 2000 companies to transform their leaders, cultures, and business results. That’s what we’re going to be talking about. The work Todd does and his thinking on professional development and how to make sure that it has the desired impact on the people who are participating in those programs. Let’s get going.

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Todd, welcome. Thanks for joining me on the show.

Thanks for having me, J.R.

Tell us about your company, Holzman Leadership.

Thank you. We are a global provider of learning and leadership development services. We work with some of the biggest, well-known companies in the world that you would have heard of, as well as a bunch of smaller, very entrepreneurial companies, particularly in the biotech space. We work across industries, banking and finance, pharma, CEM, I think is the term for Construction, Engineering, Manufacturing, all of the stuff in tech and telecom as well.

Remind me how long you’ve been doing this. When did you get started?

I feel compelled to look at my watch because I’m not that sure it’s going to answer the question. I think I’ve heard the word time, and it’s like a Pavlovian response. We’re in 2025 now, so since 1994.

It’s been a long time. How did you get started? What was the prompt that led you into this space?

Is that Cornell undergrad, junior year, or the summer between my junior and senior year? That’s the time of your life when you’re thinking about, “What am I going to do with my life? What job do I want to have?” It seemed like an important question for me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I’d gotten to Cornell with the goal of becoming a Supreme Court justice because I’m not that vicious at all.

The goal was, “I’ll go to Cornell, I’ll go to Harvard Law afterwards, and maybe I’ll do my MBA as well, and that’ll set me up nicely.” The problem is I fell in love in my freshman year. My grades tanked, and unless you’ve got straight 4.0s, you’re not going to Harvard. If you’re not going to Harvard, at least back in those days, no more Supreme Court justices. I couldn’t get the pinnacle. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I’m probably glad I didn’t become a lawyer because it would just foster the worst part of my personality, which is the anal side of me. It was probably fortunate, but as I was trying to explore this question of “What do I do with my life?” I knew work was going to be a huge part of it. I equated those two questions with each other. I saw my friends doing what was expected of them. It’s like, “I don’t want to go down that road.”

I had several experiences with people who told me that I should be doing something to inspire people to live better lives. I gave my mission statement then. When I graduated, at my teacher’s invitation, I decided to start, of all things, a Taekwondo school in Manhattan. It felt like it was a good way to keep doing Taekwondo, which I loved. I seemed to be on this path of inspiring people to live better lives.

At some point, I knew I was going to go to grad school, and I didn’t want to do an MBA. It felt too empty for me because the people dimension wasn’t there. Right up the street, twenty blocks away, there was Columbia University, a huge college, and they had a program in Organizational Psychology. That’s what I went to do. Through that, I became very interested in professional development, in particular leadership development, and using that as a lever to make organizations a lot more effective. That’s where it all started.

The Real Work Methodology: Tackling Business Challenges

What are the kinds of things that you tend to specialize in now with your clients across the industries that you mentioned earlier? What types of topics, what types of problems are they wrestling with?

You could ask me this question tomorrow, and I’ll probably give you a slightly different answer than I would give you today. It’s some of the same things that they’ve always struggled with. How do we improve the performance of our business? They’re always thinking about, “How well our organization as a whole functions?” As a consequence of that, they start thinking about, “How do we get the best performance from a very human being that works for us? How do we get them collaborating well with each other? How do we get people executing well?” All of that, or a large portion of that, comes down to two things. How well people are led by people above them, and how much responsibility they take for leadership, regardless of their role.

We do something that I would say is strange. Most of the people who buy our services are HR executives, heads of leadership learning, talent, and training. We’ve developed a methodology where we can help people make massive progress on real business problems while we’re developing them to be able to do both of those things.

It creates a ton of value for people because most leadership development and most learning and development services don’t render people more effective in the real world. It’s a sad state of affairs. I gave a keynote speech on this at the SHRM MENA conference in Dubai two Novembers ago, MENA, Middle East and North Africa. They asked me to talk about what’s ailing learning and leadership development. Leadership development alone is a $60 billion industry globally.

Most people, if you look at McKinsey, Harvard, or even CCL, all the biggest purveyors of leadership development ever, I used to hire them when I was at Honeywell, will say, “We are not seeing an impact on business performance as a result of these hefty investments in money, but also people’s time. If you believe Michael Beer, who is this famous change guru and a Harvard professor, he’ll say, “That’s because people revert back to their old ways soon after the programs are over.” I’ve always found that incredibly sad.

