In this post: Velocity Advisory Group Founder and CEO Dave Fechtman explains why winning makes leaders less strategic, why executive alignment is more than chemistry, and how to deliver bad news before people fill the silence with worse stories.
Dave Fechtman has a piece of advice he wishes he had heard in early 2023. The second half of that year and all of 2024 were tough for Velocity Advisory Group, the leadership consulting firm he founded, after a long run of growth. The flat stretch lasted longer than he hoped.
"I wish I recorded this at the early part of '23, because I would listen to my own advice," Fechtman said on the first episode of Activating Greatness, the leadership podcast from Velocity.
The advice is a line the firm repeats to its clients, and one Fechtman admits he had to get right himself. "We say at Velocity that the biggest enemy of strategy is success," he said. "Generally you become less strategic when you're winning. You're just going to kind of ride the wave."
That tension runs through his thinking: winning breeds comfort, comfort hides misalignment, and misalignment eventually shows up in the numbers.
Fechtman came to leadership consulting from banking, where he served as an area president for one bank and head of sales for another. He decided he was "really not a great banker," he said, but he had a passion for leadership and culture. Velocity grew out of that calling.
Today he runs the firm and coaches CEOs across industries, a combination he described as "a cheat sheet to greatness." He borrows what works. One coaching client asks his team a simple question, and Fechtman adopted it. "I stop and I pause and I ask, well, is this my best work? And 90% of the time, it could just be a little bit better," he said.
He was careful about what the question does not mean. "It's not working harder and it's not a level of effort that determines that, but it's the quality and the importance that you put behind it," he said. In construction terms, measure twice, cut once.
Most of what separates strong leaders, he added, travels well. "I find most leadership skills are industry agnostic. They're transferable," he said. Delegation, conflict resolution, and decision-making look much the same in a bank or on a job site.
Fechtman is writing a book on executive team alignment, and he starts with a common mistake. "When we talk about this concept of alignment, we are often thinking of chemistry," he said. "We're oftentimes thinking about do we like each other."
Camaraderie, respect, and trust are building blocks. They are not the whole structure. The harder questions are whether the team agrees on goals and direction, and whether it has a shared reason for the work. Teams without that tend to compete with each other for resources and talent. The damage widens with each level down, until whole functions cannot work together.
You do not need a seat on the executive team to see it. "If you sense that things are out of alignment, guess what? Everyone else does too," he said.
"If you sense that things are out of alignment, guess what? Everyone else does too."
Dave Fechtman, Founder and CEO, Velocity Advisory Group
Senior leaders are often the last to know. "The higher up in the organization you go, the bigger your blind spots," Fechtman said, because people do not want to bring you bad news and you are watching 100 different things every day. His first diagnostic question: Is the problem a blind spot, or is it something you see and are neglecting? If you cannot answer, it is probably a blind spot.
His verdict is hopeful. "The good news is this stuff is all fixable," he said. "The bad news is that it's commonplace."
FREE ONE-PAGE CHECKLIST
Use it to test whether your leadership team shares goals, direction, and a clear why, or simply gets along.
Fechtman often guides executive teams through acquisitions, leadership changes, and other moments when the ground shifts. Change brings uncertainty, and uncertainty sends people to the worst case. "Everyone's always dialed into the radio station WIIFM. What's in it for me," he said.
His rule for bad news is blunt. "Lean into the punch. Don't skirt around it," he said. When leaders dodge, people climb the ladder of inference and write their own stories, and those stories are almost always worse than the facts.
Picture a team of five facing a change with no explanation. You now have five versions of what is happening. Some people withdraw to protect themselves. Others start gossiping. No one stays indifferent. Clarity is the leader's first job, followed by listening: asking how the change affects each person and what they need to know. "Maybe I can't share everything, but I'll share whatever I can," Fechtman said.
Momentum, Fechtman said, can swing in both directions. "Winning breeds more winning," he said, but "you can't expect momentum alone to carry you forward."
With a tailwind, his advice is to stay humble and move. "Don't take things for granted. Don't think that that's going to last forever, but take advantage of it," he said. "Be opportunistic, place bets, make investments."
With a headwind, stop. Get the team together and realign, because a stalled team has usually lost its common goal and started seeing every problem as insurmountable. Break the work into smaller pieces, execute at a smaller scale, and stack a series of small wins. Watch your trend lines, and know whether the tide is coming in, going out, or standing still.
That is how Velocity climbed out of its own slump. The firm has been in positive momentum since the end of 2024. Joe Witte explored the same theme in the momentum mindset.
Asked what great leaders should stop doing, Fechtman did not hesitate. "Holding on to everything," he said. "It's holding your people back, it's holding yourself back, and it's creating a lot of extra work for you and not enough work for them."
The fix is to delegate, coach, and develop people. Leaders with the right systems and people in place, he said, gain the discretionary time to make a major impact. His most underrated leadership skill took one word: gratitude. His daily habit is to start early, exercise, and set the day's direction before decision fatigue sets in.
When Fechtman nominated a future guest, he chose Jon Stenberg, CEO of Citizens Inc., for bringing innovation to a mature organization. Stenberg later joined the show to talk about accountability.
HOW VELOCITY HELPS
Fechtman argues that blind spots grow with seniority because fewer people bring leaders bad news. Velocity's Executive Coaching gives senior leaders confidential, one-on-one work with a Velocity Coach, a space to test their own alignment, examine how they deliver hard news, and decide what they should stop holding on to. Leaders gain an outside view of the gaps they cannot see from the top and a partner for staying strategic when the organization is winning.
The best leadership advice Fechtman has received is the idea he now repeats to his coaching clients: culture is the key competitive advantage. Money buys tools and talent. Culture is what sets an organization apart. "It helps with recruitment, it helps with retention, it helps with discretionary effort," he said, along with critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration.
That belief ties his lessons together. Alignment at the top, candor during change, and discipline during good times all shape what people experience every day. Leaders who wait for revenue to fall before they fix those things are paying for a lesson they could have learned while they were winning.
Hear Dave Fechtman's full conversation with host Alec McChesney on Activating Greatness. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Follow Dave on LinkedIn.
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Fechtman warns that leaders often mistake chemistry for alignment and grow less strategic when they are winning. This short diagnostic helps you test whether your team shares a goal, a reason behind it, and a way to govern itself, or just gets along.