The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 53 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Stutman: Low-empathy leaders can build relational closeness through deep understanding
“They've learned to create relational closeness without empathy. They've learned to create it without being warm and fuzzy and giving people a lot of couch time. What they've done is they've invest deeply in those people and understanding them.”
Stutman: Hedge fund managers lack people willing to speak truth to them
“The biggest issues for hedge fund managers, as far as I'm concerned, is a couple things. Number one, many of them like themselves way too much, and so they really need somebody that's willing to be honest with them. They're very powerful people, both financial…”
Stutman: High public profile is an enemy that invites scrutiny and lawsuits
“Profile is your enemy. It makes you a target for litigation. It makes you a target for media scrutiny. It makes you a target for pure jealousy. Profile for all great leaders, unless they can't avoid it, Is your enemy, and your job is not to covet profile.”
Stutman: Interviewing leaders is ineffective because they don't know what they do
“We normally don't learn all that much when we interview leaders. Just like a great ball player, they don't know what they do.”
Stutman: AI Cannot Replace Human Coaches on Complex Multi-Level Problems
“Now, Alex can't care about you, doesn't have conviction, It's not going to replace me as a coach or any of the good coaches in our firm. It can't work through a multi-level problem the way that I can.”
Stutman: Most leaders lack the maturity to provide pure, unexplained observations
“Most leaders aren't mature enough to do that because they can't stop from them saying and finishing what the observation means.”
Stutman: Too Many Leaders Depend on Direct Feedback Delivery
“Too many leaders depend too much on telling people and delivering feedback in a more direct way.”
Stutman: Most executive coaches lack actionable answers and rely on vague facilitation
“The majority of coaches that do this for a living don't have answers. And I actually, some of them are very proud with the idea that they process people and the answers are in other people. I believe the answers are in all of this, but at the same time, if you…”
Stutman: Sizing up and adapting to individual motivations in real time fails
“What you learn really quickly is that being able to size people up and adapt to them in an ongoing flow of interaction is almost impossible. So you've got your own goals. You've got other competing things going on. You've got the noise of the context. It's ver…”
Stutman: Leaders motivate more effectively by practicing consistent fan-ness
“And that by being a great fan of other people, and showing your fan-ness, and asking yourself the question in almost every context, what would a fan do here? What would somebody who's your fan do? That becomes a very different thing because you can work on you…”
Stutman: Trait anxiety and poor judgment cannot be fixed through coaching
“If you tell me that you've got some, you know, stress, anxiety, trait anxiety, I can't coach for that. If you tell me that you have bad judgment, I probably change your judgment time. Take me 20 years. If you've got poor judgment, that is not a coachable thing…”
Stutman: Leaders should build consensus offline and use meetings only for validation
“Rather than waste time in group settings, trying to make decisions in group process, what you do is You do it away from the table after a target position's made, you create consensus or near consensus, then you come to the table, and then you validate the deci…”
Stutman: Skill-only respect creates division in hedge funds and private equity
“And in many cases inside places like hedge funds or private equity firms or other places where allocators would invest, there's a high degree of respect on skill and a low degree of respect on character. And that creates division inside those teams.”
Stutman: Personality tests merely reflect the answers users input
“I'm always amazed at how many people take one of the self-diagnostic tests, whether that be DISC or Myers-Briggs or Hogan or whatever it might be. They'll sit down with me and they'll say, Randall, that really nailed me. I can't even believe how good that diag…”
Stutman: Walking shoulder-to-shoulder yields far more disclosure than face-to-face meetings
“It is amazing the research about being side by side and walking with people. People get much more disclosive when they're actually walking shoulder to shoulder than they ever are face to face.”
Stutman: Adopting a new leadership behavior takes three to six weeks
“Once you do that for a handful of weeks, three, four, five, six weeks, it become a routine, it become a habit, and then it will be yours.”
Stutman: Leaders must focus on developing one behavior at a time
“What you have to do is pick a behavior that you're going to work on. Just one. Not 20.”
Stutman: Practicing leadership behaviors solely for effect causes abandonment when they fail
“Because if you do them for effect, you won't keep them up. You'll only do them in some situations. You won't get very skillful at them. As soon as they don't work on somebody, you'll give them up. You got to pick the behavior that you believe in that represent…”
Stutman: Admired Leadership Cannot View Client Conversations With Alex AI
“By the way, Alex is entirely confidential. We can't see your questions and answers. We do a couple of quality checks randomly, but other than that, it's just like a coach. It's totally confidential.”
Stutman: Feedback delivered from power inherently triggers recipient defensiveness
“That power has a consequence. It creates resistance. People naturally become a little bit reluctant, if not totally defensive, to things that come at them from power.”
Stutman: Frame feedback as recommendations to drastically reduce employee defensiveness
“What I tell leaders all the time, Ted, is they need to get out of the feedback business and get in the recommendation and suggestion business. They're going to be able to give a lot more feedback a lot more often with a lot less resistance and defensiveness ju…”
Stutman: Internalized Feedback Has Longer-Term Impact Than Direct Feedback
“Internalized feedback is feedback that's going to get acted on, remembered, has real duration to it, and has a longer-term impact.”
Stutman: Prompt self-feedback easily by asking for a third-party perspective
“Anytime I can get you to give yourself your own feedback and using a third party is the easiest way to do it.”
Stutman: Deliver feedback immediately after successes, not mistakes, to reduce defensiveness
“Right after success, right after mission accomplished, right after tasks have been achieved, people are much more receptive to feedback. Why? Because they've just succeeded. They've got an armor to them because of their success, their effectiveness. They're mu…”
Stutman: People are systematically more critical of others in their own strengths
“There's a bias that almost everybody has across the whole world. You have it, I have it, everybody has it, and that is, we're generally more critical of people based on our own strengths. Whatever it is that we're good at, we're more critical about other peopl…”
Stutman: High-performing toxic employees require high-cadence feedback on small issues
“You need an ongoing high cadence of feedback on the smallest issues over time. What you'll see is you'll slowly move people from negative to positive in terms of climate attitude, other kinds of affect. That's the key. If I save it up and I never give it to yo…”
Stutman: Research identified 500 universal leadership behaviors and 30-40 feedback behaviors
“I've been able to find 500 of them, probably 30 or 40 of them in feedback.”
Stutman: Embed feedback inside 'how' questions to completely bypass defensiveness
“A how question, if it's done and carries feedback, actually embeds the feedback inside the question. When I say to you, Ted, how are you going to upgrade the talent on your team? The feedback is that your team talent needs to be upgraded. But I don't say that.…”
Stutman: Peak team performance requires both high standards and relational closeness
“The highest performing teams are the ones where the leaders have really high standards, really high expectations, unusual focus on certain kinds of details, and people feel relational closeness.”
Stutman: Corporate leaders require a more validating tone than athletic coaches
“Most athletic coaches can have a bigger range of tone and style than you and I can as team leaders. We need to have a more positive, it doesn't have to be warm, but more engaging, more validating style to the way that we engage people.”
Stutman: Smart people default to negative feedback to signal intellectual differentiation
“Most smart people start on the negative. Because it's a differentiator, because it illustrates differentiation and distinction, as well as it illustrates, at least in most people's mind, that you understand something at a deeper level.”
Stutman: Great Followership Leaders Act as Fans and Deeply Invest in People
“Good followership leaders tend to be high fans of other people. They tend to be relationally close to other people, but in particular, they tend to invest in other people in a multitude of ways, and that builds a sense of loyalty and a connection that they get…”
Stutman: Leaders must prioritize relationships and conversations over tasks
“I'd argue that you need to organize yourself more about relationships and conversations than about tasks. That too many leaders think about tasks, and by the way, that's a perfectly acceptable majority of the world does that. But if you're going to be good at …”
Stutman: Overscheduling executives leads to poor strategic decisions
“Some people are so overscheduled they've never had unstructured time to think freely and let decisions and strategy and other things bake. They make poor quality decisions as a result.”
Stutman: Rewarding decision process over outcome produces better long-term decisions
“Start celebrating decision processes that are great processes that produce bad outcomes. What you're going to find is you make for people willing to take more risk, willing to invest their time and energy, hone in and be specific with the process. Long term, t…”
Stutman: Growing hedge funds lack the skill to build organizations
“Most Hedge funds, private equity firms, small ones that start to grow, recognize that they have growing pains, and that their expertise is limited to investment, and they really don't know how to create an organization, how to create team culture, how to both …”
Stutman: Decision makers save time by soliciting feedback against specific target proposals
“One of the things that they do is they rely on a target proposal decision that basically they put out there, but they go out of their way to say, here's the target, and now they get people to weigh in against that target, and that saves tremendous amounts of t…”
Stutman: Resolve conflict via voice rather than inflammatory text or email
“You might have a rule that says, when conflict occurs, I immediately go to voice-to-voice conversation, because I don't do conflict vis-a-vis texts or emails, because those are inflammatory mediums, because we get to hide behind the words and not the face and …”
Stutman: Underperformance usually stems from weakness in one critical task
“So all of us have weak performance, but very few of us are truly weak performers around everything. If we're known as weak performers in organizations, generally because we're weak at the most critical thing.”
Stutman: Top leaders fix underperformance by requiring frequent, specific progress reporting
“So, so when we study the best leaders, people that are really good at elevating performance and getting the most out of teams, we were interested in finding, is there something that they do differently? And the answer is, yeah, they do. And they basically conf…”
Stutman: Behavioral, Best-Practice Executive Coaching Is Rare in the Marketplace
“We come at this thing behaviorally, best practice, which is fairly rare in the marketplace.”
Stutman: Most Leaders Want to Improve but Lack Specific Behavioral Tools
“My belief is most leaders want to be better, but they don't know how. You have to give them the tools, the specific things to do to make them better.”
Stutman has studied 15,000 leaders, including 3,500 elite 'admired leaders'
“I have spent time with over 15,000 leaders trying to figure out their leadership, but about 3500 admired leaders.”
Admired Leadership's AI coach runs on Claude using strictly proprietary data
“Alex operates from Anthropics Claude as a base, but it has no access to the internet. It only answers from our data, and we have a couple million words in it.”
Stutman: Top leaders use pre-meeting 'echo questions' to prompt self-feedback
“When you study admired leaders, they always have an echo question going on with somebody about something.”
Stutman: Good leaders schedule priorities instead of reacting to demands
“In case good leaders have time value congruence, they schedule their priorities rather than let their priorities schedule them.”