http://www.cowartconsultinggroup.com/

Cowart Consulting Group, Roswell, GA (2026)

08/28/2026

Fatalism as a measurable risk attitude

Aviation named this decades ago. When the FAA built its human factors curriculum, it identified five attitudes that get pilots killed. Four of them are loud: anti-authority, impulsivity, invulnerability, macho. The fifth is quiet. Resignation. "What's the use."

Resignation does not present as a risk attitude. It presents as the guy who stopped filing near-miss reports. As the crew that quit pushing back on a bad procedure two years ago because nobody ever changed it. It looks like compliance, which is exactly why it survives an audit.

We screen for it. In our watchout framework it surfaces as Deflated: prone to discouragement, low enthusiasm, low energy for pushing on anything. And it is measurable, which matters more than it sounds. Most organizations treat fatalism as a mood, something in the water at a site with a rough history. It is not a mood. It is a stable disposition, and it predicts whether a person will intervene when they see something wrong.

The operational consequence is specific. Impulsivity and machismo produce incidents you can trace afterward. Resignation produces the incident nobody reported the setup for. It removes the last human check in the system, quietly, and the system looks fine right up until it does not.

What makes this a leadership problem rather than a screening problem: resignation is learned. Nobody arrives that way. People get there by raising something three times and watching nothing happen. The measurable attitude in the individual is often a lagging indicator of the supervisor above him.

Screen for it. Then go fix whatever is manufacturing it.

08/27/2026

The supervisor as the variable

Gallup put a number on something most operators already suspect. Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. Same company, same pay scale, same posters in the breakroom. Different supervisor, different outcome.
Gallup

That figure gets misread constantly. It does not mean your boss controls 70% of how you feel about your job. It is a between-team measurement. It says that when you line up the engaged work groups against the disengaged ones inside a single organization, most of what separates them sits with the person running the group.

Our Climate and Culture Survey measures Supervision under Mood, and Development and Resources under Engagement. What we see repeatedly is that the Supervision score moves first and the Engagement scores follow. A crew can have the training budget and the equipment and still read low on Development, because the person who decides who gets tapped for the next opportunity is the supervisor, not the budget.

Which is why "we have an engagement problem" is usually the wrong diagnosis. Engagement is not issued at the corporate level and then degraded on the way down. It is manufactured locally, shift by shift, by whoever runs the shift. When a site shows a 30-point spread between its best and worst work groups, the culture is not the variable. The org chart is.

The structural problem: most organizations promote supervisors on technical mastery and then measure them on engagement. Those are different capacities. One does not produce the other, and no amount of company-wide programming closes the gap.

If you want the engagement number to move, stop surveying the organization and start assessing the supervisors.

08/26/2026

From John-Luke, our firm’s biggest Dolly fan 🦋

Dolly Parton was not just an American icon, which is what everyone will be saying. She is a hero and role model for all people of all walks of life. I was in the barber shop waiting my turn when the news broke. Others waiting were old, young, different ethnicities, well-dressed, in gym clothes, overalls, and everything in between. When we heard it on the radio, conversation stopped and everyone looked at each other. The younger folks immediately went to their phones to confirm the news, and then there was a real, genuine, spontaneous moment of silence in the room. Jill stopped cutting hair.

The first to break the silence was the old man in the corner, who simply said, “I never heard a bad word about her.” That sparked comments from everyone, even the quiet ones, about performances, interviews, and acts of goodwill they remembered. In Western North Carolina, we remember Hurricane Helene all too well. In September 2024, Helene devastated communities across the Appalachian region, and Dolly personally donated millions to assist in the restoration of the homes and local businesses in the area. This was not the first or last time she jumped in to help her community, not because she was pressured to do so, but because she felt it was right.

She didn’t preach her opinions and she didn’t judge. If she preached anything, it was that love is always the right answer. But she also didn’t back down when challenged on her values. She didn’t try to make everyone love her, she was just herself, and everyone did. She balanced the line between being caring and being fierce better than anyone we’ll ever see again.

There are thousands of lessons that people can take from the life and actions of Dolly. For me, what she taught is that you need to understand yourself, what matters most to you, and be courageous enough to act on it. If it comes to it, fight like hell for what you care about. You can be kind while also being a force to be reckoned with. Be authentic and walk your talk, and you have nothing to be afraid of.

