Are today’s managers too nice? In our efforts to create more compassionate workplaces, have we gone too far in avoiding difficult conversations, lowering expectations, and letting poor performance slide?

In this episode of Career Sessions, J.R. Lowry sits down with Matt Hunter, executive coach and co-author of Tough Enough: How to Lead a Team to Greatness Without Being a Jerk, to explore why great leadership requires more than kindness. It also demands candor, accountability, high standards, and the willingness to make uncomfortable decisions.

Matt argues that many organizations have fallen into what he calls the “Mirage of Compassion”—creating the appearance of caring for employees while failing to challenge them to grow and perform at their best. But there’s a fine line between being appropriately tough and becoming the kind of boss nobody wants to work for.

Together, J.R. and Matt discuss how to find that balance, including:

Why managers often confuse compassion with avoiding discomfort

How to establish clear expectations and hold people accountable without being unfair

Why psychological safety should encourage honest disagreement, not suppress it

How leaders can become more comfortable giving—and receiving—difficult feedback

Why the right level of toughness depends on your ambitions, circumstances, and stage of life

They also explore the risks of taking toughness too far, drawing lessons from high-profile business leaders and Matt’s own experiences as an entrepreneur and executive coach.

Whether you’re managing a team, aspiring to leadership, or simply trying to navigate a demanding workplace, this conversation offers a thought-provoking perspective on what it really takes to achieve high performance without sacrificing humanity.

The takeaway: Being a people-first leader doesn’t mean making everyone comfortable. It means caring enough to tell the truth, set meaningful expectations, and help people become their best.

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/matt-hunter

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Are Managers Too Nice? The Case for Tougher Leadership, with Matt Hunter

What if one of the biggest problems in management were that we’ve become too nice? Not too caring or too human, but too willing to avoid the hard conversations, to tolerate mediocre performance, to soften our feedback, to protect people from the discomfort that’s going to help them grow. My guest, Matt Hunter, argues that great leadership requires something different, being tough enough. Tough enough to set ambitious standards. Tough enough to tell people the truth. Tough enough to hold them and yourself accountable, and tough enough to make difficult decisions when the situation demands it.

To be clear, this isn’t an argument for bringing back the screaming fear-based boss. It’s about finding the narrow zone that exists between being too soft and becoming a jerk. Matt is an Executive Coach and a Co-author, along with John Baird, of the new book, Tough Enough: How to Lead a Team to Greatness Without Being a Jerk. In this episode, we’ll explore whether management has overcorrected, why kindness sometimes becomes avoidance, and how leaders can combine humanity with high performance. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions. Here’s my discussion with Matt.

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Matt, thanks for being with me. I’m glad you can be on the show.

Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

We’re doing this a day before your new book comes out that you wrote with John Baird. I want to get right into it. The basic premise, as I took away, is that we’ve overcorrected in trying to make workplaces more humane. What are we getting wrong?

Let’s say from the late 2008s, as these tech companies started to grow. We began this process somewhere along the line. Someone thought that, “If our people are happy, then they’re going to do better work.” They made some connection that if we could just make our people happy and feel good, they’re going to do better work. As we progressed into the 2010s, there started to be some of these more social movements.

All of a sudden, managers became scared of holding high standards. They had to give these employees whatever they wanted. There were basically all of these factors that incentivized managers to be nice and placate and not share how they feel. Not hold people accountable, because you don’t want to upset your people. You don’t want to lose your own job.

Although. we think that movement was helpful in the sense of, it’s good to take care of people more. It’s good to care about people. We feel like there was a strong overcorrection and that most of these companies and managers went too far. In the process, we lost our ability to drive for performance, which is at the end of the day, what we’re coming together to do at work.

We’re coming together to deliver a performance. Kim Scott calls this quadrant of her framework, ruinous empathy. You call it the mirage of compassion. In the book that I’ve written with Daniela DeLuca, we called it something like living in the lounge chair. What does that look like in day-to-day life from your perspective? How can a leader or manager of a team or somebody more senior tell the difference between genuine compassion and just avoiding discomfort in hard conversations?

We believe that all leaders have a tough miscalibration problem. Our thesis in the book is that all great companies are built by tough leaders and tough teams. If you want to get better results, you need to have higher levels of toughness. What happened because of this mirage of compassion, which is essentially this appearance of care without giving the real care that matters, which in our opinion is sitting with people, partnering with people and helping them achieve important good goals.

