Introduction
Grant Tate had a thriving career at IBM, a company whose stated top value, respect for the individual, matched his own. Then a senior leader told his team to lower planned salary increases and, in the same breath, told managers not to tell people the truth about it.
That single instruction told him everything he needed to know. In this conversation with Sope Agbelusi, the former IBM executive, now a transformational coach and author of "Hand in the Shoulder: Finding Freedom at the Confluence of Love and Career", explains why he walked away from a successful corporate path, and the three questions he now asks anyone trying to work out what comes next: who am I, what am I called to do now, and who am I going to work with to get it done.
A childhood lesson in survival by understanding people
Grant graduated high school at 16, the smallest kid in his class, and quickly learned he would never win by brute strength. His edge became understanding people and his environment, a skill that shaped his entire career. A second formative influence came from his grandmother, who told him plainly: if you have a talent and you are not using it, it is a sin. As the oldest grandchild, he grew up expected to set the standard for behaviour, a role he still discusses with his younger brother today.
The moment the values stopped matching
Grant's disillusionment with IBM had specific triggers, not a vague drift. A direct, unfavourable encounter with the company's CEO revealed a values gap at the top. Then came the salary directive: leadership planned to slow pay increases in a weak year and instructed managers to withhold that truth from staff. Grant refused, telling his own team the real story and pushing back on the guidance itself. It confirmed that respect for the individual, the value that had drawn him to IBM in the first place, was no longer being honoured where it counted. Not long after, seeing "clouds on the horizon" from his seat in strategic planning, he turned down a promotion and took early retirement instead.
Reboarding is not the same as onboarding
Asked about the return to office after remote years, Grant is blunt: companies are welcoming back people who are not the same people, into a company that is not the same company either. Organisations plan onboarding for new hires but rarely build a formal reboarding process for returning staff who have spent three years developing entirely different ways of working and relating to each other. He points to a science company whose favourability score moved from 54 per cent to 100 per cent on key survey questions after adopting a deliberately cheap fix: 15-minute daily morning huddles focused on priorities, escalated to weekly and monthly meetings for longer-range planning. The lesson scales with the rate of change in your business; a steel company producing the same output every six months needs a very different meeting cadence to a lab running new experiments weekly.
Smart brevity: what people actually need to know
Grant borrows a phrase from the newsletter company Axios, "smart brevity": tell people the five things they need to know today in two minutes, with the option to go deeper if they want to. Every meeting or communication should be able to answer one question honestly: why do I need to be here? If it cannot, it should not exist.
Self-development over one-size-fits-all training
Rather than mandating blanket training programmes, Grant recommends working with individuals on their own development, tailored to how they personally engage with knowledge, some people are natural "vacuum cleaners for learning", others want only what directly serves the task. The aim is overlap, not identity, between a person's own goals and the organisation's: not the same dreams, but enough alignment that the person's success and the team's success move together. He recalls IBM once mandating 40 hours of annual training even for its most elite programmers, who rightly asked what anyone had left to teach them; the better answer, in his view, is a growth mindset where every encounter, including an argument, is treated as a chance to learn.
Hot nodes, black holes, and where to spend your energy
When driving organisational change, Grant looks for two types of people: "hot nodes", the true influencers regardless of hierarchy, and "black holes", people who absorb the organisation's energy without giving anything back. His advice is unambiguous about where the fastest change comes from: address the black holes first, then win over the hot nodes, because their buy-in, built on trust rather than coercion, is what brings everyone else along.
Choosing who you work with
Grant has no checklist for choosing clients. His filter is conversational: what questions do they ask, how deep is their thinking, what are they trying to accomplish, and critically, how do they talk about their people? He runs a simple exercise with executive teams, mapping people by productivity and values, which reveals as much about the leader doing the mapping as it does about the team being discussed.
Leverage over reach
Grant's personal definition of impact is leverage, not personal fame. Help one leader with 200 people make the right change, and you have touched 200 families and everyone connected to them. He resists the idea of waiting for a single leader to fix society's turmoil; the real question is what each of us can do, in our own sphere, to move things in the right direction.
When ambition costs you the people closest to you
Grant is candid about the end of his first marriage: at the time, he had no one to turn to, and he and his then-wife had drifted into separate, unknown worlds. He calls his drive not ambition but something inherited from his grandmother's charge, and admits that same drive can blind you to who is hurting closest to you. His resolution was structural: build close confidants deliberately, understand your own blind spots, and accept that you can only see them with the help of people who know and care about you enough to tell you the truth.
Leadership, defined
Grant's definition of leadership: building on your values, and helping create the direction and change needed, for yourself, your team or your organisation, for the good of the people involved. He resists neat lists of leadership traits; today, it means helping others create the change they need in whatever context they are living in.
