If you are new here, welcome. If you have been following along - thank you. This first edition is designed to be your entry point into everything published so far, and a signal of what is coming next.
PTM Insights is a newsletter about leadership, people, and behavioral change. Not theory for its own sake. Practical insights grounded in real frameworks, real coaching conversations, and 20+ years of working with leaders across some of the world's most demanding organizations. Each edition will give you something you can think about, reflect on, or apply — whether you are leading a team, developing one, or navigating your own next level of growth.
Let me bring you up to speed on what we have covered so far.
The Success Paradox is the moment when the habits that made a leader successful begin to limit their impact. Not because those habits were wrong, but because the context changed and the strategy didn't.
Most leaders have one dominant strategy center: Heart, Head, or Willpower. Each one has a distinct set of strengths that enabled early success. And each carries a shadow that becomes more costly as the role grows in complexity.
(previously published in LinkedIn)
Seeing the paradox is step one. Understanding what is driving it .. and what it would actually take to change it .. is where the deeper work begins.
The Leadership X-Ray is a diagnostic process grounded in the Immunity to Change framework developed by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. It maps the hidden system that keeps a leader stuck, not as a flaw, but as a logic that once made sense. Once you can see that system clearly, you can begin to work with it.
Using Time Management as an example ("I am committed to focusing my time on what truly matters."), we look at sample x-rays from three leadership lens:
The next phase of the series moves into Phase 3: what happens after the X-Ray. Once you can see your immune system clearly, how do you actually begin to change it?
The answer is not trying harder. It is designing small, safe experiments that test the assumption underneath the behavior, and collecting real data about whether that assumption is actually true.
Starting next Monday, I will walk through what that looks like in practice for the Willpower leader, the Heart leader, and the Head leader, each with a completely different experiment, grounded in their specific big assumption.
I started writing this series because I kept seeing similar themes in my coaching work (and let's be honest, in myself too!). Smart, capable, deeply committed leaders. These are people who genuinely wanted to change, but stuck in patterns they could not seem to shift, despite knowing exactly what they needed to do differently.
"I see it now.. but..." or "I have to think about this more, I know things will only get worse... but..."
The frameworks in this series (the Success Paradox, the Leadership X-Ray, the safe test) are not silver bullets. But they do something that most leadership development does not. They explain the reasons behind the gap. Not just what to change, but why change has been so hard. Here, we shift from technical change (temporary) to adaptive change (sustainable).
That understanding, in my experience, is where real change begins.
I am glad you are here. And if you are ready to explore what your own X-Ray might reveal, reach out at diane@ptminsights.com.
