Holzman Leadership

Holzman Leadership Holzman Leadership’s Global Faculty is committed to sustainable behavior change and measurable business impact.

Each member is trained in Holzman’s Real Work Process and has 15+ years experience developing leaders and/or leading people.

Every leader has at least one situation they’d love to “finally fix.”A relationship with a colleague that feels “off.”An...
12/17/2025

Every leader has at least one situation they’d love to “finally fix.”

A relationship with a colleague that feels “off.”
An organizational design that’s never quite worked.
A good culture that has yet to live up to its promise.

And we tell ourselves,
“If I could just solve THIS, everything would get better.”

We help leaders solve problems like this.
And yet, there’s a reality that often has to be faced first…

Some problems aren’t in your life just to be fixed.
They exist to fix you too.

They reveal something about your default operating system that needs to change—
your avoidance, your need for control, your need to be right, your discomfort with discomfort.

They show you:
📍why you get stuck
📍why your patience ends
📍why your assumptions harden
📍why your reactions take over
📍why your capabilities need to grow

And as much as you want to change things EXTERNAL to yourself…

The real work is often INTERNAL.

Not because you’re at fault.
Not because you’re responsible for the whole situation.
But because this particular struggle is exposing something you haven’t had to confront.

So here’s the real leadership lesson…
When you stop treating the problem as something “out there,”
you can start seeing what it’s trying to build “in here.”

Courage.
Candor.
Curiosity.
Compassion.
A new operating system.

The kind of capability that doesn’t just fix one problem—
but changes the way you handle all problems.

So let me ask you:
What’s the most frustrating problem in your life right now?
What is it about you and the way you handle things that might need to change?

Some problems just whisper.Those are the ones leaders should worry about.A long-term customer relationship that feels “o...
12/16/2025

Some problems just whisper.
Those are the ones leaders should worry about.

A long-term customer relationship that feels “off.”
An organizational process or structure that’s never quite worked.
A good culture that has yet to live up to its promise, despite years of effort.

And underneath all of it is a quiet, persistent tension:
We KNOW things could be better than they are.

Not perfect.
Not easy.
Just BETTER.

What’s interesting is… there’s often no evidence for that belief.
The situation may have been stuck for months, even years.
The other person may not be changing.
The pattern may be deeply entrenched.

But still, something inside us says…
This isn’t the best we’re capable of.
We’re falling short of what’s possible here.
There’s a version of this relationship, this team, this conversation that’s higher than the one we’re living in now.

➡️ That internal pull matters.

Because it’s the thing that won’t let us fully accept the “tolerable bad.”
It’s the reason we feel restless when we settle.
It’s what keeps us from giving up on ourselves and each other.

I truly believe…
That discomfort isn’t a FLAW.
It’s a SIGNAL that you need to stop accepting the “tolerable bad” and start expecting more from yourself and others.

It’s a CALL TO ACTION.
The only question is will you respond?

So what is your small voice telling you to no longer accept?

In my last post, I talked about the “operating system” most of us run on—an OS designed to OVERPROTECT you and others.Bu...
12/11/2025

In my last post, I talked about the “operating system” most of us run on—an OS designed to OVERPROTECT you and others.

But here’s the real challenge…
That OS is 100% incompatible with solving complex problems together.

Why?
Because in the name of keeping things comfortable, avoiding risk, looking good, and maintaining control, it pushes us to avoid and distort reality—the death knell to problem-solving.

The tragedy is that the same reflex that once kept our ancestors alive now undermines our ability to adapt.

This threatens the ability of our organizations and our species to survive and thrive.

So what to do?

We'll need to fundamentally rethink the way we develop people.

🛑 STOP over-relying on snackable content (as tasty as it can be).
🟢 START using the science of transformative learning to upgrade our OS.

We can help. At Holzman Leadership this is one of our deepest areas of expertise.

Shoot me a DM if you want to talk.

Most of us tend to think of conflict as yelling and screaming. But the truth is it rarely shows up that way. It usually ...
12/02/2025

Most of us tend to think of conflict as yelling and screaming.
But the truth is it rarely shows up that way.
It usually shows up as something that’s hard to put your finger on.

