I began the CEO coaching assignment by soliciting comments from Todd’s senior leaders:

“He’s confident and decisive.”

"He’s humble and has a good heart.”

“His passion makes people want to follow him.”

“I love how curious he is.”

At first, it all sounded great—until the tone shifted:

“It’s so frustrating; sometimes he can be so stubborn.”

“There are times when he shuts down the discussion and doesn’t want to hear what I have to say.”

“He can’t admit, or even imagine, he might be wrong.”

“He’s so busy; I need to talk to him, but I hesitate. . . because it probably won’t go well.”

And the comment from Todd’s senior team that stopped me in my tracks because it captured the human complexity that confuses others and often ourselves.

“He’s humble until he isn’t. And then he’s arrogant.

My job as a coach is to discover the threads that connect all these comments, because, although we may seem a bundle of contradictions, we aren’t.

Can someone be both humble and arrogant? Todd, the CEO of a Silicon Valley biotech start-up that had excited venture capital firms enough to invest nearly $100M, knew he was having difficulties and asked me, an executive coach, to talk with his team. The company was making great progress using artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up drug development. Todd was a first-time CEO with a talented team, and things had gone well for the first year, but now his team was beginning to sour on him and he on them. What was wrong? That is what he asked me to figure out.

When I assess an executive, I interview them about both their early life and their professional

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