At Berman Leadership, we’ve seen firsthand how coaching is evolving—and so are clients’ expectations.

In a recent conversation, Berman Leadership founder Bill Berman put it simply:

“Companies want somebody who knows what they’re going through.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean a coach must have walked in their client’s exact shoes. They don’t need to be a former lawyer to coach lawyers, or a healthcare executive to support a hospital system. But they do need to understand the pressures, vocabulary, and rhythms of that world.

Why does that matter?
Because it helps clients feel seen.

When a coach brings contextual fluency—when they “get it”—clients don’t have to waste time translating their experience. They can go deeper, faster. That sense of being understood builds trust, which unlocks more powerful coaching outcomes.

At Berman Leadership, we build our team with that principle in mind. Our coaches come from diverse backgrounds but share a core ability: to connect deeply with the lived realities of the leaders they support.

Because coaching isn’t just about insight. It’s about relevance.
And relevance is what makes coaching truly resonate.

Learn how our coaches help leaders feel seen—and succeed:
https://bermanleadership.com/our-approach

Leadership isn’t about waiting until the end of the year to reflect. As Bill Berman and Suzanne Joseph discussed in a recent internal conversation, meaningful leadership development happens when we make space to pause, learn, and reset—mid-year included.

So what’s the real difference between mid-year and year-end reviews?

According to Suzanne, it’s not about the structure.
It’s about the mindset:
“What did we learn, and where do we go from here?”
This question grounds both conversations in forward-looking growth—not just past performance.

At Berman Leadership, we coach executives to lead with clarity and intention, even in moments of ambiguity. Reviews—whether formal or informal—are powerful when they help leaders connect the dots between self-awareness and strategic alignment.

We encourage leaders to ask:

• What have I learned about myself and my team in the last six months?
• What small shift would create greater alignment—personally and organizationally?
• Where am I stuck, and what would help me move forward?

You don’t need a big reset—just a thoughtful one.

When feedback becomes a habit of reflection instead of a ritual of evaluation, leaders begin to move with greater clarity, confidence, and impact.

Learn how we help executives navigate complexity with intention:
https://bermanleadership.com/our-approach

Leadership is often described as the ability to get work done through others. But what’s less often discussed is the quality and intentionality behind those “others.” Who are they? What do they expect? And how do those relationships shape outcomes?

Scott Serviss, Chief Operating Officer at Berman Leadership, recently posed a simple but essential question:
“We all know leaders get work done through others. The question is whether they’ve thought intentionally about that.”

It’s easy for leaders to default to habitual modes of communication—texting a colleague, emailing a client, updating a board member—without taking time to consider the broader network in which they operate. But leadership doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It unfolds within a complex system of relationships, both internal and external.

A thoughtful leader might ask:

• Who do I need to be in alignment with in order to succeed?
• What are the expectations—explicit or unspoken—of those people?
• Have I built the right network for what’s ahead?

While internal relationships with teams and peers are critical, they’re just one piece of the picture. External stakeholders—customers, regulators, partners, board members, investors—often influence what’s possible more than any one internal decision.The good news is that stakeholder strategy isn’t innate. It’s a skill, and like any skill, it can be learned and strengthened. Leaders who take the time to map their landscape, understand key relationships, and communicate with intention tend to be more resilient, more effective, and more trusted.

In short: Relationships aren’t just part of the job. They are the job.

Executive coaching is often framed as a conversation between coach and client. But the most effective coaching happens when that conversation is rooted in context—when the coach understands not just the individual, but the environment they’re navigating.