Discomfort. Awkwardness. Just a feeling that something isn’t right.

All these things are a sign that there’s a conflict you’re avoiding.
And you’re probably avoiding it for good reason.

You don’t want to blow up the relationship.
And when you’ve tried to talk about it, it didn’t make anything better.
In fact, maybe it made things worse.

But here’s the truth:
If you DON’T find a way to address it…

The awkwardness will continue.
Things might get worse.
And your conscience will plague you more than ever.

So when you’re ready to get back in the game, redefining the problem if your first move.

The problem is no longer the other person, it’s the conflict.
And you have to treat the conflict with curiousity.
Perhaps it has something to teach you about yourself.

For exmaple, you might say:
“We’ve been in conflict with each other for a while and we haven’t been able to resolve it, despite your and my best efforts. I hope we can because our relationship is really important to me, and impacts everyone else. What could I be doing differently that would help?”

And now your job is simply to listen.
Not to share how you feel until the other person feels 100% understood.
Then, and only then, do you get to share how you feel.

For my American friends, welcome back to work!

You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves.Every leader KNOWS that.And yet—we keep trying.We coach, we e...
11/25/2025

You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves.
Every leader KNOWS that.
And yet—we keep trying.

We coach, we encourage, we “check in.”
We give them another chance.
And another.
And another.

Until you finally realize…
you care more about their success and growth than they do.

That’s the moment one of my clients hit recently.
They walked out of a one-on-one thinking,
⁉️ “Why am I the only one sweating this problem?”

It’s brutal—because you want to believe everyone’s capable of doing better.
You want to believe effort and clarity and support can enable that.

But no amount of coaching can compensate for lack of will.

You can TEACH skill.
You can CLARIFY expectations.
You can even BUILD capacity.
But you CAN’T manufacture motivation.

And if someone doesn’t think there’s a problem,
you’re not solving—you’re babysitting.

That’s the line every leader has to learn to walk:
The difference between someone who’s struggling to perform
and someone who’s comfortable underperforming.

💬 How do you tell the difference between “can’t do” and “won’t do” on your team?

When someone on your team underperforms, your brain doesn’t whisper.It often screams.“They’re lazy.”“They’re incompetent...
11/18/2025

When someone on your team underperforms, your brain doesn’t whisper.
It often screams.

“They’re lazy.”
“They’re incompetent.”
“They just don’t care.”

Because when we’re frustrated, our emotions narrow our vision.
We stop seeing context.
We stop seeing nuance.
We just see THEM as the problem.

That’s what happened to me recently.
I was gearing up for a tough conversation, angry and convinced I already knew the cause.

But once I cooled down, I started to notice other possibilities:
Maybe expectations had shifted.
Maybe capacity was the real issue.
Maybe I hadn’t been clear enough about what success looked like.

That’s when my frustration turned into curiosity.

And curiosity changes everything.

It doesn’t excuse the problem—it just expands your understanding of it.

You can still hold people accountable.
You just do it with a fuller picture and a steadier hand.

Because leadership isn’t about pretending you’re not human.
It’s about noticing when your emotions have hijacked the conversation—
and taking the wheel back.

I built an entire framework for honest conversations…and still manage to screw it up sometimes.Because here’s the thing ...
11/11/2025

I built an entire framework for honest conversations…
and still manage to screw it up sometimes.

Because here’s the thing about frameworks—
they can be super useful,
but in real life, you’re human.
You get frustrated and sometimes the framework goes out the window.

That’s exactly what happened to me a couple of weeks ago.
I was diagnosing a problem I wasn’t sure the other person was even motivated to solve.

Classic mistake.

So, note to self (and to every leader out there):
You can’t fix what they don’t think is broken and aren’t motivated to solve.

That’s why I created the REAL-Results Framework™.

R — Ready yourself.
Get clear on what’s really bothering you BEFORE the conversation.
If you walk in hot, you’ll burn the bridge before you cross it.

E — Engage.
Frame the issue clearly, without blame.
Not “You’re failing,” but “Here’s what I’m seeing.”

A — Agree.
Before you talk root cause, get agreement that there IS a problem—
and that they actually want to solve it.
Otherwise, you’ll end up doing all the work.

