We were six days into a trip together, my son Tyler and me, and something had been sitting on him the whole time. I could see it. On day six he finally put it down on the table.
"I've got to ask you a question. Who the fuck are you?"
He wasn't being funny. He said, "Because you're not my dad. I've got no advice from you. You've not yelled at me. You've not told me how wrong I am. Who are you?"
Here's the honest answer to his question, and it's the same answer I give founders who ask me why everything still runs through them after they've done the work. I'm Todd Palmer, an executive coach for CEOs and founders, and I had changed years before anybody around me believed it. Your business is an amplification of your psychology, which means it's also an amplification of your history. When you genuinely change how you show up, the people who spent years adapting to the old you won't update their schedules, and they don't owe you an update either.
I told Tyler the truth. I said, "I'm a coach. I'm a client of Dr. Danny Friedland. That's who I am." Danny had spent years helping me understand the space between reacting and responding, getting me curious about what was happening inside me before I dumped it onto somebody else. Tyler didn't know any of that work was happening. He only knew that for six days he was experiencing a different dad.
Then I asked him. And that other guy wasn't working for us, was he?
No, he said. And then he said the line I've thought about ever since.
"But I don't want to trust that this is real."
I Wasn't a Thoughtful Man Back Then. I Was a Reactive One.
I want to be clear about who I was before that trip, because the story only means something if you know what he was reacting to.
For most of my 24 years running Diversified Industrial Staffing, I was reactive. Fast to anger, fast to correct, fast to tell you where you were wrong before you'd finished the sentence. I had opinions about everything, and I gave them to everybody, invited or not. At home, that showed up as a dad offering advice to a son who hadn't asked for any. At work, it showed up as a CEO who solved problems his people should have owned, only to wonder why nobody stepped up. I didn't have the language for it then, but the bottleneck in my business was me. And when I was $600,000 in debt and lying awake wondering how I was going to make payroll, none of it got better. It got louder.
Getting out of that took years. Not a weekend seminar. Not a book. Not a decision I made one Sunday night that I was suddenly going to become a different person. It took years of work with a coach. I was a difficult client, and there were plenty of times when I went right back to the old behaviors, especially when I was under pressure. If you're wondering what to expect from executive coaching, that's the honest version of it.
I want to say something here that I think gets lost in most articles about personal growth, including some of mine. Changing doesn't mean the old version of you disappears forever. I still have moments when the old Todd shows up. The difference is that today I usually recognize him sooner, own it faster, repair what needs to be repaired, and hopefully learn something from it. Growth isn't perfection. It's awareness, ownership, repair, and increasingly different choices.
So by the time Tyler and I took that trip, the man sitting across from him was not a man who had turned over a new leaf. He was a man who had been quietly rebuilding himself for a long time in rooms Tyler never saw. Six days of evidence against twenty years of evidence is not a fair fight.
Which brings me to the part almost nobody looks at.
Tyler was getting exactly what he'd probably wanted from me for years. A father who listened instead of lectured. So why did that make him suspicious instead of grateful? Why did he say he didn't want to trust it?
Because believing me was the riskier move. If he decided this new version of his dad was real and I went back to the old way in three weeks, he'd have to feel that disappointment all over again, and this time he'd have participated in it. Staying skeptical protected him. That's not stubbornness. It's a perfectly intelligent defense, and your people have built the same one about you.
I see this constantly in coaching. A founder finally does the work, comes back to the leadership team calmer and more open, and instead of relief, they get a room full of careful faces. Then they get frustrated. "I'm doing everything you told me to do, and they're still walking on eggshells." Of course they are. You spent four years teaching them what happens when they bring you bad news. You do not get to un-teach that in a month, and their caution is not disrespect. It's memory.
Sit with that one a minute longer, because there's a harder truth inside it. The leader built an environment, and then got frustrated with the employees for adapting to the environment the leader built. The person who stopped bringing you bad news didn't wake up one morning and decide to be less accountable. They learned, through repeated experience, that bringing you bad news was painful, risky, or pointless. They adapted. That's not a character flaw. That's a functioning nervous system doing exactly what it's designed to do.
And here's the part that stings, because it stung me. Nobody owes you credit for changing. Your team doesn't owe you trust because you hired a coach, read a book, went to therapy, attended an offsite, or spent six months working on yourself. One of the hardest parts of doing personal work is that we naturally want some recognition for it. We're doing something genuinely difficult and we want the people around us to acknowledge it. But trust isn't something you announce. It's something other people decide to give you after enough evidence makes it feel safe.
There's research that puts numbers on this, and it landed hard when I found it. Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan studied leadership development across eight major corporations, tracking 11,480 managers and roughly 86,000 responses from the people who worked with them. What they found had almost nothing to do with which program or which coach a leader used. The leaders who told their colleagues what they were working on and then kept checking back in with those colleagues over months were seen by those colleagues as having improved significantly. The leaders who did the work quietly and waited to be noticed were rated as improving at a level that, in the researchers' words, barely exceeded random chance.
