Copy of Lessons from a Breakfast on Burnout, Deal Flow, and Doing the Work That Matters (TPL Insights #296)

By Rob Andrews

You can learn a lot over eggs and coffee.

This week, I sat down with a friend who lives where mid-market deals, audits, and quality of earnings collide. We compared notes on a year that’s felt like MMA—messy, momentum-driven, and occasionally bruising. Deal flow is the lowest it’s been in a decade; audit requests come in waves; partners change; people leave; leaders hold it together while quietly carrying more than most will ever know.

And woven into that whole conversation were a few simple (not easy) leadership truths that keep showing up in my work: engage your people, build real relationships, practice productive disagreement, and pace yourself so you can lead.

Here are the takeaways.

1) In choppy markets, culture becomes your strategy

My friend’s firm is one of the last independent shops of its size in Texas. No private equity parent. No distant decision maker. That independence is more than a talking point—it’s a real differentiator with clients who are feeling fee inflation and service deflation after their providers got acquired.

Leaders: when the market gets noisy, your operating philosophy becomes your competitive moat. If you stand for something—responsiveness, craftsmanship, local decision-making—double down. Clients notice when your culture shows up in the way you answer the phone, return emails, and solve problems under pressure.

Practice: Write down the 3 behaviors that make clients say, “We stay with them.” Now make those behaviors visible, measurable, and teachable.

2) Relationships aren’t “soft”—they’re durable infrastructure

We swapped stories about bankers who went the extra mile (shout-out to relationship bankers who still pick up the phone), about introductions that turned into multi-year engagements, and about the simple power of staying in touch after the deal closes.

In every example, the asset wasn’t a pitch deck. It was trust.

When you build a culture that treats relationships as infrastructure, you stop thinking in quarters and start thinking in decades. That shows up in referrals, forgiveness when you inevitably stumble, and doors that open precisely when you need them.

Practice: Map your top 20 relationship nodes (people who connect you to opportunity). Ask, “How can we create value for them this quarter, with no ask attached?”

3) “Busy” is not the same as “effective”

We both admitted it: when we let our calendars own us, our minds get frantic and our teams feel it. That’s why the phrase taped to the corner of my credenza is: Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

Rushing is expensive. It produces rework, short tempers, and sloppy thinking. Smooth, deliberate work feels slower in the moment and faster over the arc—because it reduces friction later.

Practice: For one week, end each day by listing the three decisions or conversations tomorrow that will actually move the needle. Protect those first. Everything else is noise unless proven otherwise.

4) Productive disagreement is a leadership superpower

We talked about the lost art of disagreeing well—how easy it is to get triggered by labels, how fast a room can polarize, and how much better the outcomes are when we slow down and seek understanding before judgment.

I’ve watched diverse groups do great work together when they anchor to a shared purpose that’s bigger than anyone’s ideology. You don’t have to agree on everything to row in the same direction. But you do need norms: charity in interpretation, curiosity before certainty, and the courage to say “tell me more” when you want to fire back.

Practice: Try this three-step pattern in your next heated discussion:

Name the shared aim (“We both want what’s best for the client/team.”)

Steel-man the other view (“Here’s the strongest version of what I think you’re saying… did I get that right?”)

Offer your view + test (“Here’s my current take and the evidence I’m using. What am I missing?”)

5) If you want better leaders, stop hiring the template

Another theme that always surfaces: we still overlook high-potential leaders because they don’t fit an outdated mold. Too quiet. Not pedigreed. Looks different from the last person who held the job. Meanwhile, we reward the over-confident self-promoter who interviews like a champ.

Performance cultures look past the packaging. They identify attributes—things like ownership, humility, discernment, composure, and the ability to build trust—and they gather real evidence that those attributes exist. They also ask who’s thriving under a leader, not just who’s impressed by one.

Practice: In your next slate review, ban the words “executive presence” unless they’re defined behaviorally. Ask for proof of impact (before/after states, stakeholder feedback, patterns across time), not impressions.

6) Imperfect data beats no data (but keep listening)

My friend described forensics work as assembling a puzzle with missing and mismatched pieces. That’s most organizational diagnostics, too. You rarely get perfect data. Things change. Surveys lag reality. People say what feels safe.

So keep listening—continuously. Interviews, pulse checks, reference audits, skip-levels. None of it is perfect, but patterns emerge: where trust is thin, where work gets stuck, where managers are quietly doing heroic work without air cover.

Practice: Run a 30-minute monthly “listen tour” with a rotating cross-section of the org. Same three questions every time:

What’s helping you do your best work?

What’s getting in the way?

If you had my job for a day, what would you change first?

Capture themes. Close the loop.

7) Coach the whole person, not just the role

Half of executive coaching is about the work. The other half is about the human doing it—energy, mindset, bandwidth, identity. Leaders bring their whole lives to the office, whether we plan for it or not. Ignoring that reality doesn’t make it go away; it just makes it leak sideways.

The most durable growth I see happens when leaders learn to spot and overwrite limiting beliefs, install healthier rhythms, and reconnect their daily grind to a purpose that matters to them. When the person shifts, the performance follows.

Practice: Ask your directs one personal systems question in your next 1:1:

“What’s one small rhythm that would make next week feel lighter and more focused?”

Then help them defend it—calendar, norms, and expectations.

8) Recovery is not indulgence; it’s a responsibility

Burnout doesn’t announce itself politely. It shows up as reactivity, hurry, and a mind that can’t settle. My friend took four days in Costa Rica—hiking, zip-lining, hot springs—came back re-centered and present. Not because vacation is magic, but because renewal is a discipline.

Leaders who don’t recover become leaders who snap. That’s costly—for teams, clients, and families. If you want to go fast for a long time, treat your energy like a balance sheet.

Practice: Block two kinds of recovery:

Micro: 10–15 minutes between big meetings to breathe, capture notes, and reset.

Macro: One day per month with no meetings—strategy, writing, thinking. Protect it like revenue.

9) Stay human

One story stuck with me: a retired CEO—74 years old—widower, same company for 48 years—now adjusting to a new identity. Titles end. People remain. The best leaders don’t stop caring when the deal closes or the role changes. They keep calling, keep checking in, keep being human.

Because at the end of the day, engagement isn’t a metric. It’s a relationship.

Practice: Each Friday, send three genuine “thinking of you” notes: one to a client, one to a current teammate, and one to someone who used to be on your team. No agenda. Just care.

The through-line

If there’s a single thread through that breakfast, it’s this: lead with intention.

Be deliberate in how you pace, how you disagree, how you select leaders, how you listen, and how you care. Markets will cycle. People will move. Data will be imperfect. But intention compounds—inside culture, inside relationships, inside you.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. And when we practice that—together—we build organizations where people do the best work of their lives.

Warmest,

Rob Andrews

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

Celebrating 28 years of Executive Search, Leadership Advisory, and Interim Executive Excellence

Direct: 713.489.9724/ Mobile: 713.301.6130

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