🤯 The Executive Puppet

Jun 21, 2026

I once coached a leader who was known as being great to his customers.

But he was also known as a danger within his company.

Every time his biggest client called with a random request, he would scrap months of hard work in an afternoon.

He called it being fast but everyone around him called it “the whiplash”

The cycle was simple and destructive.

A client would push and he would cave. He felt that saying no to a big account was fatal to the business.

He mistook his anxiety for intuition.

He would jump into group chats at 4pm on a Friday and demand everyone change direction because of one phone call.

He wasn’t running the company because his biggest customer was running it.

The fallout was fast and expensive.

The product became a mess: The software turned into a pile of random features that only served one large customer.
The team checked out: The engineers stopped caring about the future because they knew the plan would never last.
Respect vanished: The team saw that his word was for sale to the highest bidder.

To save his leadership, we had to build a wall between action and reaction.

We used the ARAR model to slow him down.

1. Awareness

This is physical.

When the client made a demand his chest tightened and his heart raced.

We called it the pressure to please.

Noticing the feeling stopped him from acting on it immediately.

2. Realisation

Once he felt the sting, he had to name it.

He started to say it out loud:

“I am scared that if I don’t do this, they will churn.”

By naming the fear, it became a problem to solve rather than flight/fight/fawn/freeze.

3. Assessment

He began to create a pause. Before saying yes he had to answer three questions:

4. Response

Only now was he ready to respond rather than react. The reply was no longer a frantic agreement

Instead it became:

“I hear you. We will look at the tradeoffs and get back to you by Tuesday.”

The gap he created was where his power now lies. He responds instead of reacting.

To reflect on: