In this insightful episode of Epic Begins With 1 Step Forward, Zander Sprague sits down with executive coach and former corporate leader Corinne Gavlinski for a candid conversation about leadership, identity, and reinvention. Corinne shares her journey through multiple career pivots, unexpected layoffs, and the identity jolts that come from tying self-worth too tightly to professional titles. Together, they unpack the concept of “lazy leadership,” why high performers often struggle as leaders, and how intentional focus—not harder work—creates real impact. Corinne also introduces her approach to helping executives define the legacy they want to leave by lifting others, not just themselves. This episode challenges leaders to rethink success, embrace self-awareness, and ask a powerful question: How do I want to be remembered when this chapter ends?
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Lazy Leadership, Hard Truths, And The Power Of Intentional Growth With Corinne Gavlinski
I am so excited to welcome Corinne Gavlinski. Corinne, tell us who you are and what you do.
Thanks, Zander, for having me. I’m delighted to be here. I am a corporate leader and have been for the vast majority of my career. I’ve had a very accomplished career that was oftentimes messy. I have pivoted my career more than one time, in fact, three times. I’ve had hardships that didn’t show up on my socials. I have largely defined myself by who I am in my career. That has led to some pretty big identity jolts in my life.
The Identity Jolt: Career Pivots, Layoffs, And Defining Your Self-Worth
I can understand that. I, too, have had a variety of careers, a variety of things. I do absolutely get that there are things in our lives that we do that are a big part of our identity. When something happens where we’re not able to do that anymore, it does absolutely cause a bit of an identity crisis, as a big part of who I was was this, be it an employee, a leader in a particular industry, or something. I am interested in your epic journey and how you got to where you are.
My epic journey began in financial services at a very large publicly traded company that offered me a lot of opportunities that I didn’t appreciate at all at the time. In retrospect, I want to thank that company for putting me through my paces and teaching me how to lead. The best thing I took away from that was being able to lead in lots of different disciplines and finding where I was well-suited, where my talents were well-suited.
That’s important for young leaders today. Perhaps this is controversial to say, but it is not to follow their passions, but also to follow where their capabilities and strengths are. I learned that at an early age. I used that to advance my career. As I did, I then decided along the way that I was going to start a family and was promptly laid off before I came back to work, which was a huge identity jolt and a huge bruise to my ego as well.
I pivoted into healthcare and had to start all over again. When I did that, I built a career that was known for building growth-stage teams and customer-facing teams. Once again, I pivoted much later in my career and started my own business, which I never thought I would do. I never saw myself as an entrepreneur, but here we are. I work with corporate executives and help them to define the legacy of leadership that they want to leave as they consider their next chapter.
I worked in the corporate world for 22 years. I did a variety of things. I had jobs. My audience has heard me say this. I didn’t know what to do, but I believed in myself. I’m like, “Sure, I can do that.” All of a sudden, here I am, working on a Unix help desk, also for a financial services company on the fixed income trading floor. I didn’t know what Unix was. The funny thing about that is that being on the help desk is not only do you knowing it, but you know it well enough to be able to help people.
I was smiling because I’m like, “It is that same evolution of finding not only where your passion is, but where your strength is.” It turned out my strength is that I’m good at explaining technical things to people who are not as technical or whatever. I spent the majority of my corporate career as a technical trainer, teaching people how to use software. I don’t regret any of the experiences, but certainly, there was a lot of time where I worked exceptionally hard to be mediocre. I prefer not to be mediocre or work that hard and go, “Here’s as high as I can get.”
In our practice, I talk about that in terms of being a lazy leader. I mean, not so much a leader that isn’t working hard and not so much a leader who is mediocre, even, but someone who’s entirely unfocused and maybe very distracted. There’s a good reason for that. Let’s be honest. In today’s corporate life, there are a lot of distractions. There are a lot of pressures to do a lot more with a lot less. Unless a leader is focused on the intentional actions that they want to demonstrate in order to be and have an impact on their team, their organization, they’re just being lazy. I say that because I myself was a lazy leader. It is unrealistic to think that none of us is a lazy leader. We all flow into and out of laziness at various points in our careers.
Escaping “Lazy Leadership”: Why Intentional Focus Beats Working Harder
There’s some comfort. “It’s comfortable. I know how to do this.” All of us who may have at least five years in the work world, or even if you’re brand new and you’re tuning in to this, we all have that teacher in school that we’re like, “That’s the teacher. That was a great teacher.” I had a manager who was, I always say, the best manager I had. The reason he was a good manager was that he did the things I think a manager should do. Working in a large corporation, there were memos that came out that we had to know about. He’d always come out, and then we’d get it.