I saw that firsthand when I was at IBM. After I was at McKinsey, then I was at Honeywell, then I was at IBM, we were able to bring in the greatest consultants in the world to develop our top 300 leaders. Their work was amazing and cutting-edge. Everybody was into it. All the stars aligned to ensure that people would be changed for the better as a result of going through what was a 6 or 12-month program because they invested in it.

I got to see what happened afterwards. I would coach these leaders, and I would sit with their leadership teams. About 20% of the time, you saw people, maybe a little bit less, make substantial improvements to how they lead, influence, collaborate, etc. Most of the people knew more, but they couldn’t produce it in real life. They had this knowing-doing gap. The rest of them, like 20%, got worse. You had people who were, for example, having a hard time with being too aggressive in their communication. They became so passive and passive-aggressive, which is arguably worse than what we saw before. We lost a lot of their good thinking and ideas.

It bothered me because I loved the work that we were doing. Again, we weren’t seeing real change or business impact, at least in my mind, from what I saw. Since then, I have dedicated my life to trying to figure out how to solve this problem. Your first question was, “What are the problems they’re struggling with? What are they looking to solve?” We have developed a methodology that enables them to solve those business problems and make them and develop their people in ways that make them more capable of not only solving those immediate problems, but problems more broadly.

Professional Development: We developed a methodology that enables them to solve business problems and develop their people, making them more capable of solving immediate and broader problems.

Even when we’re doing things like that, we never imagined doing sales training. We do a lot of sales training for people in tech and people in pharma. When I was at IBM, early application, this methodology allowed them to secure the largest telecommunications outsourcing deal in history, to the tune of $5 billion.

They exceeded their profit targets by 130% and revenue targets by 120%. The account executive, the client said, “I don’t know if you guys did it yourselves, but you’re a completely different company to work with.” The reason is that we had the IBM-ers bring to this development program all the little conversations they were going to have during the negotiation that they thought might not go as well as they needed to.

We’re able to help them see that you have a default way of handling this conversation that’s going to get in your way. Once we could create that realization and show them what good looks like, and then they apply it to the real world thing that was coming up, we’re not only developing them, but we’re making it very practical as they apply it immediately to something that matters where there was real money on the line.

That’s what we’re always doing. We’re always using their business promise to develop them and taking their newly developed self to help them make a lot more progress in their business problems than they otherwise would be able to. That’s our approach. We call it our Real Work Methodology. We use that whether we’re coaching an executive one-on-one, whether we’re working as a team coach to a team of executives, whether we’re developing thousands of first-line leaders, like we did at the post office, Royal Mail in the UK, it doesn’t matter. It’s always the same methodology.

The Journey To Leadership Development

Talk a little bit more about some of the secret sauce, some of the things that underpin your methodology.

I’m going to deep dive into the first step, and I’ll give you an overview of the four steps. The first step is, I don’t care if it’s like a coaching thing or it’s a workshop. Whatever it is, we always have somebody bring in a real business problem that they are not making progress on that they like, or a business problem they’re going to address. They think it’s going to be a real challenge for them to make progress on that thing.

With the salespeople, it’s, “I know there’s an opportunity for this drug to do a lot more good for these patients. I’ve had a bunch of conversations with this doctor, and nothing that I’ve said is moving the needle. My prescriptions have remained flat,” or it’s your old industry, finance, like one of the big banks in the world. We run a high-potential program, or one of the providers on this, like an award-winning high-potential program, and NPS scores are through the roof. We’re getting a 78. Our portion of it is, how do you lead beyond boundaries? How do you influence people beyond your team, up the chain, across the organization, outside of the organization, etc?

The key is always for them to bring something that they’re struggling with. I said I was going to say the four steps. That’s the first step. The second step is realization. The third step is rewiring. The fourth step is real-world results, but I’ll stay on this first step, which is to select a real-world problem. The reason for it is that it’s when we lean into those kinds of things, the things that we don’t know how to solve. The things that we’re struggling with are where all the lessons for our growth, our development, our ability to make a bigger difference to other people, to our teams in the world. All the goodness is in the place where we’re least likely to look.

Everybody wants to know best practices, but the real lessons come from our own experiences. We’re trying to help people mind these situations for the lessons that exist in them for that person, because those lessons can be truly transformative. Let me pause there. Any reactions or questions to that? I have a lot more to say about it, but I want to see what you think.

