The Crucible

I took my job at Onin out of desperation. Fired from my road gig and needing to eat and pay rent, I walked into a branch looking for a warehouse job. Lisa, the then branch manager, told me about a sales opening that I interviewed for and, eventually, begrudgingly took. My heart wasn’t in it because I wanted to play drums, but I worked at it anyway and eventually started having success. It felt good to pay the bills, upgrade my vehicle, and start paying off credit cards. Keith and Hugh were great guys to work for, and over time, my book of business grew. I actually started to find my job rewarding.

Just as momentum started to build, Lisa, our workhorse branch manager, went out on maternity leave and then decided to stay home as a full-time mom. I absolutely respected that decision, but it left me without an operations partner to make sure my customers were taken care of. I was offered the manager gig, but I didn’t want it. What I wanted was to make as much money as possible so we could get out of debt and scrape our way into the middle class—sales was the most direct path. I didn’t want to worry about a team; I just wanted to make bank. I shared this with Keith, and the decision was made to hire a new branch manager.

We found someone, but the problem was she was a flop. My customers’ orders were not getting filled, and I found myself having to step in just to keep the machine running. After a few months, the decision was made to let her go. We went through another round of interviews and kissed a bunch of toads, to no avail. The circumstances seemed to be calling me to step up and into the leadership void.

One of our recruiters, Erin Herrera, and I came up with a plan. She was a fantastic operator but did not feel ready to take the manager role (she later emerged as a leader in her own right). I was willing to lead but wanted to stay focused on developing business. All the elements were there; we put our strengths together and got after it.  That combination led to record-setting branch performance in the early days of Onin. Over the years, I discovered, very much by accident, that even more than drumming or sales, I am encoded for business building and leadership.

Moving the Frame

Leaders don’t set out to be leaders. That is just not the way it works. Massive amounts of  money is spent on leadership courses every year, but far more leaders have been made by accident, circumstance, and sheer grit than all the leadership courses combined. The only real laboratory is the laboratory of leadership itself—leadership is by nature experiential.

It is adversity that instructs. For me, it was the adversity of a dying musical dream, the desperation of financial scarcity, and then the absence of leadership in the branch I sold for that put me on a leadership track. Adversity has no use for an org chart. Whether a bear market or a mamma bear on the hiking trail, the one who initiates and inspires followership in that moment is the leader. The good news is that life is full of adversity, so leadership opportunities abound for everyone.

In my last post, I wrote about “moving our frame” in order to align with encodings. Refer to may last post for full detail, but the concept came from Jim Collins.  The jist of it is that we all have a vast array of talents or encodings and most are undiscovered, because we can only live life in limited frame of context.  To discover new encodings we must move the frame.  Because we are creatures of habit, most of us won’t move our frame voluntarily. Adversity, change, exposure to something new—these things shift the frame. Jim Collins, in his book What to Make of a Life, calls these pivotal moments “cliffs.” This could be a tragedy, a crisis, getting fired, a new boss, divorce, a financial windfall, or retirement—anything that jars us into a sudden change of context. These force us into a new part of the sky, a new set of encodings for a new circumstance. These “cliff” moments are opportunities to step out as a leader.

I made a new friend at a summer adventure camp I went to with my 16-year-old daughter. Walt, a district attorney in southern Alabama ran into a cliff in 2015 when he was diagnosed with a rare ocular cancer and was given two years to live. Married with three young girls, Walt doubled down on family time and turned his hobby of writing into a purposeful outlet to document his last words, lessons, stories and advice. Miraculously and unexpectedly, after treatment, the tumor resolved; he is cancer-free. As Walt walked through the valley, his writings evolved from family pieces to public posts. Cancer gone, a writer born.

To say Walt got his frame shifted is an understatement. Facing death has a way of burning off the dross, distilling life down to its essence. His charming, faith-filled tales resonated with thousands, eventually leading to a book deal. Walt is still a District Attorney, but adversity made him a more engaged father as well as a voice of wise counsel for parents looking to connect with their children in a meaningful way. Leaders are forged through these crucible moments.

Leadership Moments

Big cliffs can be pivotal leadership moments, but leadership is honed incrementally in the bumps and bruises of the day-to-day. While they are easy to miss, these less dramatic moments in our everyday work lives provide opportunities that keep us in the leadership lab of life.

The moment when you see a destination but there is no path—that is a leadership moment 

We recently went through a reorganization of our strategic sales teams. We were not generating enough large deal flow, and we were in a huge hole at the beginning of 2025 because of it. Our target, or destination, is to double the number of enterprise accounts in four years. We knew that it would take a three-pronged approach of hunting, developing, and delivering, so we organized around those three elements and went to work.

It was interesting to see how different people responded to the challenge. Many responded well to the ambiguity.  But about a third of the team said, “I don’t know what we are supposed to do,” and either froze or quit. The thing is, no one, myself included, really knew how we would get there. “There is the destination in the distance, there is a jungle between us and where we want to go, here is a machete…..let’s go.” That is the leadership crucible—that is a leadership moment. If you find that you are saying “I don’t know what I am supposed to do,” or maybe “I didn’t get enough training,” that is your cue to step out. You aspire to be a leader; that is your moment! Figure that $hi+ out!

Now, I know that not everyone likes stepping out into ambiguity. I recently heard it said that there are conquering leaders and there are cultivating leaders who make what is conquered better. That makes sense; maybe you are more of a cultivating leader. One needs a warrior mindset to lead—regardless of the leader type. The warrior takes things as a challenge. The ordinary person takes everything as a blessing or a curse. The warrior leader sees the world simultaneously as it is and as it can be, and any temporary sorrow can be borne if it supports a compelling vision.

Get In the Lab

Adversity, change—the crucible—is a leader’s opportunity to get in the lab and learn. In times of great change, it is the learners who lead us into the future while the learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. The leader’s constant appetite for knowledge, bred with the warrior spirit gives birth to the ideas that draw forth vision from the chaos. The crucible creates the laboratory from which leaders emerge.

Scope and scale may vary but I have come to believe that the vast majority of people actually have in them the ability to lead.  So, when the next “cliff” appears—when the path disappears and the future feels uncertain—don’t recoil. Lean into the friction. Every setback is an invitation to the lab. Whether you are a conquering warrior or a master cultivator, your capacity to lead is forged in the fire of these very moments. The crucible isn’t just testing you; it is building you. Take up the machete, step into the jungle, and lead.