Dr. Bill Berman recently outlined four key dimensions that shape how leaders grow. These broader factors provide essential context for any coaching relationship:

1. The Marketplace
   Leaders don’t operate in a vacuum. Economic conditions, industry disruptions, and shifting customer expectations all influence what leadership looks like in practice. Coaches who understand these external pressures are better equipped to help leaders adapt with clarity and purpose.
2. Organizational Culture
   Every organization has its own unwritten rules. Culture determines which behaviors are encouraged, which are avoided, and which are invisible until missteps occur. Effective coaching requires sensitivity to these norms—especially when a leader is trying to shift the culture or navigate misalignment.
3. The Team
   Leadership is relational. The size, structure, and dynamics of a leader’s team can either support or constrain progress. Understanding how the team works—its roles, trust levels, and shared goals—helps coaches identify what’s really needed to improve performance.
4. Stakeholders
   Executives are accountable to many people: board members, peers, direct reports, customers, investors. Each has expectations—some clear, others unspoken. Good coaching helps leaders surface and manage those expectations, while also clarifying what the leader can reasonably expect in return.

When coaches take these four contexts seriously, the work becomes more relevant, more strategic, and more effective. Leadership is never just about the individual. It’s about how that individual functions within a larger system.

Leadership is rarely about clear-cut choices. More often, it’s about navigating competing priorities with intention.

As Dr. Bill Berman shared at the close of his Human Wise podcast conversation, effective leadership often begins with one small, reflective action—especially when it aligns personal clarity with organizational value.

The question he offered was simple, but layered:

“What’s one thing you can do this week that serves both your needs and your organization’s needs?”

This is a practical expression of both-and leadership—the ability to hold personal and professional priorities at the same time, and act in ways that support both.

We often ask leaders to explore:

• What decision would support both your well-being and your team’s performance?
• What conversation could bring clarity to a tension you’ve been carrying?
• What boundary or priority shift might serve long-term sustainability—for you and for the business?

These aren’t abstract questions. They are entry points to more effective, human-centered leadership. When leaders take time to reflect in this way, they gain insight into what matters—and act from that insight, not just from urgency.

And the impact compounds. Small shifts in presence, clarity, or alignment often ripple outward—building stronger teams, clearer strategies, and more grounded leadership over time.

At Berman Leadership, we help executives move through complexity with a framework that is both human and strategic. Leadership doesn’t require grand reinvention. Often, it just asks you to pause, notice, and choose with greater intention.

Because when your actions reflect both personal integrity and organizational purpose, leadership becomes more sustainable—and more effective.

Explore how we support leaders in navigating complexity with clarity:
https://bermanleadership.com/our-approach

 

Inclusion sounds simple.
But doing it well takes thought, intention, and leadership.

In a recent conversation, Bernardo Ferdman unpacked what inclusion truly means in organizations—and why it’s more than just being “invited to the meeting.”

As Bernardo puts it:

“When people are included in everything—every email, every meeting—that’s a recipe for chaos.”

Inclusion isn’t about volume. It’s about value.

At Berman Leadership, we believe inclusion means creating systems, spaces, and mindsets where every individual feels:

• Safe to contribute
• Valued for their input
• Able to bring their full potential to the collective work

“It’s about building environments that are mutually beneficial—where people can really belong.”

True inclusion isn’t just a DEI initiative. It’s a leadership imperative. Because teams perform best when people feel respected, heard, and aligned—across all kinds of differences.

And while inclusion is for everyone, it’s also challenging:
It involves navigating paradoxes, adapting systems, and rethinking what belonging looks like in practice.

But when leaders embrace that complexity, the rewards are transformational.

Explore how we coach leaders to foster true inclusion:
https://bermanleadership.com/our-approach

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a distant frontier, it is embedded in the daily operations of organizations, transforming how decisions are made, how work is performed, and how leadership is exercised. As AI technologies evolve rapidly, leaders face a new imperative: to understand not just the capabilities of AI, but its implications for people, culture, and the future of their workforce. This paper describes what we see as the most pressing leadership issues in the age of AI, drawing on contemporary insights and frameworks for organizational life.

 

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as a Metaphor for AI Adoption

 

Unpacking the Metaphor

We are not the master of our tools. The story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice offers a vivid lens through which to view the leadership challenges brought on by AI. In the tale, the apprentice, eager to harness magical power, sets forces in motion that rapidly spiral beyond their control. Without the wisdom and restraint of the master sorcerer, the apprentice becomes overwhelmed by the very tools meant to empower them.