I’m curious. You’re having people bring in these real-world problems that the group rallies around. What’s the realization rewiring piece look like? What are you trying to get them to rethink?

Maybe I’ll explain that through an example. We were working with all the client partners globally and the top sellers, a hundred people at a fairly well-known IT/tech/digital services provider. They do transformation and all kinds of stuff with AI and putting stuff in the cloud. These guys are amazing. They’re super smart. They’re so hardworking. They’re so honest. They’re so humble.

They should be at least double the revenue, in my assessment. How do I know that? It’s quite a claim. Maybe I’m wrong, but I know they should be bigger than they are because of those qualities and the capabilities they have inside their firm, and how well-liked or loved they are by their clients. You have everything going for you. You’ve got super smart, hardworking people enabled by great technical capabilities, and their clients love them. What’s the problem?

We have them as part of step one. It’s like, “Write a little example of where you feel there’s a deal to be had here. There’s an opportunity for you to serve your client or customer, and you’re not moving the needle on it.” In order to help somebody, you have to know how they behave and think in real life, not how they say they think and behave, because we all have our blinders up. “I’m an honest person.” You look at them in real life, but you don’t see that happening.

The problem is that we cannot bike them up or film them when they’re talking to their customer. It’s very entertaining. My partner, Olga, has a reality show called Olga Knows Best?. She would love to do that. She’s been begging me to do that for years, by the way, it’s on Apple TV and Prime, but it’s not going to work.

This amazing guy named Chris Argyris from Harvard created a tool that we have appropriated that takes 45 minutes to fill out. All they have to do is try to do their best to remember what they said and what the other person said. For reasons that we may not go into right now, it’s foolproof. You get access to people’s default ways of thinking and behaving in real life if they fill out this tool properly. It’s the best next thing to filming it or hearing it live.

When we looked at all these case studies, it is obvious that they are making errors in these interactions and sometimes errors in their thinking that are a big part of why they’re struggling to advance the deal but they’re unaware of it, because when we asked them in this little personal case study device, “What is it that you said or did or didn’t say or do, which is preventing you from making progress in the deal?” They either don’t see it at all or they misdiagnose it entirely.

As an example, a big pattern you see in the data is not unique to this particular client of ours. This is quite common. They jump into action too quickly. They’re trying to propose the next step on the deal with the client or a solution to the problem, but the problem hasn’t been discussed out loud or hasn’t been fully agreed upon.

Now, I’m recommending to you the next step or solution to solve a problem we’ve neither discussed nor agreed on. That’s called Jumping to Action. We have looked at about 50,000 of these case studies now globally across all kinds of industries, all kinds of roles, different companies, different cultures, all of that. Jumping to Action, trying to solve a problem that we haven’t agreed needs to be solved and that we haven’t aligned on yet, is quite common. We see that.

You ask them, “What is it about the way you behave in the situation?” They go, “I probably wasn’t pushy enough on the action.” You’re like, “No, that’s not the problem.” You never discussed the problem. You never got an agreement on the problem. They have no interest in your solution. They have a blind spot around that. Not everyone, but almost everyone in these particular case studies, where there’s a gap between the results they’re trying to get and the results they’re getting, they’ve got big blind spots about what their contribution is to the lack of progress.

In the realization stage, we get to help them see that, because how can we help them solve their problem in terms of how they’re approaching these situations, unless they agree they have a problem. It’s not the only thing we do, but one thing we do is that within a space of 90 minutes, we can help them become very clear on what they’re doing or not doing this, preventing more progress in the deal.

Professional Development: In the realization stage, we help them see their blind spots. How can we help them solve their problem in how they behave and approach these situations unless they agree they have one?

What’s also cool about it is that they start to realize, “This isn’t just me in this situation. This is me. This is something I do everywhere.” It’s quite an enlightening, disturbing, but also empowering moment. Once you realize there are things that I’m doing that are hindering my progress, that means there are things I can do that would make more progress. The rewiring comes in because what’s interesting, this has always floored me. It’s like, “I’m aware of what I need to do. I’m aware that I’m not doing it. I’m doing a bunch of other things instead. I should be able to do it.”

No problem. Problem. We put people in role plays where they simulate after having this realization moment. “Here’s the Monday morning conversation with this client. I’ll play them. Go.” They’ll still repeat the same errors, even though they don’t want to do them. This is where Argyris discovers that anytime we feel a little anxious in these important interactions with each other, an overprotective program gets activated. That’s our terminology for it.