If you’re not supporting someone in their development, we don’t believe that is true compassion. What ends up happening is that most managers and leaders move towards the side of the toughness spectrum that we call the comfort zone. Most leaders tend to move to that zone where they have lower levels of toughness. They’re prioritizing comfort. As a result, they’re essentially ruled by their emotions. If they don’t feel like holding someone accountable, they won’t. If they don’t feel like working, they won’t. If they don’t feel like ruffling someone’s feathers, they won’t. That is a bit of what it looks like when you go over to that side of the spectrum.

The challenge, though, is eventually that’s going to come back and bite you in the backside if you’re being held accountable yourself. Maybe the whole corporate culture is that way, in which case it’s probably a company that’s falling short of its potential. If you’re living in a company that’s got a performance expectation and you’re living in this mirage of compassion or whatever you want to call it. It’s going to come back and hurt you.

There’s many companies and institutions. A lot of academia lives in the comfort zone as well. Certainly, many large companies that have been around for, let’s call it decades or hundreds of years, we see a lot of those cultures. Live in the comfort zone. Let me make no bones about it. Living in the comfort zone is not going to get you anywhere close to your highest potential. You will not be able to create great work from that zone.

I hear you. At the same time, you’ve got a lot of people who will say, “If I can get paid X thousand dollars a year and live in my comfort zone, I’m good with that.”

For sure. That feels better. If you have low levels of toughness, you’re ruled by how things feel, how you feel and how other people feel. You don’t want to ruffle other people’s feathers. You don’t want to feel uncomfortable. The end result of being over there is that you’re not going to produce great work. If you prioritize the mission, it’s likely not going to feel great. It’s going to be painful. You’re going to have to sacrifice a lot. You will create better work. It comes down to, “What do you care about?” If you don’t care that much about work, if you don’t want to put that much into it and you can get paid a salary to be in the comfort zone, that’s fantastic.

You should go ahead and milk that if that’s what’s important to you. At the end of the day, it comes down to what do you want specifically as a leader and how tough do you want to be and then just go for that level of toughness. If your choice is to be in the comfort zone, then that’s great. In our book, we have this concept called the toughness spectrum. It’s a spectrum where you have toughness on one side and comfort on the other side. As you move from comfort to toughness, you’re going to get better results, generally speaking.

If you want to live in the comfort zone, you are essentially ruled by how you feel. Now on the other end of the spectrum, when you have high levels of toughness, essentially your mission is everything. It doesn’t feel as good. It’s painful. It’s hard. You have to work hard here, but you do incredible work. What I want everyone to come away with is to pick the part on the spectrum, the amount of toughness that works for you.

I hear you say that, and what comes to mind is, I’ll say, putting myself in the shoes of somebody who may say, “I’m just at a stage in my life where I can’t afford that level of toughness. It’s not that I don’t care, but I’ve got things going on in my personal life that necessitate me dialing back a bit.

Being parents? What’s an example?

Maybe having to care for aging parents or dealing with a health challenge or whatever the case may be. I just wonder whether they feel like, “You’re shaming me for taking a step back.”

Thanks for asking this question. The book’s called Tough Enough: How to Lead a Team to Greatness Without Being a Jerk. When we talk about greatness, we’re talking about an intense playbook. That’s ultimately not for everyone, but it is for all people in the sense that you can pick and choose little pieces to improve the way that you work if you’ve got young kids. I have one young kid and I got another baby on the way. I’m not trying to work around the clock.

I’m not but there are other areas of the way that I’m working where I can ratchet up my toughness that aren’t a function of time. In the book, we have these seven habits of toughness. Some of them are very much, “If you want to get a lot done, you need to work very hard.” You need to sacrifice everything. If that’s not for you, that’s no problem.

I want you to be honest about how tough you want to show up, then just go for that level of toughness. There’s literally nothing wrong with that. There’s no shame in that. I deeply respect that. While you’re at work, there’s some of these other habits that you can apply to get better results that have nothing to do with how long you work.

People will immediately go to the idea that being tougher or being in a tougher environment means everybody has to work harder. There is some truth to that. Let’s not brush over that. At the same time, to your point, there are things you can do. It’d be great to hear you talk about what some of those are that don’t necessarily involve more time.

In an athletic context, people talk about the idea of deliberate practice versus just practice. You’re focusing on getting better at specific things. You’re going to spend that hour working out, but you’re doing it in a different way than somebody might be who’s getting on the elliptical and keeping themselves in a lower zone. If you want to use an athletic analogy here, an exercise analogy.