He’d forward it to us, even though we’d seen it. If it didn’t affect us in our daily job, he’d say, “Wind above your head,” meaning, “Know about this, but know that it is not something affecting what we’re doing as a group, your daily job.” That was always helpful because, as you might know, you see stuff and all of a sudden, you’re like, “That’s my division. What does that mean to me? Am I getting laid off? Am I not doing the job I’m doing now? Am I getting redeployed somewhere?”
The other thing he did was he was strategic. He would look at where he needed me to be, let’s say six months from now, and maybe I needed to pick up a skillset. He’d say, “Zander, I need you to learn how to do this.” When I was up to speed, it intersected with when he needed me to do it versus the lazy leader who goes, “I knew about that six months ago. All of a sudden, I need you to do this new skill that you don’t actually have, and you have to study for, but I need you to be up to speed tomorrow on it to do it.” You’re like, “That’s not possible.”
We teach that which we most need to know. For far too long in my career, I spent a lot of time centered on self, my own ambition, and my own drive. I’ve realized far too late in my career that you can grow and rise by pouring into your team members and allowing them to grow and rise as well. It’s a little shameful to me that it took me so long. I work with executive leaders to help them do just that, to recognize how they themselves can experience growth when they are allowing someone else to shine. That’s a difficult thing to do. A lot of leaders become leaders because they are so good at operating. They know they’re experts at what they do, but expertise doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the best leader. Practice being a good leader.
What’s important for young leaders today is perhaps not to just follow their passions, but also follow where their capabilities and strengths are.
People get promoted for a variety of reasons in their lives. Stuff happens. Maybe it’s because you’ve been around long enough. It doesn’t mean that you’re actually qualified to be a leader. Sadly, there’s a lot of lip service for leadership training. I haven’t been in the corporate world in many years, but my experience was that I didn’t see that happening. I saw people, colleagues of mine, promoted to managerial positions, leads, or whatever, and they had to lead. I’m like, “I can see that person’s floundering because no one’s told them how to do this job.”
Modeling leadership is something that is a little bit of a dying art. You and I can name the best managers or leaders we’ve ever had. Probably, we can list them on one hand. It’s not double digits. For both executives and younger leaders, the ability to grow in leadership is twofold. You have to have some level of self-awareness, and you have to have the behavior that you’re trying to emulate be modeled for you.
That goes both ways. More mature leaders need to be able to model that behavior and explain to people what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and why they need to employ that right now. Younger leaders need to seek that out. One of the regrets I have in my career is that I’m an executive coach, and it never occurred to me in my entire career to seek an executive coach. That would have been a distinct competitive advantage had I done so.
Asking For Help: Why Seeking A Coach Is A Sign Of Leadership Strength
Part of what I do now is I’m a licensed mental health provider. Although I’m delighted that mental health is less stigmatized, asking for help is seen as a sign of weakness. We can’t be seen as being weak. However, I’m of the opinion that asking for help is actually a sign of strength, saying, “I recognize in myself the humility to go, ‘I need to do this better. I want to do this better.’ How do I do that?” You go to someone else who already has that experience. Maybe you get lucky, and you have a senior leader who wants to mentor you and says, “Here’s where you went wrong on this thing.”
We don’t like to hear that we went wrong, but we can’t correct what we don’t know we’re not doing correctly. The other thing that’s important when I work with some people when I’m doing EPIC coaching with them is to understand what kind of a leader you are, and what you want to be. If you try to be the gruff coach, tear them down, don’t give them compliments, and that’s not who you are, you are not going to be successful. If you’re more of the “Let me encourage you. I’m here to support you,” that is what a manager does. A lot of the time should be supporting their team for success because your team’s success is your success.
I was talking with a client. He and I were discussing how, in 2026, he wants to distinguish himself and his accomplishments. My follow-on question to him was, in doing so, in distinguishing yourself, how do you allow someone else on your team to shine? There was this giant bubble of silence that followed. To an executive coach, that’s the best sound because that means my client, an executive, was thinking and perhaps hadn’t contemplated how, by distinguishing himself in some way, he could allow someone else within his team to shine.
He goes forward into 2026 planning and is more mindful and more intentional about who on my team might be that person, how I might challenge them with something new and different, and what I want to see as the outcome from that experience. Those were things that perhaps he hadn’t even contemplated. To your point, that’s the intention. You have to set out to understand not just what kind of leader I want to be, but how I want to be perceived as a leader, because therein lies your legacy as a leader.
