“What do you want people to brag about once you’ve left the room?” Carole Stizza asks every senior leader she coaches that question, and the silence that follows is usually the diagnosis. The leader has stopped hearing what anyone actually thinks, and by Stizza’s account the stall that follows gets misread as a skill problem. “The ego gets blamed when a leader stops listening,” she says. “And it’s driven home when they also stop asking questions that would provide answers that would help them make more accurate decisions.”

Carole Stizza is the founder of Relevant Insight Coaching, a PCC executive coach named among US Insider’s top 20 executive coaches to watch in 2023.

The Altitude Effect

Stizza has a name for the pattern she has watched for more than 25 years: the Altitude Effect. “Climbing to high altitudes in your career with limited information, including limited feedback, creates the same effect on the body as low O2 at high altitudes,” she says. The higher a leader rises, the fewer people tell them the truth, and the thinner the air gets without anyone announcing it. Her sharpest observation is where the isolation actually comes from: “Being at ‘high altitude’ within an organization only becomes isolating when leaders don’t recognize the team built around them. Thus, they forget to trust, develop, and honor the intelligence they have access to. Their perspective has become self-centric.”

The corrective is a shift in perspective, not a skills course, and she is specific about its levers: becoming “a rain maker of talent,” seeing oneself as a bigger part of the whole organization, and understanding that “delegating is developing, not abdicating.” When those shifts land, she says, they land fast.

Two engagements from her decade running Relevant Insight Coaching show the pattern breaking. One of her first SVP clients arrived pessimistic about having what it took to change, and asked her to build a customized leadership 360 survey. Stizza designed it from the research behind her book, and the insights proved instrumental enough in reshaping the client’s leadership style that a C-suite promotion arrived faster than expected. Years later, she learned the client still uses the tools they built together.

The second was a team in open conflict. Stizza ran strengths assessments and put the results in front of them, and the discovery that each member processed the same information differently became the raw material for a shared language. Hard topics got discussable. Contributions that had been competing began to be celebrated. “In both of these examples,” she says, “I was reminded that we all need to recognize, appreciate, and use what makes us uniquely valuable in order to own our successes, rather than chalk it up to chance, luck, or someone else.”

The Altitude Method, and What a Leader Can Steal From It

Stizza’s structural answer to the missing feedback is a mastermind built deliberately small: 8 to 10 leaders, four 90-minute group sessions across less than four months, four individual coaching sessions in between, all virtual, with two to three assessments and recurring challenges that train participants to ask for the feedback they have stopped receiving. The design premise is the one most leaders will not admit: “having limited visibility into what they do well in the eyes of those they admire, lead, or have as clients.”

The moves inside it travel to any leader this week. First, ask the brag question, of yourself and then of your team. “I need them to see the long game so that the short game answers become more obvious,” Stizza says of why she opens there.

Second, ask for positive feedback on purpose. Her book, The Ask Framework, is the playbook for it, “how to ask for positive information and control the negative information that often comes along with it.” She has watched the move convert skeptics in real time. Observing a client present to a room of peers and direct reports after they had worked on turning meetings into engaging conversations, she saw the room answer his questions readily, and his bewilderment afterward stayed with her: “Thank you for showing me how positive people can be, even when the work is hard, the budget tight, and project deadlines keep changing. I never knew appreciation would go so far in one meeting.” When she asked what he had learned about his own part, he answered: “I never knew they appreciated me in that way, it feels good.”

Third, treat delegation as development. Handing work down is not abdicating the job; it is how the team beneath a leader becomes the intelligence around them.

Fourth, integrate difference instead of judging it. “There has never been redundancy on a superhero team,” she says. “Stop judging people for being different; start integrating them for the opposite perspectives that make your team more innovative.”

Who Is Carole Stizza?

Carole Stizza is the founder of Relevant Insight Coaching, based in Breckenridge, Colorado, a PCC-credentialed executive coach and SHRM Senior Certified Professional who works with senior leaders and leadership teams on trust, accountability, and the feedback that disappears with seniority. Her vantage point is unusual in the category: more than 25 years in HR roles as a military spouse moving across the country, comparing military leadership, which trains leaders early and often but inside narrow contexts, with corporate leadership, which trains less but opens onto relationships, retention, and vision once leaders choose to learn. Both, she concluded, climb without the long game of relationship building.

She holds a master’s in applied industrial-organizational psychology from Colorado State University, and her recognitions include US Insider’s top 20 executive coaches to watch in 2023 and HR Tech’s top leadership development training and coaching companies in both 2023 and 2025. She is the author of The Ask Framework, the feedback playbook that underpins her coaching and her mastermind work. A life that included serious car accidents and a cancer diagnosis shaped the resilience she brings to leaders chasing large goals, though she is quick to keep the focus on theirs.

Ten years into running Relevant Insight Coaching, her argument has not moved: capable leaders do not stall from lack of skill. They stall when the truth stops reaching them, and the fix begins the moment they start asking for it again.