Firstly to talk about that piece about deliberate practice. If you think of someone like Kobe Bryant, he was doing that deliberate practice, but he was doing it all day long. He famously took like 3 or 4 naps throughout the day to allow him to be able to do that deliberate practice more than others. The working piece, how hard you work, I do think that is 100% a factor. We have these seven habits of toughness. There’s all kinds of other habits you can apply. You can have a strong, clear vision and you can live it with deep amounts of conviction.

Having high conviction around what you’re working towards. You can assemble what we call a cult of incredibles. You can get a team of highly talented mission converted people to rally around your vision. You can harness emotional thunder. You can use the power of what we call quote unquote negative emotions to get your team to focus and shift behavior. You can fiercely pursue the truth. You can be honest and have a culture of candor in your company. You already mentioned radical candor. That is a big one. Can you be honest and passionately debate ideas? Can you build what we call an accountability stack?

Tougher Leadership: High performance isn’t accidental. It requires stepping out of the comfort zone and deliberately choosing your standard of toughness. How do you calibrate your leadership style?

This is your own unique system that drives accountability in your organization or your team. This is a big one that people just miss out on. They don’t do this well. Lastly, can you use the best ideas from warfare that have been developed over thousands of years that match these intense moments? If you have an intense problem or a big opportunity, can you break out of the day-to-day operations and throw your effort behind something that matters for the company? There’s all kinds of other things that anyone at any position can pursue.

That construct of having a set of habits that you can pick where you want to be and maybe almost where you want to be in certain dimensions of your life or even certain dimensions of your work.

Exactly. Let’s be deliberate about how tough we want to be in each area and then go for it. There’s no shame. There’s literally no shame. I am someone who naturally skews to the less tough side of the spectrum. We all know the famous leaders that skew on the too tough side of the spectrum. That gets great results, but it also has a high cost. For me, my natural place that I am most comfortable is to not have the hard conversations, to not hold someone accountable. It depends on how seriously you’re taking it. If you’re taking it very seriously, if it matters to you, then you do need to up your level of toughness.

Personalize this, given what you just said. Do you want to be tougher or do you feel like you are operating in the right zone for your life now?

Toughness is also dynamic. It depends on the situation. It depends on who you’re with, how safe you feel, or how important the situation is to you. Historically, I have not been tough enough. I was a startup founder for fifteen years. I had one company that was acquired by Yelp and I had another nonprofit that has raised a couple billion dollars for charity now. The piece that I fell short on both of those endeavors is that I wasn’t willing to push harder.

I was scared of these big, more emotionally intense moments. I didn’t want to confront the brutal facts of how I was showing up. I thought that I was just crushing it. Anyone who had feedback for me about how I wasn’t, I just wasn’t willing to entertain that. There were a lot of areas where I just was not being tough enough.

Now, in my life, I have the good fortune of being an executive coach and working with startup founders, Fortune 50 leadership teams, and C-suites. I do operate at the right level of toughness. I’m not a workaholic. That’s just not in my nature. For example, when I get in a coaching session, I don’t hold back. I try to be as honest as I can with people. I try to hold them accountable. I’m digging in. I’m using those moments to apply these habits.

It’s interesting what you were just saying about you having a successful exit. You have a nonprofit that’s raised several billion dollars to help the charity, and you feel like you weren’t tough enough. Probably underpinning that as a sense that maybe you underperformed relative to what you could have in those two organizations, which is pretty striking given a successful exit, billions of dollars raised.

Let me fill those gaps in. In both of those, I partnered or worked with people that had very high levels of toughness that were in the hardcore zone. In that too tough zone, which yields the best results, but also comes with the highest cost. In that first one, my co-founder was a force of nature, very strong personality, and incredibly driven. It mattered to him.

I do think that made a big difference, and then similarly with the non-profit, which by the way I just want to be clear. I helped lead that organization. I was in the US. CEO and the president of the global organization, but it wasn’t mine. I didn’t start that organization, but similarly, that one was founded and ultimately led by a guy with very high levels of toughness, so I honestly think that’s why.

Talk about that other end of the spectrum that you were just referencing. How does somebody know when they’re in that danger zone?

