Abigail was four minutes late to our session last week.

When she came on screen she was flushed. A little annoyed. You could see her doing the quick reset, putting the work face away and the pleasant face on.

She did it well. Most people would not have noticed.

I noticed. A mentor of mine, a former CIA agent, once told me I read a room like I am running surveillance on it. He meant it as a warning. I took it as a compliment.

So I said, "You were working on something right before this. And it annoyed you. What was it?"

She laughed, a little caught. And we had the session she actually needed instead of the one she had planned.

Abigail is a founder. There was a contract being negotiated, her side and the other side, each with their COO running it. COO to COO. That is how she set it up.

Her COO had drafted the email to send across. And Abigail had taken it back to rewrite it.

Not because it was wrong. The email was fine. She told me that herself, eventually. She just felt it needed to sound a particular way, worded so the other side would not push back.

So I asked her. "Why are you writing this email?"

She gave me the reasons. The deal matters. The tone is delicate. She knows how the other side reads things.

I kept pushing. Every answer, the next question. She started to get annoyed with me. Good. That is usually the sign we are close to something.

Because by the fourth question, she had said out loud that her COO is excellent. That she trusts his judgment. That he has handled negotiations harder than this one.

So I said, "Then you have two options. You let him do the job you hired him to do. Or you fire him. Pick one."

She did not like that.

She said it was not that dramatic. And she was right. He was not failing. He is a genuinely great COO. I would take this man in a heartbeat.

That was exactly the problem. He was not the problem. She was.

I said it more gently than that. But not much more gently. That is what she pays me for, to see the thing she cannot see about herself.

Here is what I see, over and over, with founders. She hires someone excellent. She means it. And then, in the moment, she cannot let them be excellent without her hand on it.

What she is doing, without ever saying a word, is telling her COO she does not trust him to do the job she hired him for.

He has noticed. They always notice.

She picked, by the way. She let it go. She let him send his version, as written.

She texted me eight days later. The deal had gone through. The two COOs had built a rapport across the table, and that rapport is a big part of why it closed.

The thing she rewrote the email to prevent was the exact thing that closed the deal.

/Ulrika