For today’s leaders, this metaphor carries profound relevance. The rush to adopt AI often comes with great enthusiasm and ambition—an eagerness to solve complex problems, boost productivity, and gain a competitive edge. Yet, like the apprentice, leaders may lack the full understanding of the technology’s intricacies, its unforeseen ripple effects, and the deeper ethical considerations at stake.

• Unintended Consequences: Just as the apprentice’s enchantment leads to chaos, hasty or unexamined deployment of AI can result in disruptions to workflow, loss of institutional knowledge, or new forms of inequality. Without careful oversight, automation may replicate biases, erode trust, or undermine morale.
• Responsibility and Stewardship: The apprentice’s predicament highlights the critical need for responsible stewardship. Leaders must balance innovation with caution, setting ethical boundaries and ensuring that AI serves the organization’s values rather than dictating them.
• Continuous Learning: The sorcerer represents wisdom built on experience and reflection. Leaders in the age of AI must commit to ongoing learning—not just about technology itself, but about its impact on people, culture, and community. This means asking hard questions, anticipating unintended consequences, and being prepared to intervene when things go awry.
• Empowerment vs. Control: The apprentice sought empowerment but quickly discovered the limits of AI offers unprecedented power, but true leadership lies in knowing when to guide, when to restrain, and when to adapt. Leaders must recognize that technological mastery is inseparable from human judgment and empathy.

Ultimately, the metaphor of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a cautionary tale for leaders: wielding powerful new tools requires humility, wisdom, and a steadfast commitment to the well-being of those affected by their decisions. In the age of AI, the real magic lies not in unchecked ambition, but in thoughtful stewardship and ethical leadership. Although the deployment of AI is inevitable, organizations and their leaders have the agency to shape its effects on individuals and the workplace with intention.
 

Our Response – A Framework of Opportunity for AI Leadership

Our conversations with leaders about AI have led us to build a framework of opportunity for leaders to hold important conversations inside their organizations about the real impacts of AI deployment. This framework has 4 elements Capability, Care, Connection, and Community.
 

 

 

Capability

AI challenges the relevance of human expertise. Tasks once considered uniquely human—writing, designing, analyzing—can now be performed by algorithms. As AI expands, individuals may feel disconnected from their sense of professional value. Critical questions arise: What does it mean to be capable in an AI-enhanced workplace? How can the dignity of human contribution be preserved when machines outperform people in certain domains? How will we as leaders respond to the impact of a loss of human capability of those we lead?

 

Care

The integration of AI risks reducing people to plug-and-play components. When employees are viewed merely as bundles of skills to be deployed on demand, the relational fabric of organizations frays. This shift can undermine both how individuals care about their work and how organizations care for their people. How will we prevent the inevitable adoption of AI from eroding empathy, trust, and psychological safety?

 

Connection

AI lacks emotional investment in its own outcomes. Our work “is an issue for us”, it’s not for the robot. While it can generate content, solve problems, and optimize processes, its outcomes don’t matter to it. Meaning in work derives from pride, ownership, and emotional resonance. What can we do to design roles and workflows that preserve the human experience of accomplishment and purpose for those using AI?

 

Community

Status and belonging remain central to groups and therefore to organizational life. As AI flattens hierarchies and disrupts traditional markers of expertise, individuals’ sense of identity and place may be threatened. How can we as leaders foster inclusive communities where every individual feels valued, even as roles and contributions are redefined by the rise of AI?

 

Ethical Leadership in the Age of AI

Ethics is not a peripheral concern—it stands at the core of leadership in the AI era. Leaders must move beyond technical and economic considerations to embrace moral and philosophical questions. What are the human factors impacting responsible AI adoption? How can fairness, transparency, and accountability be ensured? How do we engage our workforce in new ways to support these outcomes? These are not hypothetical questions; they demand immediate and thoughtful attention.

 

Toward a Human-Centered Response

A central principle for leadership in the AI age is clear: AI may be happening to organizations, but the response remains a matter of choice and stewardship. Leaders must reclaim their role as stewards of culture, meaning, and human dignity, embracing courage, curiosity, and a commitment to asking essential questions—even when answers remain elusive.
 