We’re talking about this sweet spot of toughness where you have very high levels of toughness, but you still have compassion. We believe that in this tough enough zone with high enough levels of toughness, you can still pursue greatness while having compassion. We think that’s important. Now there’s two zones beyond the tough enough zone. The zone right next to the tough enough zone. It’s called the hardcore zone. This is where you have very little levels of compassion. There’s a little bit, but there’s very little.

This one we think does yield the best results, but it’s not the right fit for most of us to live there. By the way, most of us don’t have the wiring to be able to hang out in that zone. That zone comes with a ton of costs, reputational costs, cultural debt, all kinds of personal costs. We know the track record of many of these “great entrepreneurs.” Their marital track record is pretty abysmal, but they get these fantastic results. Many times, they go on this journey with people at the end that just don’t feel ultimately proud of the journey they went on with that leader.

That’s the hardcore zone. The danger zone is one zone beyond that. This is a very rare zone to tip into. This is where there is literally zero compassion, zero empathy. The mission is so important that even fundamental baseline commitment to ethics is overrun. You could think of Sam Bankman-Fried at FTX, Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, Jeffrey Skilling at Enron. This is that danger zone where the ends fully justify the means.

Now, most of your audience are not going to come anywhere close to this danger zone. However, there is one habit where people regularly fall into the danger zone, which is the one that we talked about a little bit earlier about how hard you’re working. This habit is called making your pursuit relentless. We all know a lot of people that just didn’t know how hard they should push and they get burnt out. They hurt themselves. They get sick. Their bodies just start to break down and say no.

Let’s talk a little bit more about what that sweet spot looks like. I would imagine people reading or watching might be thinking to themselves that they’ve got high standards as a manager. In your view, what does it mean to hold people to a high standard in everyday management?

To hold a high standard on an everyday basis has a handful of fundamentals involved. Firstly, you want to set clear goals or clear expectations with that person present. That could be a collaborative process if you want it to, but the goals need to be very clear and mutually agreed upon upfront. In addition to the goals, when we talk about standards, we’re talking about how we’re doing our work. There might be certain ways or certain quality bars that we’re talking about.

The work needs to be above these certain bars. When you hear someone say holding a high standard, they’re talking about these ways of working and these commitments that we have. They could be goals, expectations, or “standards.” What that looks like is having some system or mechanism of tracking how it’s going so that there’s a shared reality of how the work is going that both the manager and the direct report agree upon. It’s digging in and having those hard conversations around how it is going.

Being honest as a manager when it’s not going well or when it’s under the standard or when the goal is missing the target. Having those conversations, digging in, triaging the problems, then ultimately, once you’ve given feedback, once you’ve coached, enforcing negative consequences if the work still doesn’t improve. That’s a big step that most managers and leaders shy away from. They shy away from enforcing these negative consequences. Which can be anything from having harder conversations to reassigning work to ultimately putting someone on a performance improvement plan and then letting them go.

As a manager, when somebody is falling short, how do you distinguish between a situation where they just need coaching or they need more time to become more skillful in whatever they’re doing, versus they’re in the wrong role or they shouldn’t be in your organization at all?

What we like to do is track what we call inputs and outputs. If we think of a salesperson, an input would be what’s the work they’re doing. This could be how many calls are they making? How many emails are they sending? How many meetings are they setting up? Those would be the inputs. The outputs are the results. How many sales are they making? What revenue are they pulling? If you can track both the inputs and the outputs, you can get a real good sense of whether the individual is firstly putting in the effort, because that’s one component of performing well in a role.

Secondly, do they have the skills and the acumen or the talent to succeed in that role? Understanding both of those simultaneously will give you a sense of, “Does this person have the talent or they just need to work harder?” For example, when I was in my early twenties, I wanted to be a good singer. I started taking singing lessons.

After six months, the trainer, who was this lovely guy, said, “Matt, we’ve been doing this for six months and honestly, I don’t think you have the ear for this.” Once you get the inputs and outputs, you can have a real good sense because even though I was putting in the effort, it was clear that I just didn’t have it, so you can get a good sense of whether that person’s going to be right for the role.

This is a challenge for a lot of managers to figure out. They often come back to this idea of wanting to be likable. They push off these conversations and then they give the person more time. On the flip side, I’ve worked with people who are like, “So-and-so screwed up on day three, we should just fire them.” Finding that spot in the middle of those two ends of the spectrum is something that more managers need to get better at.