We call it the overprotective program. He called it Model 1, which is why you’ve never heard of it. The point of it is that we feel a little anxious. We start to overprotect ourselves and others in interactions. That’s why maybe we’ll jump to action, because if I talk to you about the real problem, maybe there’s a possibility that it might be upsetting to you, or maybe I’ll feel like I’ll lose control of the conversation, so let me be more solution-oriented. We’ve had to figure out a way to rewire people’s default behavior.

We do that largely. Yes, we display it to them and we demo for them what good looks like. We make sure they can see it clearly in their mind’s eye. That’s important, but then we reproduce the Monday morning conversation, and we do a very particular in-the-moment coaching. You may have seen this in your life, but you role-play. A lot of the role plays are BS. They’re fake.

First of all, we’re recreating the situation they’re going to be in, and it feels very close to the people they’re going to have to interact with. That’s important. Realism is key. The other thing is we don’t sit back like most people do, give them feedback five minutes later, everybody claps, and sit down. It’s like, “No, man.” The moment they make some errors, which is a result of their programming, it’s not their fault, then we point it out in the moment.

It’s like, “J.R., you’re jumping into action again.” You’re like, “I am?” Here’s what you said. You’re like, “Darn it, you’re right. I am jumping into action.” What do you think is the real problem that you guys need to align on? “I think the real problem is that X, for example, is that they’re spending tens of millions of dollars managing multiple vendors. As a consequence of that, they’re getting poorer service, and they’re getting overcharged.” “You got data to back that up, J.R.?” “Yeah, I do.”

Tell him that, so then we stop the role play, give him the feedback, help them figure out what the correction is, and then we restart the role play. They start producing better behavior. What’s cool about that, what I love about it, is they start to feel like, “I know what to do now in this next conversation,” which is very confidence-building. It’s like, “I’ve been depressed about this thing or frustrated. Now I know what to do.”

Also the more reps they get it, because we have them do this against each other’s situations as well, then we’re building confidence and capability that would be resilient to the anxiety that they feel, which will cause them to revert back to their old ways, which was what Michael Beer was talking about the whole time. I love that. The results phase is where there are all kinds of stuff that we do to support them after these workshops to ensure they actually apply this stuff confidently, and it keeps going.

We do these things called workouts, once a month, 90 minutes, we get a small group of a subset or a larger workout of people together. A lot of times, we even train master coaches inside of our clients so that they own the capability and their leaders or their high-potential peers can run these workouts for them and provide the coaching that we were at the workshops.

We’re big believers in let’s not make you dependent upon us. Let’s make you independent and able to do a lot of these things yourselves after we get the boat off the dock for you. That’s what we do. I’m passionate about it after doing it for so long. I love it. I love what it does for people. I love what it does for results. I love what it does for their clients and anybody they get to interact with.

Professional Development: We’re a big believer of making you independent, not dependent upon us. You will be able to do a lot of these things yourself after we got the boat off the dock for you.

AI In Leadership Development: Revolutionizing Coaching at Scale

It’s funny you mentioned you cannot go in video or audio. Now you’ve got those credit card-sized devices that people are starting to carry around that are recording everything. Even if you’re doing it in the scope of your workshops, you can record and transcribe entire conversations. Are you guys making use of that in the way that you’re approaching your work?

No, we’re not. The thing we are doing in terms of leveraging the most recent technology is around the AI apps that are being developed. This is the problem, even with the digital state of affairs for leadership development. As I said, it’s a $60 billion industry. By the way, corporate learning and development, according to the Forbes article that I read a couple of years ago, was $360 billion. Those things can be very helpful, except when they require people to change their behavior. They seem not to have much of an effect.

We have to fundamentally change how we interact with each other, whether I’m the manager trying to give you feedback or a salesperson. The additional problem is that only the top 1% or whatever you want to call it. It’s probably more like 0.02% get access to stuff that which on the face, seems very good. Look at IBM, for example. It was a top 300 that got access to this. One of our big pharma clients spent $20 million, probably my guess, maybe $15 million on the extensive leadership program. This was a few years ago that went at least maybe eighteen months or something.

They measured how much better their leaders were. This was only for the top say 200, 300, or something like that. They still couldn’t give and receive feedback. No improvement in that whatsoever, despite what seemed like an amazing program. They had an amazing experience that to them was life-changing. They still cannot give or receive feedback. The problem is that I want as many human beings as possible on this planet to get access to good development.

