Case 02
The VP he couldn't fire -- and the diagnosis that was really his own
He wanted synergy with his people. He expected inspiration from them. But in reality, he treated them like chess pieces -- and saw no problem with it.
The presenting problem
The client came frustrated with himself — irritated by what he described as his own indecisiveness. He could not bring himself to fire one of his vice presidents, and he believed this was seriously harming the business. His expectation was straightforward: either help him go through with the termination, or work with the VP — a woman he called “hysterical” — to fix her behavior. He had confidently attributed the problem to menopause, despite having a background in physics and mathematics rather than medicine.
The internal conflict
The reasons for his hesitation surfaced quickly. He did not actually want to let her go. He considered her an exceptional, rare, and deeply reliable professional. There was no one else he would trust with the financial operations of his holding company. But he found it impossible to work with her day to day.
What the diagnosis revealed
A deep diagnostic process revealed something very different from the client’s assumption. The VP’s behavior was not hysteria. It was resentment and indignation that had reached the point of despair — caused by the boss’s own exploitative, transactional treatment of her.
Moreover, it turned out that other members of the leadership team were also in a state of chronic stress.
The systemic cause
The root of the client’s dissatisfaction did not lie in the “psychological inadequacy” of his employees, nor in his difficulty firing valued people. It lay in his inability to build genuine, partnership-based human relationships with his team. He wanted synergy and inspiration from his people, but in practice he treated them like figures on a chessboard — and did not recognize this as a problem.
The path forward
The work needed to begin with deep correction of the leader’s own destructive relational pattern. Only as a second phase could the focus shift to helping his VP learn to express her emotions constructively and to defend her professional and human dignity without driving herself to a breaking point.