A simple “RIP” does not do it justice in this case. This woman started the Imagination Library, giving my own kids and thousands of others books every month. That’s just one small impact that my family feels. She made craters that people will feel for generations. I will not be saying “RIP.” Dolly will live forever.

08/14/2026

This is the last post in a series about Jackie, the Big Bear bald eagle. The first three were about stewardship and succession (building for perpetuity and making sure readiness is a system rather than an assumption). This one is about the camera.

Jackie lived under a permanent livestream. Every storm, every lost egg, every feeding, every absence from the nest was watched by millions in real time. That transparency built extraordinary attachment. People named the eaglets, they organized vigils over lost eggs, they celebrated every fledge. And, when her decline became visible in July, the response was immediate. Everyone saw it as it happened.

But, most of those millions were not qualified to tell you whether what they were seeing was normal. She left the nest for three hours; is that a problem? Shadow brought food and she did not eat; does that mean something? The footage was available to everyone, but the ability to interpret it was not.

When Jackie was found weak on the lakeshore in July, the specialists at the Ojai Raptor Center could read what they were seeing: severe anemia, systemic compromise, specific markers that pointed toward something deeper than the visible confrontation with younger eagles. The camera showed the event, but only expertise translated it into a diagnosis.

Modern leadership operates under a version of the same camera. Organizations have more data on their leaders than at any point in history. Multi-rater feedback. Performance dashboards. Engagement surveys. Board-level reporting. The observation is abundant. What is often missing is the interpretive layer.

Observation and data always tells you something, but what it tells you depends on who is doing the observation (and sometimes tells you more about the observer than the observed!). A leader whose direct reports rate them highly on warmth and availability sounds like a strength, but it can also be the signature of someone whose team has learned to defer rather than develop. A leader whose peers rate them low on collaboration might be difficult, or they might also be the only person willing to hold an unpopular position.

The observation is not the insight. It is merely the starting point, and turning it into something accurate enough to act on requires a framework, experience, and the willingness to sit with ambiguity long enough to find the story beneath it.

Jackie's nest cam showed everything... the patience, the storms, the losses, the decline. What made it useful was not the footage, but instead the trained observers who could look at the same image everyone else was seeing and know what it actually meant.

People are always watching. But do they know enough about the subject matter to understand what they are seeing?

08/13/2026

This is the third post in a series about Jackie, the Big Bear bald eagle, and what her story reveals about leadership. The first was about stewardship and perpetuity. This one is about what happens when the steward's time runs out.

Jackie's confrontation with two younger eagles in mid-July was not the beginning of her decline... it was simply the moment her decline became visible. She was already compromised by severe anemia that weeks of intensive veterinary care could not reverse. The challenge did not create the vulnerability. It surfaced what was already there.

In organizations, the equivalent moment tends to get treated as the event:

A CEO retires and there is no internal candidate. A plant manager takes medical leave and no one has been cross-trained to run the operation. A founder dies and the next generation has never held operational authority.

These are not the moments succession failed. These are the moments everyone discovered it was never actually built. Effective succession planning is about making sure what gets revealed in a moment of vulnerability is readiness rather than fragility. It is the operational requirement for stewardship.

Succession carries four risks (and most organizations are more exposed than they realize on at least two of them):

- Vacancy risk is the most straightforward: a critical seat is empty with no one to fill it.

-Readiness risk is subtler; people are on the bench, but no one has measured where they actually are against what the role requires.

- Legitimacy risk shows up during the transition itself, when succession has not been communicated clearly and stakeholders start drawing their own conclusions about who is in charge.

- Transition risk is the one that gets the least attention: a successor exists, they are ready, their authority is recognized, and the system still falters because the institutional knowledge and decision-making protocols lived in the departing leader's head rather than in the structure.

Amazingly, a bald eagle seems to have managed risk better than many successful organizations:

- Jackie and Shadow shared responsibility across eight years. When she was rescued in July, the seat (or nest, as it were) was not empty.... Shadow was there.

- Six eaglets fledged over multiple seasons, each one developed through a full progression from dependent to independent to launched. The next generation was not theoretical; it existed, and it was flying.

- When younger eagles tested the territory, Shadow's continued presence and the established boundaries held. The claim did not collapse under challenge.

- And, the nest itself (the structure, the routines, the operational knowledge of the territory) persisted intact. Shadow did not have to rebuild anything. He stepped into a functioning system.