Read that carefully, because the finding is about what colleagues experienced, not about whether the leaders actually changed. That's the whole lesson. You may genuinely be changing, but if the people affected by your leadership aren't experiencing the change, your intentions don't count for much yet.
Which means waiting quietly to be noticed is the wrong strategy, and so is demanding credit. There's a third option, and it's the one I had to learn.
You own the impact of the old behavior.
Imagine a CEO saying this to their leadership team: "I know I've taught some of you not to bring me bad news. That's on me. There have been times when you brought me something difficult and I reacted instead of listening. I'm working on changing that. I also understand why six weeks of different behavior doesn't erase three years of experience. You don't owe me immediate trust. I need to earn it."
Notice what that leader is not doing. They're not asking their people to validate their growth or confirm that they've changed. They're acknowledging what the old behavior cost the people who lived through it. That's accountability, and it's a load-bearing piece of psychological safety.
What Trust Lag Costs Your Business
I don't write about my son so you'll feel something. I write about it because the same pattern shows up in your company, and it's expensive.
Here's what the lag costs while you're waiting to be believed. Your team keeps pre-editing what they tell you, which means you're still making decisions on filtered information. Your best people, the ones with options, keep one eye on the door because they're not betting their career on a change they haven't seen hold under pressure. Your leadership team keeps escalating decisions to you, because handing you a problem is still safer than owning one, which is most of what people actually mean when they talk about building a culture of accountability.
But go one level deeper, because this is where trust lag becomes scalability lag.
Your people still expect the old reaction, so they filter what they tell you. Because you're getting filtered information, your decisions get worse. They still expect you to swoop in and take over, so they escalate decisions instead of owning them. Now everything is back on your desk, and you look around and conclude, "See? They can't do this without me." What you may not realize is that your old behavior helped create the dependency you're now using as evidence that your team isn't capable. You built the loop, and then you read the loop as proof.
Nobody puts "we didn't believe the CEO had actually changed" on a P&L. You pay for it every week anyway, in slower decisions, rework, and turnover you'll explain to yourself some other way.
And here's the part that actually gets leaders. Many of them quit right here. They do six months of genuinely hard work, get no visible credit, quietly conclude that executive coaching wasn't worth it, and go back to the old operating system. That's the most expensive move available, because now you've spent the money and the effort, and you've also taught your people that your changes don't stick. You made their skepticism correct.
Being part of the loop is the good news, by the way. If your team's caution were about the economy or the industry or their personalities, you'd be stuck with it. The fact that you helped build it means you can help dismantle it. That's leverage, not a verdict.
The Ninety Day Receipt
So here's the practical piece, and it's small on purpose.
Pick one behavior you're working on. Not five. One. Maybe you interrupt. Maybe you jump straight to solutions. Maybe your tone changes under pressure. Tell the three or four people who experience that behavior most often what you're working on. Don't promise perfection, because you're going to screw it up. Give them explicit permission to tell you when the old version shows up.
Then come back in ninety days and ask a very different question than the one you want to ask. Not "have I changed?" Ask: "Are you experiencing me differently?"
Then listen to the answer without defending yourself. That last part is the whole exercise.
Your intention to change matters. It's the necessary first step, and it's genuinely hard. But their experience is what tells you whether the change has made it out of your head and into the relationship, which is the only place it counts. That gap between intention and impact is where most leaders live without knowing it.
One caution. Don't announce it if you have no intention of doing the work, because a stated commitment you abandon costs you more than silence ever would. But if you've been at this for six months and you're staying quiet because it would be uncomfortable to admit out loud that you needed to change at all, that's not humility. That's avoidance wearing a nicer suit.
So let me leave you with the question I actually want you sitting with.
Who in your business has already decided who you are, and has been operating off that decision for years without ever telling you? Not the person who's annoyed with you about one thing. The one who long ago stopped bringing you the hard stuff and never mentioned it, because they concluded a while back that it wasn't worth it.
If a name came to mind immediately, that's your work. And to be clear about what that work is: your job isn't to convince them that you've changed. Your job is to behave differently long enough that they no longer need convincing. They're not the project. Your behavior is the project.
If no name came to mind at all, that might be the more concerning answer, because it usually means nobody's telling you.
Either way, understand what your people are actually watching for. They're not watching the calm version of you in the Tuesday meeting when nothing is going wrong. They're waiting to see whether this month's calmer CEO survives the next lost customer, the bad quarter, the missed deadline, the cash-flow problem. And that's reasonable. That's exactly what I'd do.
Anybody can behave differently when nothing is going wrong. Trust gets rebuilt when the shit hits the fan and the new version of you still shows up.
If you're at the point of trying to find the right executive coach, look for one who's been the guy nobody believed anymore. Let's talk.
Here when you need me,
Todd