I’ll come back to something I said at the beginning. Organizations are looking to improve how well their authority figures lead their people, but we need good leadership from everyone. We need everybody to step up and to speak up and try to make things better, and influence and collaborate with people who don’t report to them in order to make things better. That’s how we make the world better. A lot of us were always complaining about the leaders above. Stop waiting and stop whining. There are things that you can do even in the most difficult circumstances through how you interact with other people to make sure more of the truth is front and center. Through that, we can make things better.

I’m developing an app, which is going to give people access to the best coaching in the world around anything they want to tackle that’s going to require them to influence and collaborate with other people. The salesperson application. I got to influence people beyond my authority inside this large, complex matrixed or networked organization, whatever new term they’re using for that.

I’m on a leadership team, and I don’t want to damage my relationship with one of my colleagues in the team, but I have some fundamental concerns about the way they’re running marketing. I think it’s preventing the brand awareness that we need, so my salespeople could do the job that’s expected of us. Those interactions need to happen, but not everybody gets access to consultants. Not everybody can go to Harvard like I had the chance to do. I got to study under some very special people. I’m very lucky around that.

We’re to make the world better. We’ve got to empower everyone. The problem with AI, and I’m working with this wonderful guy named John Hack and John Muldoon at Interflexion. John Hack is from MIT, another very unknown school across the Charles and Cambridge. The AI entity, when you’re interacting with a breakdown after the first few interactions, struggles with context. It struggles to factor nuances of your situation that you’re facing and provide you with helpful coaching in the context of those nuances.

Who’s the guy who used to own the Mavericks? You’ve got to develop some AI app, and at a certain point, it feels like he’s preaching at you. What she’s going to be able to do is two very special things. We’re going to be pushing the technology. One, you’re to be able to bring a real-world problem that you want help with, some important problem or opportunity, that’s going to require you to mobilize other people to confront and deal with.

She’s going to be able to provide you with very practical advice about what to do in a way that’s contextualized to the nuances of that situation. That’s a tall fricking order. Even executive coaches aren’t good at this, but fine. The second thing that she’s going to do, which is going to be awesome, is remember that whole like realistic role playing thing I was telling you about? She’s going to be able to recreate the conversations you’re going to have before you have to have them. She’ll realistically play one or more of the people that you have to engage with around this important problem or opportunity.

She will also provide you with in-the-moment coaching. It’s like, “You’re jumping action again. You’re asking me a question. You haven’t provided any examples to illustrate your opinion.” She’ll stop and start the role play as well. Every time you work with her, one, you’ll be prepared to deal with something important to you, but two, you become stronger and stronger about influencing and communicating with people and collaborating with them, and leading them more effectively. That’s where we’re using technology, or we will be.

The Human Element: Emotion And Replicating Real-World Stakes

I guess the question is, to your point, you made the point a few minutes ago about machines struggling with context. They also, to a degree, struggle with emotion. I’m thinking about a conversation I had with Chris Voss. He made a reference to the fact that you have to practice to be a great negotiator. I said, “How did you guys practice?” He said, “The second best way to practice is to teach it. We brought in actors we thought would be the best able to replicate the emotional context and nuances, a particular negotiation situation, and it didn’t work. The first best way to practice is to work on a suicide hotline.”

I remember him saying that one.

I did not hear him say that before. I guess what I wonder with all of these things is how well they will replace that emotion. Your example about Michael Beer, everybody reverts, they go into Chris Argyris with the Model 1, and what you call the Overprotective Program. You go into that mode, it’s hard to replicate that even with a very skilled person. I have a hard time seeing yet how machines can replicate the real-world sense of being in that moment with real stakes. I think that’s ultimately what Chris was saying. You’ve got somebody on the other end who is in a very real situation. For you, the stakes are very high in how you’re counseling that person. It’s hard to replicate that. That’s the piece I’m curious about, whether the machines will get there.

I’m trying to think about what you said. There’s going to be a but in the middle of the sentence. Before I say but, I do think what I’m going to accomplish is going to be very hard to pull off. Maybe this is an error in my thinking, so please challenge me. I’m not so worried about the ability of the AI entity to be able to demonstrate human emotion. The thing I care about the most is whether the person interacting with her, the client in this case, the person who’s bringing their problem to her, feels the emotion.