Systems that handle succession well treat it as a discipline, not a conversation they plan to have later. They assess their bench before they need it (where candidates actually are in terms of temperament, cognitive capacity, how they handle pressure, what data reveals about how the organization experiences their leadership). They build developmental tracks calibrated to what the data shows. And, they do that work continuously, because by the time the revealing event arrives, there is no more time for development... there is only time to react.

Jackie's nest had all four risks covered before the reveal. That happened because the system was built over years, tested by loss, and designed to function beyond its most charismatic leader.

08/12/2026

Yesterday, we wrote about Jackie, the bald eagle who died Monday after eight years of being watched by millions on a livestream at Big Bear Lake. We called her a steward of a system, not a symbol. This post is about what that distinction actually demands.

Stewardship gets used loosely in leadership pop lingo. It tends to mean something like "care for the thing while you are in charge of it." Maintain it. Protect it. Hand it off in roughly the condition you found it.

That is custodianship. Stewardship demands a higher standard.
The steward's obligation is perpetuity. Not to preserve the system as it is, but to leave it more capable, more resilient, and less dependent on any single individual than it was when they arrived.

The measure is not whether the system survived your tenure.

It is whether your tenure made the system more likely to survive the next one.
Jackie did not just protect the nest. She and Shadow rebuilt it after storms. They adapted after losing eggs to ravens, laid again, fledged six eaglets who are now out building their own capacity somewhere. The territory is stronger, the lineage more distributed, the system less fragile than it was before she arrived.

Leaders who are deeply committed can, over time, become a load-bearing wall upon which the entire system depends. With the best of intentions, everything of consequence ultimately runs through them. They are not hoarding; they are genuinely good at what they do, and the system has organized itself around that goodness.
But, the effect is the same: capability concentrates rather than distributes, and the institution becomes more fragile with every year the leader stays, not less.

The work we do (assessment, leadership development, succession design) helps to address the question: is this leader building for perpetuity, or are they building for their own tenure? Those two things feel similar by intent, yet they produce very different systems.

Perpetuity means the bench is deeper when you leave than it was when you arrived. It means decisions are being made well in layers you do not touch. It means the institution's identity is not fused with yours.

Jackie's nest will outlast her. That is not a sad footnote. It is the entire point.

08/11/2026

Jackie the bald eagle died yesterday. She was 14.

If you followed her, you already know the story. If you didn't, here is why millions of people are grieving a wild bird in Southern California...

In 2016, a wildlife nonprofit called Friends of Big Bear Valley set up a camera overlooking a bald eagle nest at Big Bear Lake. The eagle they were watching was originally thought to be male and named Jack. When she grew larger than her mate, they corrected course. Jackie.

Her first partner, Mr. B, was displaced in 2018 by a younger male who simply refused to leave no matter how many times he was chased off. They named him Shadow. Jackie eventually accepted him, and together they built something. Six eaglets fledged over multiple seasons. They survived blizzards that buried the nest in two feet of snow. They lost eggs to ravens and laid more. They lost a chick named Misty in a storm and came back the next season. All of it happened on camera, in real time, watched by millions of people who named the chicks, organized vigils over lost eggs, and celebrated every successful fledge.

In mid-July, Jackie was found weak on the north shore of the lake after a confrontation with two younger eagles. She was rescued and transferred to the Ojai Raptor Center, where veterinarians spent weeks treating severe anemia they could not explain. She died Monday morning.

The grief is enormous. And, interestingly, the instinct is to mourn Jackie as a symbol. A symbol of resilience, of the species' recovery, of nature's beauty under pressure. She was all of those things. And she was more.

Jackie was not just a symbol... she was a steward of a system.

She did not own the nest. She maintained it.

She did not control the territory; she defended it long enough for the next generation to use it.

She did not perform for the camera; she just did what was necessary (and the camera happened to be there).

The system she and Shadow built (the mate bond, the territory, the successive generations launched into flight) was never about her permanence; rather, it was about both protection and regeneration of the system.

A good portion of our work is focused on assessing leaders and the systems they build. A common outcome of these assessments is that many organizations still confuse the leader with the system.

We admire the person who weathers every storm. We grieve when they leave. And, we rarely stop to ask the harder question: did they build something that can flourish without them?

Over the next few posts, we will use Jackie's story to explore what stewardship actually requires, why succession has to be a system and not a hope, and what happens when leadership operates under a permanent camera.

Jackie's story, albeit unlikely, is a spectacular case study in stewardship.

08/07/2026

Talent evaluation and development are not about collecting MORE data. Instead they are about collecting the RIGHT data to improve “signal” and to reduce “noise.”

When “noise” (i.e., irrelevant information) drives decisions, organizations get misaligned hiring, unclear growth paths, and wasted training outlays.

Coward Consulting Group’s approach focuses on those “signals” that actually predict performance and potential. Talent recommendations are based upon structured, job-relevant assessment; evidence-based talent insights; and developmental planning tied to measurable outcomes.

The results are clearer recommendations, better internal mobility, and stronger overall capabilities among selected talent, allowing organizational leaders to make confident decisions with less ambiguity and more impact.

Ready to turn uncertainty into actionable talent insights? Contact [email protected] for more information.

08/04/2026

Locus of control and ownership:

Imagine you’re going through a 360-degree feedback process and received feedback that your communication style can come across as condescending.

Do you think: "They're being too sensitive. That's just how I am."

Or: "That's uncomfortable to hear, but if multiple people are experiencing it, there's something worth examining here."

That difference in response has to do with your locus of control. People with an internal locus of control believe their outcomes are shaped by their own choices and behavior. People with a more external locus tend to attribute outcomes to circumstances, other people, or forces outside themselves. Neither is a moral failing. Both are patterns that form over time, often without our awareness.

Lefcourt and Davidson (1991) found that people with a more internal locus of control not only performed better under pressure, but they also actively sought feedback, took ownership, and their performance metrics improved. People with a more external locus, when given the same feedback under the same conditions, were significantly more likely to dismiss it, rationalize it, or attribute it to bias in the person delivering it.

Same feedback, completely different outcomes. Worse, those outcomes compound over time across performance, relationships, and career trajectory.

What this study doesn’t illuminate is that locus of control is not a fixed trait. It exists on a continuum, and where you fall right now does not determine your destiny. Like self-awareness and any leadership capability worth developing, it can be grown. It starts with one question to ask yourself next time you get uncomfortable feedback:

What part of this is within my control?

Feedback should be treated like a gift. While it is based on people’s perceptions, which can be biased intentionally or unintentionally, asking yourself this simple question allows you to take ownership for what you can and become something greater because of it.

07/24/2026

"With great power comes great responsibility."

Everyone knows the line... but perhaps fewer of us examine what the responsibility really means.

We hear it as an obligation to act: if I am the one who can, I am the one who must.

That read is noble, brave, and courageous. It also produces some of the most limiting leadership we see.

Take it in the context of the story itself. Uncle Ben has no powers. His entire contribution is a single memorable sentence (and a lifetime of guilt) delivered to a superhero who will outlive him and outperform him in every measurable way. Ben was not telling Peter, a literal superhero, what to do.

Ben was trying to teach him. But Peter heard an assignment... an obligation.

And look where that lands him. After sacrificing himself to save the world, the new movie opens with Peter alone in a city that no longer knows his name... a lonely hero with no team to help him.
Sad? Yes.
Heroic? Maybe.
A failure of leadership? Often, yes.

This is the logical endpoint of believing that capability equals obligation.

The organizational version looks like a leader who knows the work better than the people doing it and steps in because stepping in is faster, cleaner, and kinder in the moment. Nothing about the impulse is wrong. But the effect of it is.

It’s like gravity. Control is visible, and people push back against it; gravity, however, is resonant... and people drift toward it. Decisions collect at the center because the center is stable, competent, and safe. Oftentimes, the very strengths that make a resonant leader worth deferring to are the same strengths that teach everyone to expect a savior instead of a teacher. And because with great power comes great responsibility, the hero always saves the day.

What this costs is judgment in the layers below. People build decision-making capacity by making calls imperfectly, living with the result, and adjusting. If the leader catches every fall, the result is not a strong team... it is a stagnant group that cannot function without heroic intervention.
Being the best suited to do something is not an automatic obligation. It is information. It shows where capability is concentrated... and that concentration is a problem, not an obligation.

So, the question is never whether you could do it faster and better yourself. You already know you can.

The question is who was supposed to learn this, and what it cost that you did it for them instead.

Cowart Consulting Group

08/28/2026

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