After twenty years of coaching CEOs, Bill sees the same four patterns in nearly every leader who's stuck. They're not moral failures. They're the moves that feel like virtue while quietly destroying your company. Poor Delegation — meet Thomas. Micromanagement — meet Lee. Perfectionism — meet Eddie. Strategic Myopia — meet Rocky. These compound in a doom loop. This week's work: rate yourself on each sin. There's a scored version at busyisbroken.com, plus a parallel version your team can fill out about you.

Links: busyisbroken.com | scalingcoach.com/Q20

Mentioned in this episode:

PhD Research on CEOs

Quick favor: I'm in the middle of my doctoral research, and I need CEOs Here's the question: is there a point where working more hours actually indicates a worse leader? Nobody has measured it. I'm measuring it. If you're a CEO or president with at least ten people in the business and three direct reports, it takes just a few minutes. And Your team answers a few anonymous questions. What you get back is a report comparing how you rate yourself to how your team rates you. That gap is usually the interesting part. ScalingCoach.com/study

Ron Friedman surveyed six thousand teams expecting to find that the most collaborative ones win. The data said the opposite. Ron is a social psychologist (PhD, University of Rochester), bestselling author of The Best Place to Work and Decoding Greatness, and founder of Super Teams. The headline number: the average team burns eighteen hours a week in meetings and another eleven on email and messages — twenty-nine hours gone before anyone does real work. Super teams aren't smarter. They're just deliberate — fifty percent better at avoiding unnecessary meetings, fifty-four percent better at killing recurring ones.

Guest Links: superteams.com

Host Links: scalingcoach.com/Q20 | busyisbroken.com

Mentioned in this episode:

PhD Research on CEOs

Quick favor: I'm in the middle of my doctoral research, and I need CEOs Here's the question: is there a point where working more hours actually indicates a worse leader? Nobody has measured it. I'm measuring it. If you're a CEO or president with at least ten people in the business and three direct reports, it takes just a few minutes. And Your team answers a few anonymous questions. What you get back is a report comparing how you rate yourself to how your team rates you. That gap is usually the interesting part. ScalingCoach.com/study

Tony Hartl built a chain of tanning salons to 17 locations and 160 employees, sold it in a recession for tens of millions — and then took ten years off. Not to retire. To learn how to climb the mountain a second time without losing everything he lost the first time. The first climb: Planet Tan, built from a $10K loan when Tony was 26. He did every job and grew it to 17 salons before selling at 39. The cost showed up off the balance sheet — his marriage lasted seventeen months and change. Now he's building Undefeated Tribe and Crunch Fitness — 70-plus locations approaching 100, 3,500 employees, $200M-plus in revenue. He meditates every morning, cooks about 70% of his family's dinners, and almost never stays overnight on a business trip.

Links: busyisbroken.com | scalingcoach.com/Q20

Mentioned in this episode:

PhD Research on CEOs

Quick favor: I'm in the middle of my doctoral research, and I need CEOs Here's the question: is there a point where working more hours actually indicates a worse leader? Nobody has measured it. I'm measuring it. If you're a CEO or president with at least ten people in the business and three direct reports, it takes just a few minutes. And Your team answers a few anonymous questions. What you get back is a report comparing how you rate yourself to how your team rates you. That gap is usually the interesting part. ScalingCoach.com/study