To me, that’s the most important thing because they need to be able to act confidently in the face of their anxiety. Sometimes it’s about having less anxiety about the situation in the first place. Sometimes, I don’t care. We can go to Zen Camp all we want. “We’re going to have anxiety. We’ve got to be able to act effectively in the face of that.” What Chris Argyris has taught us is that as long as they’re thinking about it and they’re trying to reproduce how they behave in a situation, or they’re going to try to produce how they intend to behave in a situation, those emotions are going to be there.

That anxiety will be triggered because they already have a model of the situation in their heads. How do I know that? I know this to be true. The reason I say it is when you look at 50,000 case studies, and what we’re asking people to do is to split the page. This is straight from Argyris, the page. Now it’s a Microsoft Word document, and soon it will not be that either. Left column, right column. Left column, write down what you were thinking and feeling but didn’t say, or what you suspect you will think and feel but not say. Right column, write down what you said to the best of your memory, or what they said, or what you predict you would say to the best of your imagination, and what you would say they would say.

They’re doing this in the comfort of their own bedrooms. There’s nobody there or in their offices. They make those errors the same way they would make them, as if they were in a role play, or as if they were in real life. It doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t imagine this situation, in the comfort of their own offices, would trigger that much anxiety.

Simply thinking about the situation where they’re not quite good enough to solve the problem, the confidence gap creates anxiety. That’s what we can count on. Now, what I would like her to be able to do is be warmer. We’ll see. I think there are ways we can bootstrap that or whatever the word is. She’s already funny. She’s already a little snarky. We’re able to give her personality.

I’m calling her a her, by the way. I don’t know why exactly. I’m probably going to call her Scarlett as a tribute to Scarlett Johansson, who filed a lawsuit against one of the AI companies for using her voice without permission. I think it’s a joke, only maybe I’ll get it, or others will get it now. That’s it. We’ve got to recreate the anxiety of their experience in real life in order to develop their ability to perform better in real life. She will certainly be able to do that.

Bridging The Gap: Bringing Leadership Development To The Masses

When I started Pathwise, the intent was to help people who weren’t getting that support. I have the benefit of going through it at Fidelity. I had the benefit of going through it at State Street. I had a lot of it at McKinsey when I was working there. Most people don’t get that stuff, and if you think about it, there are only so many C-level leaders in a company, but there are an order of magnitude more managers than there are C-level leaders.

I think that’s ultimately where companies win and where they win and lose, where cultures are built or destroyed, and your ability to raise the level of awareness. There are schools of thought on whether you can get people to change, but at least to make them aware of what’s out there, how they are perceived, where they may be turning left when they should have been turning right.

They desperately need help. They aren’t getting it. I started this before AI became prevalent as it has become in the last few years, but whether it’s a tech platform that scales much better than one-on-one coaching, or even better, an AI platform that allows you to deliver knowledge at a real scale. To me, it’s ultimately all aimed at addressing the massive need in the middle of organizations to be better. I think that’s where things are ultimately decided in terms of how companies succeed. It’s not the 1 or 2 or 3 people at the top. It’s the ability to bring a few hundred or a few thousand people along with them, or tens of thousands.

Leaders at the top listen, and they can do big things that end up making a big difference. They could do big things that could destroy a company. On a day-to-day or a month-to-month basis, it’s everything that’s happening down below. I was going to say the word pessimism. I’m not sure if that’s the right word, but there’s something that you said about how much of a difference an individual can make.

I don’t blame people for feeling this way. We should all be realistic about how much of a difference we can make as individuals, because look at a big organization. Many things are beyond your power to alter, and look at what’s happening in our broader society from one administration in the US to another, and things that are happening globally. It’s all so much bigger than any one of us. It’s not like I’m not sympathetic to that. I’m very sympathetic to it.

I feel that way, too, but what people don’t realize is that they can make a much bigger difference than they realize. They could influence things for the better than what they give themselves credit for. What triggered me to say this is that you said maybe we give people self-awareness, and maybe whether people can change or not is questionable. This is not a reaction to you, but I got to tell you, when I hear people say, “You cannot change people,” it pisses me off. My father used to say that to me. He passed away last summer and said, “You cannot change people.”