L — Lead to Action.
Only THEN do you talk about next steps.

And yes—I literally teach this for a living, and still catch myself going too fast sometimes.

BUT DON’T DO IT.

We all want to move fast.
But the irony is that REAL conversations only happen when you slow down.

💬 Which part of the REAL framework do you find hardest—Ready, Engage, Agree, or Lead?

Most conversations are doomed before they even start.Not because you didn’t prep.Not because the agenda was unclear.But ...
11/06/2025

Most conversations are doomed before they even start.

Not because you didn’t prep.
Not because the agenda was unclear.
But because of a big assumption you might've made.

That was a leader I was coaching last month.
He walked in ready to open-heartedly discuss “root causes” and “solutions.”
But for some reason the conversation was really clunky.

Why?
Because he’d ASSUMED the other person really wanted to solve the problem.
But if a person isn’t motivated to solve the problem, there’s no point in discussing root causes with them.

I call this the “Agreement Gap.”
Leaders rush in to diagnose and fix the problem, thinking “It’s obvious this is an issue—of course they want to understand it and do something about it.”

Nope.

Sometimes they don’t see it.
Sometimes they see it but don’t care.
And sometimes, they care—just not enough to change.

So here’s the rule he wished he’d followed:
👉 Before root causing and solutioning—GET AGREEMENT.
Not just that the problem exists, but that it matters to them.

If you skip that?
You’ll waste an hour (or more) having the wrong conversation.

And then you’ll walk away thinking, “Why did that feel so weird?”

So slow down.
Don’t fix what they don’t think is broken.

The first step to solving anything is getting on the same page about reality.

💬 Ever found yourself trying to “coach” someone who clearly wasn’t worried about the problem? What did you do?

I’ve been teaching people how to have honest conversations for 30+ years.But even I get nervous sometimes.Years ago, I h...
11/04/2025

I’ve been teaching people how to have honest conversations for 30+ years.
But even I get nervous sometimes.

Years ago, I had to talk to someone about their performance.
Not a bad person. Not incompetent.
In fact, somebody who’s quite capable and who I cared about a lot.
She just wasn’t showing up with the effort the work demanded.

And there I was—
Heart rate up
Stomach tight
Running the whole conversation in my head.

Why? Because I wasn’t just frustrated with her results.
I was disappointed and angry with her apathy.

If you’re trying and failing, I’ll coach you all day.
But if you’re not even trying?
That’s really hard for me to accept.

Here’s the truth:
You can be great at “difficult conversations” and still hate having them.
Because they’re not just about performance—they’re about people.

And when you actually care about the person, that’s what makes it hard.

You’re not just managing performance.
You’re managing emotions—yours and theirs.

So next time you walk into that kind of conversation, remember this:
Being nervous doesn’t mean you’re weak.
It means you’re human and care about the other person and the outcome.

💬 What’s harder for you: having the conversation or getting your head straight beforehand?

Have you noticed that everyone's walking around with "their truth" now?I don’t know about you, but for some reason it dr...
10/30/2025

Have you noticed that everyone's walking around with "their truth" now?
I don’t know about you, but for some reason it drives me nuts.

❓ Maybe it’s the arrogant, self-aggrandizing, "look-at-me" attitude that rubs me the wrong way.
❓ Maybe it’s the demand to put everyone’s feelings on a pedestal, regardless of their validity.

I think the biggest reason is that it shuts down conversations about what’s ACTUALLY true.

And when that happens, we can’t figure out how to make things better because… “We can’t solve any problem we can’t discuss with each other openly and honestly.”

For example, one executive I know was recently told by their leader, "You're not showing enough leadership." But when she pressed for specifics, he retreated to "that's just my perception." Now what?

The executive…
Can't improve,
Can't defend herself,
Can't even understand what happened.
The conversation dies right there.

Real leadership requires something harder: Courageous Humility.
The guts to say what you think, and the humility to be wrong about it.

Truth isn't something you own.

It's something you discover through honest dialogue.
Even when—and maybe especially when—it’s uncomfortable.

That's how trust gets built.
That's how breakthroughs actually happen.

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