Welcome back to the Look and Sound of Leadership, an ongoing series of

executive coaching tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace the

way you want to be perceived. I'm Tom Henschel, your executive coach, and today we're talking

about the flexible leader. Martha, a director at an entertainment company, was struggling to manage two of her direct reports.

She said, I'm not sure why, Tom, but I'm not succeeding with either of them. First she told me about Don, a smart young fellow who had started 18 months earlier.

Martha said Don consistently made errors when creating the reports that were his primary responsibility.

She said,

These aren't little errors, Tom.

He gets a major piece of data wrong at the start

and then spends hours building on the flawed data.

He should be able to catch that stuff by now.

Then she told me about Larena.

Larena was such a super-performer.

She had almost become a department of her own.

She had an enormous amount of responsibility and she executed flawlessly.

Hers was not an issue of performance.

Hers was an issue of attitude.

Lorena was openly contemptuous of Martha.

During their weekly one-on-one meetings, Lorena sat tight-lipped hardly talking as if she could

barely stand to be in the same room with Martha. In team meetings, whenever Lorena answered a question

for Martha, she would look at someone else while responding.

Martha was concerned that if she didn't manage Lorena's insubordination, it could infect the whole

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