I was never angry with him about that. I felt it was pessimistic, but I remember my professors and I said, “Chris discovered Model 1, Overprotective Program. I’m going to dedicate my life to short-circuiting it, replacing it with something more consistent with their noble natures.” They said, “There’s nothing you could do about it.” Chris’s proteges, who wrote the books with him, told me that when I was being developed by them. I looked at all of them. I said, “Cocky 24-year-old.” Maybe there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s like, “If I would have been like Samuel Jackson, the next thing that would have come out of my mouth.” I felt that, but I didn’t say it.

That was on the left-hand side.

That was on the left. It’s like, “Who are any of us to decide what people are capable of becoming?” It’s like, “Are you going to play God with people?” Just because you haven’t been able to bring change about in someone doesn’t mean that the person isn’t capable of changing. We see all kinds of examples where people transform in their lives and change for the better.

Is it less of a probability? Yeah, there’s more of a probability that people are going to stay the same than change for the better, of course. It doesn’t mean the latter is not possible. By the way, maybe your methods suck. What you’re experiencing is as much a function of your ineffectiveness as it is of them. Our species didn’t get here through war, pestilence, and the ice age, because we don’t have a vast, untapped genetic reservoir of potential.

You’ve probably experienced it in your life where you’re forced to step up to something, something hard. More often than not, something that you didn’t even know existed in you emerges. I would call that a change. While I’m sympathetic to the more dim view, and it has roots in some rationality and data that people have experienced, there’s a lot more in us than meets the eye.

To be clear, I am a firm believer in the growth mindset. There are a lot of people out there who are guilty of having a fixed mindset, to use language on this, but I believe that people do change. I believe people are capable of change. I believe if you see that in yourself, you can change. As I said at the outset, there are schools of thought on people who do and don’t believe that.

There are schools of thought on people who say to focus on people’s strengths versus focus on their weaknesses. You’ve got all sorts of debates on these things, but there’s a multiplier effect when you go into the middle of the organization because there are so many more of them. If you can deliver impact in a scalable way, you’re trying to do it with AI with what you’re building, potentially, that’s a game changer in the ability to bring leadership development support to the masses. How can that not be a good thing?

I agree with that 100%.

Future Horizons: Expanding Assessments And The Power Of Truth

We’re running up against time. I guess one last question. Besides the AI tool that you’re building, what else is ahead for you and for your business?

We’re certainly growing in terms of clients and the number of people we’re developing across the world. Our team is growing. We have a bunch of amazing practice now. We have a healthcare practice leader, Keith Willis. We have a US practice leader, Jennifer Buck. I’m now giving people shout-outs. The UK EMEA practice leader, Tom Blower. We have an industrial sector practice leader, Aaron Penwill. We have an assessment practice leader, Dr. Eric West. He hates that I call him doctor, and that’s exactly why I do it.

The next cool thing is we’re going to do something very special in the assessment business and the book that’s coming out. The problem with the assessment business, like leadership assessments or assessments of salespeople, most of them are personality assessments. Personality assessments only give you a probabilistic assessment of what someone’s likely to do, but they don’t tell you what somebody does in real life.

We have this unique ability to capture real-world data and how people behave, and we also have a way to analyze that data and tell organizations things about their people that they otherwise don’t know. Also, tell them about the situations that they’re struggling with as well. I’m very excited about that. Eric is going to co-lead that effort with me because I’m a real geek when it comes to all that. I like reading these case studies. Every one of them is a mystery for me that I’m trying to figure out and trying to crack.

The other thing I’m very excited about is the book that I’m writing. A draft of it will be done in June. This will have to give us six months from then so February, so the book will be released. The tentative title will be something like The Truth Can Set You Free. The book will be dedicated to not just inspiring people, but equipping them to speak and seek the truth, and all their important interactions with each other, in order to make things better. There have been similar books or cousins, like books on conversations, like courageous conversations and difficult conversations.

Radical Candor, all that stuff.

I like it too. What no one has done is take the time to do the real, in-depth research on people’s real lives, the way they’re having these interactions in real life. You look at 50,000 case studies where people didn’t get the results that they wanted. We’ve learned a lot from that data. We’ve learned a lot now for 30 years about what people need to avoid doing and what people need to do in these critical conversations about things that matter.

What I want to do is make that research available to the masses through the book. People in my position often write books. They’re marketing puff pieces now. We’re using it as a marketing tool, and I hope it’s a great marketing tool, honestly. I want it to be something where it’s like an actionable, practical guide. I know people still need the rewiring experience.

What I want to do is make sure the app, at least the beta version of it, is ready with the book, so people will get the app for free. At least they’ll get something that can help them create some self-awareness and a realization experience. They can have that through their work on the book, through reading the book. They can start to recognize, “Here’s what it is about my own approach that’s preventing me from making more progress on things that matter to me, that require me to influence and collaborate with others.”

Tell them straight up, like, “Here’s what to do, and they’ll be able to do some of it at least under pressure in the real world.” I want it to be an inspiring book, but I want it to be a very practical guide that will synthesize in an easily digestible and entertaining way how to have much more effective interactions and conversations in the real world.

It’d be fundamentally about, “How do you speak and seek the truth and live to talk about it?” That’s the essence of it. Everybody is afraid of the truth, and yet we all teach our kids to be truthful. It’s quite a contradiction because we’re worried about hurting relationships. We’re worried about upsetting somebody. We’re worried about when the whole thing backfires, and it hurts me and my career and all that. Yet the truth gnaws at us constantly in the back of our minds, a little voice that is always calling out to us.

We try to reconcile the real-world pressures that we’re under to take care of our families and our careers. Yet this thing that is pushing us to speak and seek the truth, and the people who are able to reconcile that dilemma, and can do something about it. I think the research would support this, but the search is all makes, we’ll have much better lives than they can imagine. We’ve been much better leaders than they could ever have thought were possible. That’s what the essence of this book will be about.

Kim Scott talks about the fact in Radical Candor that not being candid with somebody when they need to hear a message is doing them a disservice. You talked earlier in the conversation about people going through all this training, and they still weren’t doing coaching and feedback any better. The ability to be able to have those conversations and get good at them can be a big game-changer, not just one dimension of the truth setting you free.

What I like about the focus on conversations is that it makes leadership accessible to everyone. What is leadership? Leadership is essentially when I take some initiative to make things better from whatever my position is or my level in the hierarchy. That’s an act of leadership on my behalf. If I see a problem on my team, and I see that maybe my leader is leading us in a way that is undermining what he’s trying to accomplish with the group, he probably doesn’t see that. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t be doing it.

Everybody is going to be scared to talk to him about it. Maybe J.R., you’re the guy on the team who feels most strongly about it. It’s your curse or your cross to bear. What do you do about it? You could either shut up or step up. Both are understandable choices because it doesn’t come without any risk. If you handle it badly, maybe nothing changes except your job.

We learned a lot about, for example, in this case, how do you talk about something like that that doesn’t get you fired, that actually would make your boss appreciate you and be grateful for your speaking up? This is possible. This is what we want to equip people to be able to do. It’s available to them everywhere they go. How many conversations do we have every day where we feel the truth is risky?

It’s an authentic expression of ourselves to be able to lean into some of that stuff or to ask a question that may be risky, but that is important. The idea that the truth shall set you free is right, provided it’s not your head from your neck. There’s not enough work done around what you do practically to prevent the bad outcomes and to maximize the possibility of good outcomes.

If you think about a red thread or a golden thread that runs across everything you do, that’s it. That is the one thing. I don’t care if you’re a salesperson or you’re on a leadership team or you’re a leader of a group of people or you’re a colleague or whatever. There are things that we’re doing that are compromising candor that we’re not aware of. There are things we could be doing much better to make sure the truth infects all of our interactions with each other.

I look forward to reading the book when it comes out, and trying your app out when the app is available. Thanks for doing this, Todd.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity.

We got to about three of my questions. The conversation went off in a completely different direction, and that’s all good.

That’s what happens when you get somebody who talks for a living.

Start provoking and say what you want in a conversation. Thank you.

Have a good day.

You too.

—

Thanks to Todd for joining me. A thought-provoking conversation on the topic of professional development. Not necessarily what I had thought we were going to talk about, but a very good conversation nonetheless. As a reminder, our conversation is brought to you by Pathwise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, you can join the Pathwise community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the Pathwise newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks. Have a great day.

Important Links

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• Holzman Leadership
• Olga Knows Best?
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About Todd Holzman

Todd Holzman has dedicated his life to improving the conversations people have with each other. He the founder of Holzman Leadership, and his Real Work Process is used by CEOs, senior leaders, and HR executives at numerous fortune 500, FTSE 100, and Global 2000 companies to transform their leaders, cultures, and business results. He has taught leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Columbia University and developed over 30,000 leaders at dozens of organizations like American Express, Nestle, and Red Bull. Along the way, he has also trained a global faculty along with hundreds of trainers and coaches within his clients in this capability.