Conclusion

The ultimate goal is not merely to make work easier, but to make it matter.

For leaders the starting point is clear, develop a contextual understanding of AI’s opportunities and risks, set ethical guardrails, create space for dialogue with your teams, and measure not only efficiency but also human impact. The real test of leadership in the age of AI is not how fast we adopt it, but how intentionally we shape its effects on people and culture.

Leaders must rise to this challenge, not as sorcerers, but as thoughtful guides attuned to the power of their tools and the humanity of their teams.

 

Michael Molinaro

Partner, Berman Leadership Development New York City, August 2025

In today’s fast-paced, highly competitive business landscape, the temptation is to move fast, close deals, and keep things transactional. But at Berman Leadership, we’ve found that the leaders who go further—and last longer—are those who lead with humanity.

On the Human Wise podcast, Dr. Bill Berman shares why relationships, not transactions, are the real differentiator in leadership:

“To build long-term clients, suppliers, or teams, you need deeper conversations. You need trust.”

This idea sits at the heart of human-centered leadership. It’s not about being soft. It’s about being real. It means asking questions like:

• What matters to the people I lead and serve?
• What pressures are they navigating?
• Where can I create space for honesty, trust, and growth?

In hybrid and remote work environments, these conversations don’t happen casually. They must be created—with intention. That’s where psychological safety comes in. Leaders must signal, through words and behavior, that their teams are safe to speak up, take risks, and bring their full selves to work.

This isn’t just good culture—it’s good business. When people feel heard and valued, they perform better, collaborate more, and stay longer.

At Berman Leadership, we help executives build human-centered habits that translate to commercial outcomes. Listening, curiosity, empathy, clarity—these are the skills that move teams and organizations forward.

In a world where everything feels replaceable, relationships are the true competitive edge.

Explore how we help leaders drive performance through connection:
https://bermanleadership.com/about/

At Berman Leadership, we work with executives who are navigating a new leadership reality—one where binary thinking no longer applies.

In his Human Wise podcast conversation, Dr. Bill Berman captured it perfectly:

“It’s not either the ethics of the business or the ethics of the individual. It’s both.”

This mindset—what we call both-and leadership—is essential for today’s leaders. It means holding space for opposing forces:

• Compassion and accountability
• Listening and selling
• Individual needs and enterprise performance

It’s not easy. And it’s not always clear. But it’s the kind of thinking that allows leaders to thrive in complexity.

“Most people are more comfortable choosing one side,” Bill notes. “But great leaders know how to hold the tension between both. They live in the paradox.”

At Berman Leadership, we coach executives to build this cognitive flexibility. We help leaders:

• Make decisions that are empathetic and strategic
• Communicate with honesty and diplomacy
• Prioritize their people and protect business performance

This dialectical approach is more than a mindset—it’s a leadership muscle. And like any muscle, it gets stronger with use.

In today’s high-stakes environments, both-and leaders are the ones who move organizations forward—without leaving their people behind.

Learn how we develop leaders to operate in the gray: https://bermanleadership.com/about/

For many leaders, self-awareness means recognizing patterns after the fact—reflecting on what was said, how it was received, and what could have gone differently. That’s useful. But it’s not enough.

In a recent Human Wise podcast conversation, Dr. Bill Berman described a deeper, more strategic form of self-awareness—one that moves from hindsight to foresight:

• Retrospective self-awareness: Seeing your behavior clearly—but only after the moment has passed.
• Concurrent self-awareness: Becoming aware of your impact as it’s happening.
• Anticipatory self-awareness: Knowing in advance how you’re likely to think, feel, and act—and using that awareness to choose your response strategically.

It’s this third level that distinguishes effective leaders from reactive ones.

“If I want others to feel a certain way,” Bill notes, “I need to know how I feel—and what I’m doing that elicits that feeling.”

