The Five Disciplines Every Leader Already Knows

This month AVEVV — my Disability-Owned (DOBE) executive coaching firm — was named a semifinalist in the Disability:IN Pitch Perfect Challenge. Three minutes in front of judges from Pfizer, Sodexo, and Ally Financial to make the case for the work. Being selected was an honor. Here's the case I made.

AVEVV is built on five disciplines: Accountability, Vision, Execution, Vulnerability, and Values. I didn't invent them, and that's the point. You already know them. You know the moment you stop being accountable to yourself. You know when you're not living your values. You know when you're being vulnerable, and you know when someone is being vulnerable with you. These aren't ideas you have to learn. They're things you already feel.

That's exactly why they're the right place to start. Coaching only works when the coach, the leader, and the organization can describe the same problem in the same words. Most leaders aren't short on experience — they're short on a clean way to name what's actually wrong. These five give everyone that language. We agree on where the problem really lives, then go deep.

And almost every problem lives here. Missed sales numbers. A product pipeline that stalls out. A reorg that goes sideways. Strip away the surface and it's one of the five underneath — execution that broke down, accountability that went missing, a direction nobody made clear, a value the company talked about but didn't live, or the hard conversation no one was willing to have. The symptoms look like strategy and operations. The cause is almost always one of these five.

That's why we start there. When a company hires AVEVV, they want their leaders stronger in one or two specific areas — and those areas map almost perfectly onto the framework, every time.

But naming the problem was never the hard part. Most leaders already know exactly where they fall short. Knowing isn't the gap. Doing is. That's where development usually dies — in the space between the leader who knows what to fix and the leader who actually changes.

You can pinpoint the discipline that needs work in a single conversation. Building it takes daily reps. That's the job of the AVEVV Performance Continuum™ — a separate system from the framework that hands a leader one specific action every day, tied to the discipline that matters most right now. The framework tells you what to work on. The APC makes you do it. Together they move a leader from knowing to doing, which is the only place change actually happens.

It all runs on a simple arc: Recognition, Agency, Growth. See what's in front of you, own what's yours to move, grow from there. The method is rigorous — I hold an ICF credential and trained through Brown University's coaching program. And a career as an FBI Special Agent and CIA detailee, before I moved into cybersecurity leadership, is what makes it real. But that's a post for another day.