Insights
Field notes on leading under pressure.
Essays on executive judgment, team culture, leadership identity, and the physiology of sustained high performance. Long-form. No fluff.
How to Turn Around an Underperforming Team Without Blowing It Up
Most underperforming teams are not full of underperforming people. They are capable people operating inside broken clarity, broken standards, or broken trust — and the leader who reaches for replacements first usually rebuilds the same problem with new faces.
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How to Lead a Merger Integration Without Losing Your Best People
Deals are won in diligence and lost in the first hundred days. Integration failure is rarely a synergy model problem — it is a leadership problem that shows up as silence, attrition, and two companies still operating as two companies eighteen months later.
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The Brilliant Jerk Problem: How to Handle a High Performer Who Is Damaging the Team
Every leadership team eventually inherits one: the person whose output is undeniable and whose behavior is quietly costing you more than their output is worth. The math is almost never as close as it feels.
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How to Scale Yourself as the Company Doubles
Companies do not outgrow their strategy nearly as often as they outgrow their leaders. Growth does not ask you to work harder — it asks you to become a different kind of operator roughly every time headcount doubles.
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The Executive Calendar: How to Spend the Company's Scarcest Asset
Your calendar is the most honest strategy document in the company. It shows what you actually believe is important, regardless of what the deck says. Here is how to rebuild it so your time compounds instead of leaks.
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Executive Crisis Communication: What to Say When Everything Is on Fire
In a crisis, your people are not grading your answer. They are grading your steadiness, your speed, and whether you told them the hard part first. Here is the sequence that keeps trust intact when the news is bad.
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How to Make High-Stakes Decisions Under Uncertainty
Most executive decisions are made with sixty percent of the information you want. The skill is not getting to certainty. It is building a decision process that produces good calls at speed, and a record that lets you learn from them.
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Executive Presence: What It Actually Is, and How to Build It
Executive presence is the most-cited and least-defined item in senior feedback. It is not charisma, height, or a lower voice. It is the accuracy of the prediction a room makes about you in the first ninety seconds — and it is trainable.
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How to Rebuild Trust After You Lose It as a Leader
Every senior leader eventually breaks trust — with a team, a peer, or a board. The damage is rarely the mistake itself. It's what you do in the ninety days after. A field guide to repair that actually holds.
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Executive Loneliness: Why the Top Job Gets Quiet, and What to Do About It
Nobody warns you that the seat gets quiet. The higher you go, the fewer people can hear the whole truth — and the more expensive your unexamined thinking becomes. A field guide to building the outside structure senior leaders actually need.
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Executive Succession Planning: Build the Bench Early
Most companies begin succession planning when a departure makes it urgent. By then, the process is no longer succession planning — it is damage control. A practical field guide to building leadership depth before the empty chair appears.
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How to Recognize Executive Burnout Before It Costs You the Company
Executive burnout almost never arrives as collapse. It arrives as narrowed judgment, shortened patience, and a leader who is still working eighty hours while quietly making worse decisions. A long-form field guide to the early signals, the real mechanism, and what to actually do about it.
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How to Run Executive One-on-Ones That Are Actually Worth the Time
Most executive one-on-ones are status meetings in disguise — thirty minutes of information the CEO could have read in a doc. A long-form field guide to the structure, questions, and cadence that turn the one-on-one into the highest-leverage half hour on a senior leader's calendar.
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How to Build an Executive Team That Disagrees Well
The best executive teams are not the most polite. They are the ones that can disagree in the room, decide, and walk out aligned. A long-form field guide for CEOs, founders, and senior leaders on building the conditions, structure, and behaviors that turn conflict into a decision-making advantage instead of a slow-motion trust leak.
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How to Set Annual Strategy That Actually Gets Executed
Most annual strategy decks die in February. The problem is not the deck — it is the process that produced it. A long-form field guide for CEOs, founders, and senior executives on how to set an annual strategy that survives contact with reality, translates into weekly work, and still holds up in Q4.
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Managing Up: How to Work With Your Board and CEO Without Losing Your Voice
Managing up is not politics. It is the executive skill of making it easy for the person above you to trust you, decide with you, and back you when it matters. A long-form field guide for COOs, CFOs, senior VPs, and founders working with a board on how to build the relationship, run the update, and hold your ground without burning the room.
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The Executive Operating Rhythm That Scales Your Company
Most companies do not fail because the strategy was wrong. They fail because the operating rhythm at the top could not keep up with the business. A field guide to designing the weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadence that lets a CEO and executive team scale without turning every decision into a fire drill.
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How to Run an Executive Offsite That Actually Changes Something
Most executive offsites are expensive theater. Three days of trust falls, deck reviews, and a page of commitments that quietly die by the second Monday back. A working field guide to designing and running a leadership offsite that produces real decisions, real alignment, and behavior changes that survive the flight home.
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How to Hire a Senior Executive Without Making a Million-Dollar Mistake
A bad executive hire does not cost a salary. It costs a year of momentum, a layer of talent underneath, and the trust of the board that approved it. A working field guide to running a senior hire the way the best CEOs actually run one — from an executive coach who has been in the room for the good ones and the expensive ones.
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How to Lead Through a Layoff Without Breaking Trust
A layoff is not an HR event. It is the single most public test of an executive's operating character, and the people who stay remember exactly how it was run. A working field guide to leading a reduction in force with clarity, dignity, and a company that is still worth working for on the other side.
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How to Delegate as an Executive Without Losing Control
Most executives don't have a delegation problem. They have a trust-architecture problem. A working field guide to handing off real authority without losing the thread of the business — from an executive coach who has rebuilt dozens of overloaded C-suites.
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How to Give Executive Feedback That Actually Changes Behavior
Most executive feedback fails not because it is too soft or too harsh, but because it is delivered to the wrong layer of the person. A working field guide to feedback conversations that actually move senior operators — from an executive coach who has run hundreds of them.
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The First 90 Days as a New Executive: A Field Guide for CEOs, Founders, and Senior Operators
The first 90 days do not decide whether you succeed in the role. They decide what kind of leader the organization believes it just hired. A long-form field guide to entering an executive seat without burning your first year of credibility.
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Quiet Leadership Under Pressure: How the Best Executives Lead When the Room Is on Fire
Loud leadership photographs well. Quiet leadership compounds. A long-form field guide to how the best executives actually behave when the stakes are highest — and how to build the operating system that makes it possible.
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Who Is Jason Lee Rannfeldt? A Portrait of an Executive Coach, Clinician, and Writer
Jason Lee Rannfeldt — also known as Jason Rannfeldt and Dr. Jason — is an executive coach and clinician working at the intersection of leadership, human performance, and health. This is the long-form portrait.
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The Leadership Cost of Decision Fatigue
By 3 p.m. most executives aren't leading — they're triaging. A framework for protecting the decisions that actually matter.
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Why High Performers Make Bad Leaders (Until They Don't)
The skills that got you promoted are actively working against the ones you now need. Here's the transition most executives never make cleanly.
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Building a Team Culture That Outlasts Your Presence
If the culture collapses the week you're on vacation, you haven't built culture — you've been personally holding up a performance.
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The Executive's Hidden Edge: Health as a Leadership Variable
The best executives I coach have all quietly figured out the same thing: their physiology is a strategic asset. Ignoring it isn't stoicism — it's mispricing.
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