Anticipatory self-awareness allows leaders to:

• Prepare for high-stakes conversations
• Navigate emotionally charged situations with greater clarity
• Adjust their presence based on context
• Influence outcomes without being controlled by emotion or assumption

And yes, the business impact is real. Leaders who develop this level of self-awareness tend to:

• Build stronger alignment within teams
• Communicate with intention, not reaction
• Reduce friction during change or conflict
• Inspire confidence—even in uncertainty

At Berman Leadership, we view self-awareness not as a personality trait, but as a leadership capability. One that can be strengthened with the right support, honest feedback, and ongoing reflection.

The leaders we work with aren’t just learning to understand themselves better—they’re learning how to anticipate and manage their impact in ways that serve the business.

Because when you can see what’s coming—both inside and out—you lead with greater intention, and greater effect.

Explore how we help leaders turn self-awareness into strategic foresight: https://bermanleadership.com/about/

Organizations often celebrate a “team of leaders” — a collection of high-performing executives each driving success in their respective domains. But a true leadership team is more than the sum of its parts. It’s not just about collaboration; it’s about collective accountability. And that shift—from a team of leaders to a leadership team—requires a mindset grounded in two deceptively simple questions: What is my Main Team? What is my First Team?

In Influence and Impact, I introduced these concepts to clarify the two key groups every leader serves. Your Main Team is the group you lead day-to-day—the people whose performance, development, and success you directly manage. Your First Team, by contrast, is the team your manager leads—the peers with whom you align priorities, share resources, and ultimately contribute to your manager’s success.

Why does this distinction matter?

Most executives view their Main Team as their primary allegiance. But when each leader in the C-suite prioritizes their own team over the collective goals of the organization, collaboration erodes. Resource battles flare up. Strategic misalignment takes root.

The transition to a leadership team begins when leaders recognize their First Team obligations as equal in weight to their Main Team responsibilities. In Ruth Wageman’s model of Senior Leadership Teams and in the work of Scott Tannenbaum and Eduardo Salas (Teams That Work), the leadership team is defined not just by hierarchical roles but by the shared enterprise of leading the business together.

This dual accountability—owning your team’s success while advancing your manager’s strategy—can be complex, especially in matrixed or global structures. HR leaders, for example, are often part of both a functional HR First Team and a business unit First Team. Navigating that ambiguity requires clarity about who makes decisions affecting your goals and your future.

As illustrated in Influence and Impact, Darlene, an e-commerce leader, advanced by understanding what her First Team—her manager and skip-level CEO—needed. She didn’t just manage her Main Team’s operations; she translated her insights into metrics that aligned with the CEO’s growth strategy. She wasn’t just a strong individual leader; she was a key contributor to the leadership team.

HR and I/O professionals have a vital role in supporting this shift. By helping leaders recognize and navigate their First Team obligations, you can foster more integrated, aligned, and effective leadership teams—teams that think beyond their silos and act in concert toward shared success.

In executive coaching, trust isn’t something you earn after the engagement begins—it’s something you build from the very first conversation.

On the Human Wise podcast, Dr. Bill Berman reflected on how this mindset has shaped his approach over the years:

“I’m not a salesperson. I listen to what people need—and if I can help, I will.”

That perspective isn’t a tactic. It’s a practice. At Berman Leadership, we view early conversations with potential clients as an extension of the coaching itself: grounded in curiosity, free from pressure, and focused on what matters most to the other person.

This way of engaging may feel unusual in a professional services context. But for the leaders we work with, it’s what builds credibility. They’re not looking to be convinced. They’re looking to be understood.

That’s why we ask coaching questions from the very beginning:

• What decisions are you facing right now?
• Where are you seeing friction—in the business or in yourself?
• What outcomes are most urgent or most meaningful?

These questions don’t just surface needs—they help clarify whether coaching is the right fit, and whether we’re the right partner to provide it.

There are moments in our work where we recommend another path or another provider. And that willingness to walk away is part of what builds long-term trust. Because good coaching starts with alignment—not persuasion.

We’ve found that the best relationships begin not with a pitch, but with presence. A willingness to listen. And an ability to sit with complexity, even before the engagement is formalized.

That’s how coaching begins before the contract ever does.

Learn more about how we build partnerships through trust and understanding: https://bermanleadership.com/about/