As I mentioned earlier, it took some pretty big identity jolts for me to have that awareness, but it was the loss of my parents that ultimately thrust me into a period of reflection to say, “Am I being the person I want to be? Am I showing up as a leader in a way that makes me not only feel accomplished, but feel proud, like I’ve lifted others?” If you’re not lifting others as a leader, what are we all doing here?
The Teacher’s Secret: Framing Communication So Your Team Always Understands
If you’re looking out for yourself, if you’re at a place where there’s 360-degree feedback or whatever, your team gives you feedback, and all of a sudden, you go, “Why do people not seem to like me?” Maybe it’s because of the way you’re leading. They don’t feel supported. Let’s go back to that teacher that we all remember. What was it? It was probably that teacher. You felt very supported by that teacher. They helped you. You learned so much. There are also teachers that you might remember that you’re like, “I did not like Mr. Smith. He scared me. When I asked questions, I felt belittled and stupid.”
I spent the majority of my career teaching people. I taught sailing when I was in high school through college. The best piece of advice they ever got when I first started instructing sailing was that it is beholden upon you as the teacher to frame it in a way that your student will understand. If they don’t understand the message, you need to see if you can change the message so that they understand, because then you’re successful. As an executive coach, if you said that to your client about defining his leadership, there were crickets, and he looked blank and had no idea, you’re like, “Hold on. Let me rephrase that in a way that you’ll get it.”
In this case, fortunately, he’s pretty self-aware.
I get that. I was originally from Boston. I was living in Boston, and I ended up with this unintentional side business where I was tutoring people 50-plus on how to use their computers. I had one client. She got a computer. I got her onto the internet. She goes, “Show me the internet.” I’m like, “What do you want to see?” “No, show me the internet.” I was like, “I need to come up with some analogy that she can understand,” because as we know, we know what the internet is, but you can’t show it. She liked reading. I said, “I can’t show you the internet because it’s millions of interconnected computers.” Blank face, crickets.
I’m like, “If you went into the Boston public library and said, ‘What’s a good book?’, the librarian is like, ‘What are you interested in?’ If you said, ‘What is a good English murder mystery?’, now you can get an answer. That’s how the internet works. All the information is there, but you have to know what question you’re looking for. You can’t just go see it. It’s not like going to the library, where you see all the books. That’s not how it works.” If I use the same analogy with my daughters, who are very smart, they’d be like, “What?” If I go, “It’s millions of interconnected computers,” they’d get that analogy. It’s all about what people’s frame of reference is.
As a leader, understand what your team’s frame of reference is. I love the StrengthsFinder. It’s awesome. It’s great. As a manager, what a powerful tool to say, “Where are my team’s strengths?” If the person you have is going out making presentations and that’s not their strength, but this other person has that as one of their strengths, go have the people who do something well be the ones who go out and do presentations. They’re probably going to shine and make your team shine and be successful.
For leaders who work with me and want to create a legacy, who have some inkling that something is off, sometimes, I describe it as they present with these problems. They tell me, “Corinne, I’m exhausted. I’m not sure I can do another day.” Sometimes, they present with, “Corinne, I know I need to reset this team, but I’m not sure what the first step is.” Sometimes, they say, “Corinne, I’ve got an event. I’ve got to motivate my go-to-market team. I am not sure what to do this year.” Any one of those things could be true, or multiple of those could be true.
You can grow and rise by pouring into your team members and allowing them to grow and rise as well.
When that happens, I’m working with that leader and his team to create something that we call the executive table read, which is a little bit akin to the StrengthsFinder, which you just mentioned, but takes it a step further. We work with teams to highlight for that leader, not only how he or she is perceived by their team, but also a 360, as you’ve mentioned. It is not just what the talents or the strengths are on the team, but how people process information. What are the behaviors that are innate to them when not under pressure?
By doing so, we are able to illuminate for the team and the leader how to best use the talents on the team and where there may be opportunities for collaboration or where there may be friction points. The way that goes beyond a StrengthsFinder or any number of team offsite events that you and I have probably gone to, where you do it, it’s put on a shelf, and you never talk about it again, this is rooted in action. It’s about not only illuminating those things, but then asking the team to define the performance behaviors that are most essential to hit their goals in the next year and measuring those performance indicators, both today and 90 days post team development meeting, so that there’s traction and accountability.
Structure Is Your Friend: How 90-Day Sprints Build Team Confidence And Traction
Like any longer journey you’re on, be it a year-long cycle of work or whatever, it is important for everyone to know where the checkpoints are. It makes it easier to say, “I understand the bigger picture, but in 90 days, here’s where I need to be,” much easier versus “A year from now, I need to have the sales way up here.” You want to know what you get there, not just by one sale and rocketing up and stuff. It’s incremental. I talk about that in the book about making a plan. It may not work out. There are things that happen in business that what you thought in January comes June, maybe there’s an economic downturn.
Maybe there’s something that has drastically changed. I got a detour here. I got to figure out how I’m going to reset it. I need to reset goals because they are no longer realistic or possible. All of us like structure. I talked about it all the time. Structure is our friend. It makes us feel comfortable from a mental health standpoint. We all like structure. It helps us to know that we’re okay. If we feel safe, we’re like, “I know what to expect out of my job when those unexpected things come.”
You’re better able to weather them.
Versus, I’m constantly in panic mode. That leader is like, “I’m so tired. I can’t go on.” They probably do not feel safe. There isn’t as much structure as possible. Do you like to cook?
I do like to cook. I’m not a very good cook.
That’s okay. If you’re trying to cook something new, you have a recipe. There is structure. Let’s say you want to make chicken cordon bleu. If you’ve never made it, if you have a recipe, there’s some comfort. There’s some structure. Maybe it doesn’t come out well, but at least you have some verses going, “I know I need chicken breast. I need ham. I need cheese. Now what do I do?”
Using that analogy, how many times have you been in a corporate team-building event where you’ve made the chicken cordon bleu, you ate it, or you set it aside in the refrigerator, and you never thought about it again? You never made it again. You never talked about it again. You never did anything with it. What if that were not the case? Instead, you were talking about, “How can we get this a little bit better in a 90-day sprint? What would we do to make this taste even better?”
It’s not dissimilar in the leadership world. If you’re talking about actions that the team believes are important, they can contextualize in a 90-day window what needs to happen to move the needle 4% or 6%. I don’t think twelve months, eight months, two months down the road. If you shorten the time horizon, it’s a lot easier to contextualize and get traction, which then leads to greater confidence in the team.
“Not Yet”: How The Power Of Optimism Drives Your Biggest Goals
One thing I love to ask my guests is this. A big part of my life is two words, not yet, because not yet has so much optimism. We all have not-yets, things that we say we want to do. Maybe it’s in your job. I want to learn this skill. Do you have it? Not yet. I want to write a book. Are you done with your book? Not yet. No makes it sound like it’s never going to happen. There are things that we know take time. For you, Corinne, what’s one or two of your not-yets?
I have done a lot of presenting in my corporate life. I was in sales. I was in a go-to-market team and led in that area as well. I’ve never been on a big stage, a TEDx or something similar, even more regional, perhaps. That’s something that I would secretly love to do at some point. Not yet, but soon.
Have you been on a big stage? Not yet. There are things that I’d love to do. I realize maybe that won’t happen. For me, I come alive thinking about it because the possibility is there. Maybe I just choose that now is not the time for me to do this.
Live by the credo of take a bet on yourself always. You don’t get what you ask for, but knowing how to ask is important.
Always take a bet on yourself. You don’t get what you asked for, but knowing how to ask is really important.
There’s no doubt. If you aren’t betting on you, if you don’t believe in you, how are other people going to? We see advertisements all the time. It’s not like a car company comes on and goes, “We hope the transmission won’t fall out at 50,000 miles. We’re hoping the wheels will stay on.” They’re not telling you that. Why are workers like, “Here are all the skills I don’t have for the job?” You’ve got to sell yourself.
How To Connect With Corinne Gavlinski
You’ve got to believe in yourself. If I don’t believe in myself, my show won’t work. “I think I’m okay.” You can’t be successful as an executive coach if you’re like, “I’m not sure.” Some of the most fun I’ve had are the things I get asked to do that are a stretch. I got about 20% of what I need to do this, but I’m still going to figure it out because I believe in myself. How can people get a hold of you?
You can find us at TheGavGroup.com. Clients who want to work with me can message me directly on LinkedIn @Corinne Gavlinski. You can also find me at
Co*****@Th*********.com
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I want to thank you so much for joining me. What an epic conversation.
Thank you so much.
I want to remind everyone that if you’re ready to begin your epic journey, go to EpicBegins.com. As always, remember, epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
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About Corinne Gavlinski
Corinne is the founder and CEO of The Gav Group and creator of the XTR (Executive Table Read). She’s a thought partner to C-Suite leaders, helping them achieve results that matter – to them, their team, and their legacy. Clients who work with her reclaim their time, their performance edge, and their influence to lead with impact.