I love that. That’s great. I just want to encourage managers to be in constant conversation with their team about how things are going so that there’s no real surprises here. It’s a stylistic choice. If you go into the super high levels of toughness, if you work for someone like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, and there’s one what they would call boneheaded mistake.

You could lose your job right there on the spot. Whereas to be a fair and ethical good manager, if someone’s a cultural misfit from the start, and that’s obvious, it’s fine to let them go right away. However, if it’s some performance thing, you need to start coaching and giving feedback right away and giving them an opportunity to live into that feedback.

Certainly, most managers are not giving enough feedback, good or bad. This idea that you guys talk about that will stick with me is this idea of consent first, enforcement second. The idea being, as you were just saying, “Get everybody to agree on the expectations and the goals,” because then the team has agreed on them. It’s not like the goals or expectations are secret and you only find out about them after you’re not meeting them. If everybody truly agrees to them up front, then you should be able to hold them accountable. Both parts of that are important. It creates the context in which you can give feedback, good or bad, to your team.

Tougher Leadership: Great leadership balances deep mission focus with human respect. The seven habits of toughness show leaders how to drive high velocity without becoming jerks.

In most companies, you have an unclear set of expectations. It’s not explicit. No one has opted-in. No one has had that powerful moment of saying, “I’m up for this.” It starts to feel almost like coercion. The manager finally finds the courage to speak up about this thing. The direct report never agreed to it in the first place. That’s a huge issue. You want to be able to look that person in the eye on day one and be clear about what they’re going for, such that you can have these open and honest conversations all throughout the journey.

Talk about this a little bit more at the team level in terms of this idea of teams needing to have both psychological safety and the ability to have passionate disagreement, which you guys talk about in your book. How do you create that environment where you can have both?

It’s interesting. I do think that this term of psychological safety got bastardized. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but it just got mistaken for just keeping people feeling safe. I don’t think that’s what it is. It’s the ability for anyone to feel safe enough to say the hard thing. Once again on this spectrum, you have comfortable organizations where, in the name of psychological safety, they think that we’re just not going to ruffle any feathers because that’s what psychological safety is, and it’s not.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have Elon Musk snarking at psychological safety and thinking it’s nonsense, where he’s also wrong in that domain. Sometimes he will have these deep outbursts or he will be such an intense scary character to the people around him that they will also feel afraid to speak up in those moments. It’s safe to speak up, firstly. That’s most important.

On top of that, if you want to run a good business, you need to be making good decisions all the time. To do that, you need to passionately debate. You need to be able to tell people that things are not good enough or this idea is not good enough. You need to be able to talk it out to ultimately land on a good solution. There’s a needle to be thread for psychological safety.

Can you tell when you’re watching one of these spirited debates go on that it’s a productive disagreement and not just a dysfunctional fight?

Lots of both. A functional debate is talking about the idea, being hard on the idea. A dysfunctional one is then going to the individual, making it about the person. You’re a bad leader. You’re not a good product manager, etc. That’s one element of dysfunction. There’s many other elements of dysfunction, like getting down these rabbit holes that don’t matter. There’s so many ways that a conversation can become dysfunctional. I do think, generally speaking, you’re having a focused, targeted conversation about one aspect of the product or the idea, and it’s in service of making that idea better.

Coming back to this idea of being willing to have hard conversations, a lot of times leaders struggle to have truth spoken about themselves. They signal to people that they aren’t open to feedback, aren’t open to advice, aren’t open to others’ experience and knowledge. You coach people. You coach CEOs, and a lot of startup founders. How do you get them to be more willing to take that candid feedback if that’s an issue for them?

It’s hard. I have sometimes delivered 360 reviews around how that leader is showing up. I have delivered some of those to these, let’s call them hardcore leaders, that those conversations felt like wrestling a grizzly bear. There’s something with powerful leaders where they get quite defensive. That’s the first reaction. That’s a natural normal reaction because it’s just hard to receive this feedback. It’s very painful, especially the first time.

Tougher Leadership: Clear expectations prevent defensive friction. When managers secure consent upfront, accountability becomes an ongoing partnership rather than surprise criticism.

If you think of yourself, let’s just say you’re an overweight individual and you want to get into better shape. That first time you step on the scale, is not going to be pretty. You are not going to like the number you see. If you want to start budgeting, you start looking at how much you’re spending. It’s not going to be pretty. It’s going to be painful.

