The best training Booz ever paid for

In 2011, Booz & Company - sharp-suited, sharp-minded, sharp-elbowed - decided to make a cultural bet. Feedback at the firm was efficient, but not always effective. Brilliant, but rarely kind. Somewhere in global leadership, someone had the audacity to ask: what if we could be just as incisive, but more enabling? A global initiative was launched. Paris, where I was based, was chosen as the pilot site. And so began the strangest professional experiment I’ve ever taken part in: a strategy firm trying to learn empathy. With neuroscience.

That’s how I ended up across from David Rock.

Booz didn’t have a kindness problem. It had a calibration problem. The firm prized intellect. Logic. Truth at speed. But feedback, when stripped of warmth or reflection, becomes blunt-force advice. People got better, sure - but often in spite of how they were told, not because of it. The goal wasn’t to go soft. It was to build a culture of growth, not just judgment.

And if you were going to pitch coaching to Booz partners, it couldn’t look like self-help. It had to be defensible. Elegant. Cognitively sound. Enter David Rock - a man who could diagram your emotional response faster than you could articulate it.

As part of the pilot, we trained as workplace coaches. But what stuck were two tools that rewired my leadership instincts.

First, SCARF.

Status. Certainty. Autonomy. Relatedness. Fairness.

SCARF isn’t a theory. It’s a decoder ring. A map of what threatens people at work - and what protects them. It explains why sharp people suddenly clam up, get defensive, or go blank. Why silences stretch in meetings. Why rational feedback sparks irrational reactions. More than that, it gave us a design tool. Something to use in building teams, shaping leadership rituals, even designing client experiences.

You could plan for emotion the way you plan for cost.

And for someone who’s spent years in strategy, that was gold dust.

Second, the Dance of Insight.

Insight is skittish. It hides when people feel judged. That was the second big idea: create the conditions, don’t push the answer. No one wants to be fixed. Everyone wants to be seen. What changed my mindset most wasn’t a model, but a provocation - the most powerful thing you can do for someone is help them think about their own thinking.

Coaching wasn’t about downloading answers. It was about triggering the flash of realisation that sticks because they discovered it.

This changed how I lead. Fewer declarations. More questions. Less solving, more scaffolding. Coaching became not a skill, but a posture. One I still use when building teams, designing systems, or running high-stakes conversations.

Because strategy is about clarity. But leadership is about creating space for others to find their own.

Booz didn’t go soft. But in Paris, just for a moment, we let intellect share the stage with insight. We trained ourselves to listen before fixing. We learned to decode defensiveness, not dismiss it. And we left with tools as rigorous as anything else in the firm’s arsenal - just aimed at something deeper.

In retrospect, it was the best training Booz ever paid for.