“In whatever kind of a company you're leading or working for,
you've got people's lives in your hands every day." (p. xxv)

Lieutenant General Rick Lynch's (U.S. Army, retired) contemporary observations of Corporate America tie very closely to Academy Leadership workshops & assessments. With the advent of disruptive Artificial Intelligence (AI), it's worth pointing out that robotic activities are the most replaceable, while leading people, who are not robots, remains a timeless opportunity.

This review maps most of Lynch's chapters to specific workshops and assessments then emphasizes that prioritizing High Payoff Activities (HPAs) inevitably leads to High Performance Organization (HPO) creation.

Personal Leadership Philosophy

When challenged to compose a first draft Personal Leadership Philosophy, or PLP, reluctance to open up or share internal beliefs usually leads to a sense of vulnerability. Lynch puts it this way: We've put up a sort of "church-and-state" type wall in Corporate America, with this false idea that work is work, and life is life, and those two things should never be intertwined (p. 10).

Lynch is correct. If they don't feel that a company cares about its people, they'll walk (or run) to work somewhere else, or they won't bother taking the job in the first place (p. 16). People are naturally drawn to a sense of purpose. Shared purpose, well-defined values, and a unified culture are found at the very foundation of every High Performing Organization (p. 20).

Unity doesn't seem to get enough emphasis today. Having a list of established values gives you the ammunition you need to enforce the types of behavior you want your organization to uphold (p. 23). We may then consistently communicate and reinforce what our enterprise is all about and then construct a leadership pipeline for continuity. It's easy to skip the latter step. When it comes to my observations of clients who are failing, each and every one of them is failing to invest in their leader development (p. 45).

Feedback | Assessments

Probably the easiest way to assess a team of leaders is to ask about internal assessment processes, especially how the leaders welcome external review such as a 360 assessment. You'd be surprised how many of them push back and don't want to do it (p. 52). When this occurs, it's a likely sign that evaluation and coaching are not employed as separate forms of feedback. If we think of a performance review as the evaluation and the follow up as the coaching toward improvement, then we're building a culture of continuous development. So we've got to quit fooling ourselves and thinking that it's okay to tolerate poor performance (p. 133). Effective leaders articulate expectations in a PLP, while simultaneously championing both individual and organizational growth.

Leader as Coach

On page 152 Lynch shares his personal discovery of deliberate practice leading to his improved golf game. Recall from Peak, deliberate practice:

• Develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established
• Takes place outside one's comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her abilities
• Involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance
• Requires a person's full attention and conscious action
• Involves feedback and modifications of efforts in response to that feedback
• Both produces and depends on effective mental representations
• Nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically

Lynch's Routine Counseling Form on page 123 is largely the same as an Academy Leadership Coaching Form. It's possible counseling may sound more therapeutic than performance coaching.

In Chapter 12, The Imperative to Return to Work, Lynch reveals his personal preference. However, he notes: In order to entice workers to want to come into the office and contribute face to face again, leaders will have to be adaptive in terms of constructing that work time (p. 186). Lynch calls this adaptive leadership. Recall in Culture Shock, Team Gallup summarizes we should hold one meaningful conversation per week with each employee. Adaptive and meaningful appear the same.

High Payoff Activities (HPAs) | HPOs

In our Setting Leadership Priorities workshop, we define High Payoff Activities (HPAs) as answering:

• What are you being paid to do?
• What do you do that produces the greatest results?
• What do you do that makes your company profitable?
• Why did the company hire you?
• What do you do that produces 80% of your results?

Lynch notices that many are not focused on HPAs. It's, frankly amazing to me the number of things that workers in Corporate America have on their plates that do not need to be there (p. 170). It's hard focusing on HPAs without delegating, especially if we're an accomplished Subject Matter Expert (SME). You cannot be an effective senior leader if you're trying to do it all yourself (p. 217).

By living our PLP, we'll build trust. Once you've built a foundation of trust, then you're free to get to the good stuff (p. 211):

• The ability to delegate
• The ability to foster teamwork and collaboration
• The ability to adapt and innovate

We may describe the above as Leader as Coach behaviors or traits. Once you're acting in full-time HPO mode, then the organization can take on the traits of a strong Strategic Leader (pp. 241-242):

• Observe and seek trends
• Sound strategic when they speak
• Ask the hard questions
• Take time to think and embrace conflict

Summary

Now is not the time for fearing robots, it's time to celebrate our humanity.

"Robots don't exhibit empathy. We cannot expect robots to lead.
And we cannot expect our people to perform like robots
if we ever want them to excel as leaders, either." (p. 218)

JE | June 2026