Executive Coaching | Arete Coach

The After-Action Review: What the U.S. Army Can Teach Leaders About Learning

The leaders who improve the fastest tend to share a simple habit: they study their own results with the same care they bring to studying their market, their competitors, and their customers. That habit is easy to lose after twelve months shaped by inflation, shifting trade policy, and rapid changes in technology, when the pressure to move on to next year’s plan crowds out any real look at this one. When it slips, the same mistakes tend to reappear in new forms, and the hard-w

4 days ago5 min read

Ten Questions to Close the Year With Clarity

The final weeks of the year have a way of compressing everything into a short window. Budgets are due, teams are tired, and leaders are trying to close out results while also planning for a year that already looks uncertain. In the third-quarter AICPA and CIMA Economic Outlook Survey, only 36% of senior executives felt optimistic about the U.S. economy, and 46% said it was already in a recession or would enter one by the end of 2026, with inflation, rising costs, and geopolit

5 days ago5 min read

Why Good Intentions Stall: Revisiting Kegan and Lahey's Immunity to Change

Most executive coaches have worked with a leader who sincerely wants to change and somehow cannot. The commitment is real, the plan is sensible, and the leader can often describe exactly what needs to happen. Months later, the same behaviors remain firmly in place. Harvard researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey spent years studying this pattern, and their findings reshaped how many coaches understand resistance. What looks like a failure of will, they argue, is usuall

Oct 155 min read

Nine Quotes on the Power of a Good Question, and How Coaches Can Use Them

Executives rarely lack answers. They are surrounded by advisors, direct reports, board members, and increasingly capable tools, all eager to tell them what to do. What they lack far more often is someone who will ask the question that changes how they see the problem. The quality of a coaching engagement tends to rise and fall with the quality of the coach's questions. The quotes below, drawn from management thinkers, scientists, philosophers, and coaching practitioners, each

Oct 125 min read

The Four Stages of Psychological Safety

Every executive coach has sat across from a leader who insists that their door is open, that their team knows they can say anything, and who still watches meeting after meeting pass without a single dissenting voice. The leader is usually being honest about their intentions, but what eludes them is the fact that psychological safety cannot be established by announcement. It develops in a sequence, and most teams stall long before they reach the stage where genuine candor beco

Sep 85 min read

Mindfulness, Not Mind-Full-ness: Ten Ways to Open an Executive Peer Group Meeting

Most chief executives arrive at an executive peer advisory meeting carrying the heavy cognitive residue of everything that preceded it. There is the traffic on the drive over, the urgent unanswered message, the critical board decision left half-made, and the operational firefighting meeting that ran long. The mind is entirely full before the true collaborative conversation has even begun. A thoughtful opening ritual gives members implicit permission to set that fullness down,

Jun 237 min read

Training the Executive Brain to Hear the Truth with AI Thought Partnership

In high-stakes leadership, the most expensive tax you will ever pay is the "Fear Tax." When a team feels it is unsafe to bring bad news to the C-suite, they begin to filter, polish, and eventually hide the truth. By the time a "Red Flag" finally reaches your desk, it has often grown from a manageable spark into a four-alarm fire. The root cause? Often, it’s a leader’s reaction to bad news six months prior. The Biology of the "Amygdala Hijack" Psychological safety is a biologi

Jan 95 min read

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