Every company promotes its best people into leadership, then sets them adrift with zero tools to actually lead. Tess Fyalka has spent 25 years cleaning up that mess. She's the founder of Angle Coaching & Communication, author of Walking the Leadership Ledge, and spent nearly a decade building leadership development infrastructure inside a mid-size commercial construction company before going independent. Two thousand ghostwritten articles and white papers later, she pulled the patterns into a book.
In this conversation, Bill and Tess take on the promotion trap that quietly wrecks teams, the lie new leaders tell themselves to avoid hard conversations, and what it actually takes for a star individual contributor to become a real leader of people. Tess walks through "Betsy" — the kind of high-performer companies promote because they assume excellence is transferable, then watch flame out when the wheels come off the bus. She names the Big Lie directly: when a leader avoids a difficult conversation to "protect" their team member, they're really protecting themselves. And the cost of that avoidance compounds.
They get into the inside-out nature of leadership development: you can't lead others well until you know your own values, your triggers, and what you're choosing to be in the role. Tess shares her BRRR framework for difficult conversations and why the imaginary scenarios in your head are almost never how the conversation actually plays out. Bill brings his own moments of getting it wrong, including the time he caught himself reflexively defending micromanagement. They close on the metaphor that gives the book its title: when you step into a new leadership role, you're standing on a ledge, and you don't know yet whether the drop is ten inches or ten thousand feet.
In This Episode:
About the Book:
Walking the Leadership Ledge: The "New" Leaders' Guide to Building Resilience and Confidence at Every Step. Hybrid Global Publishing, 2025.
Connect with Tess:
Connect with Bill:
Busy is Broken — Bill's new book, coming September 2026. Sign up at busyisbroken.com
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Mentioned in this episode:
Busy Is Broken
Have you ever had a week where you're completely slammed but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That’s not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter, over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. Also on amazon and other booksellers.