The Leadership Skill That Multiplies Every Strategy
A conversation with Dave Reynolds on coaching, ownership, and lasting results.
Every senior leader I coach can produce a strong plan. Clear objectives, sensible milestones, a tidy slide deck. Yet so many of those plans stall somewhere between the boardroom and the front line. The knowledge was there. The application was not.
I explored this tension recently on the podcast with Dave Reynolds, founder and CEO of the Rumin8 Group, a growth consulting firm that works with executive teams around the world. Dave put it simply: ‘the gap between success and failure is knowledge and application.’ A plan can be beautifully formulated and still fail, not because the thinking was wrong, but because nobody built ownership into the rollout.
That distinction matters more than most leaders realise. Strategy tells people what to do. Coaching culture determines whether they actually do it.
The Real Difference Between Directing and Coaching
Dave described coaching as ‘a two-way investment’, not a one-way transfer of knowledge from leader to team. His approach is deliberately Socratic: rather than teaching people something new, he uses questions to help them organise what they already know into something they can act on with confidence.
This is a subtle but important shift for leaders used to solving problems by telling. When a leader hands down a finished plan, the team receives instructions. When a leader builds the plan with the team, using questions to draw out their thinking, the team gains ownership. Dave’s experience across industries backs this up: organisations that create plans with their people, rather than for them, see far less resistance during implementation.
That single question, ‘did you create the plan with the team, or for the team?’, is one worth asking in your own organisation this week. It tends to expose exactly where execution problems come from.
Where Strategy Actually Breaks Down
In Dave’s diagnostic work, the pattern that shows up again and again is a lack of self-awareness. Teams and leaders often believe they are communicating clearly, aligning well, and executing consistently. The reality inside the organisation frequently tells a different story. Silos form, communication gaps widen, and progress plateaus, usually because leaders have been directing and dictating rather than asking.
This connects directly to something I write about in Enhanced Leadership: authenticity is not what you say, it is the alignment between what you believe, what you say, and what you do. A leader can claim to value collaboration while every decision-making moment is a monologue. The team notices. Coaching culture closes that gap by making questions the default mode of leadership, not an occasional technique reserved for formal one-to-ones.
Dave also stressed a point that gets missed constantly: follow-up. A powerful coaching conversation with no accountability afterwards achieves very little. He described good coaching as ‘Chainlink’, where each session connects to the last through a simple check-in on what was committed to previously. Without that link, energy and intention evaporate, and accountability with them.
What This Means for Leaders
If you want to close your own gap between plan and execution, start by auditing how much of your leadership is spent asking versus telling. Leaders who default to giving answers create dependency. Leaders who default to good questions build capability, and capability is what allows a team to execute without you standing over every decision.
It is also worth being honest about how much time you invest in preparing for coaching conversations and following up afterwards. Dave found a direct correlation between preparation time and the value a coaching session delivers. Treat coaching as you would any other investment: input matters, and so does tracking the return.
Succession planning deserves the same honesty. Dave’s view, echoing Peter Drucker’s observation that culture eats strategy for breakfast, is that succession planning fails when it is treated as a strategy document rather than a cultural habit. Organisations that build career clarity and mentorship into everyday practice retain their best people far longer than those that scramble for a plan once someone hands in their notice. In exit interviews, the recurring theme Dave hears is not pay or workload, it is a sense that nobody was investing in the person’s future.
What Coaches Should Notice
For coaches working with senior leaders, Dave’s discovery process offers a useful model. Treat every organisation like a puzzle where half the pieces are still face down. Your job in the early conversations is not to offer solutions, it is to ask the questions that turn those pieces over: what has been a persistent challenge, for how long, and how self-aware is the leadership team of the real cause.
Watch for leaders who describe their plan as something they ‘rolled out’ rather than something they ‘built with’ their team. That language is often the clearest early signal of where resistance will surface later. And listen for what happens after a coaching conversation ends. If a client cannot tell you what was committed to last time, the accountability chain has already broken, and that is worth addressing before moving on to anything new.
A Simple Test for Your Own Leadership
The next time you finalise a plan, pause before you present it. Ask yourself whether your team helped build it or simply received it. That one question will tell you more about your likely execution success than any amount of additional strategic polish.
Coaching is not a soft add-on to leadership, it is the mechanism that turns knowledge into application.