If you start to get in the habit of receiving that feedback, it’s going to become less and less painful. If you work with that feedback, it’s going to become easier to receive it. You’ll start to notice this flywheel of improvement. Your relationships will get better. Performance will get better. There’s a lot of incentive to just get in that habit. It’s just good hygiene as a leader.

You get a lot of people who, despite their success in life, are insecure and they feel like, “I’m successful enough. I don’t need the feedback, so I’m not even going to be open to it.” It hurts them in the end.

I agree. As someone who has a decent amount of insecurity, just like pretty much everyone else, it’s hard. It always stings, but ultimately, it’s for the best.

Last question. For a manager who’s reading to this or a more senior leader who’s thinking, “I’m probably too nice. I avoid conflict. I soften feedback. I give people too many chances.” What are two or three things that you would suggest to them that they should focus on right away?

All of us can take a meaningful step towards the tough enough zone. For the vast majority of us, that looks like a few different things. One, being very clear about what it is you’re working towards. What’s your mission? What’s your goal? Start to share that with a lot of conviction. Start to take it seriously. If others are not taking it seriously, step in and have conversations with them. Understand why they’re not and see if you can get them back into this place of taking it seriously. That’s the first one.

The second one is to give and receive good candid feedback. While you do that, I want to see you start to share your own personal emotions that you’re feeling about the situation. It supercharges these conversations. It helps the recipients start to code the conversation as important. If you can share that you’re disappointed or frustrated and you need something more from them, that’s a big skill that will help level up your toughness and your performance. Finally, I would love to see you build a system for holding people accountable.

In the book, we have the six steps of any good accountability stack. We’ve talked about some of them, but I would encourage you to check them out. It’s a pretty robust list and build a system of accountability that works for your context, your mission, your team, and your leadership style. If you can do that and you can run that system well, give and receive feedback and orient people to a goal that you have high conviction around. You’re going to see phenomenal results.

Good advice. I wish you well with your book launch, which, as I said earlier, is the day after we were recording. It goes out into the world. It’s an exciting time. A little bit probably nerve wracking as well. I hope everything goes well with the launch for you and John.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Great to be with you. This was a lot of fun.

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Let’s wrap up the conversation that I just had with Matt. Here are four ideas that I hope you will take with you. First is that being people first doesn’t mean avoiding discomfort. Great managers care about their teams, but that doesn’t mean that they avoid having difficult conversations or delivering candid feedback or making tough personnel decisions when they’re required. Compassion and accountability aren’t opposites. The best leaders practice both.

Second is that high performance starts with clarity. You can’t fairly hold people accountable for expectations that they never understood or agreed to. This is the consent part of what I was talking about with Matt. Set clear standards, establish ownership, measure what matters, and create a regular cadence for reviewing progress. This helps ensure that accountability, the enforcement part, that’s the second part of that message, feels less personal and becomes more about commitments the team has made together.

Third is that toughness does need guardrails. Intensity, relentless pursuit, truth-telling, and even some of the warfare tactics that Matt describes can produce extraordinary results. Pushed too far can damage trust and culture and people’s lives by extension. The goal isn’t maximum toughness. It’s being just toughened up, hence the title of the book, Demanding Excellence While Preserving Dignity, Integrity, and Respect.

Finally, it’s this idea that you need to find the environment that’s right for you. Picking an environment that is less tough may be what’s appropriate given your ambition and what is going on in your life. At the same time, others may choose to do something that is a tougher environment and they opt-in to that. It’s what works for us. That may change depending on the task that we’re focused on. It may change in our work life versus our personal life. It may change in the season of life that we’re in.

That is okay as long as you are comfortable with the consequences of where you choose to put yourself on that continuum. I hope you found this conversation valuable. Please subscribe, leave us a review, and share this episode with somebody who is aiming to become a better leader or build a stronger career. If you’re an organization, I do workshops and keynotes on a variety of management topics. If you’re an individual, you can sign up for my membership community, which is called Pathwise, and our newsletter, PathWisdom. Thanks for tuning in.

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About Matt Hunter

Matt Hunter is an executive leadership coach and author. He has two decades of experience founding, leading, and coaching companies, most notably cofounding Turnstyle (acquired by Yelp) and serving as president and US CEO of Founders Pledge, a community of entrepreneurs that has pledged over twelve billion to charity, with more than one billion already deployed. Today, he coaches founders and CEOs of high-growth companies backed by firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and NEA, with a combined valuation in the tens of billions. He is expanding his work to include public companies and elite sports teams. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.