Glenn Gow with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. CEO Success Blueprint

Glenn Gow talks with Jason Barnard about the CEO success blueprint.

CEO Success Blueprint! Glenn Gow, The CEO Success Coach, shares the hard-won lessons from 25 years as a CEO, 5 years as a venture capitalist, and 17 years of being coached himself. Discover why the best CEOs constantly reinvent their leadership style, how to build a high-performing leadership team, and what it takes to adapt as your company grows. Glenn reveals the patterns that hold leaders back, the power of self-awareness, and practical tools for navigating tough conversations and team dynamics. Learn how to become top-of-mind for clients—and even AI—by building authority and credibility in a world where reputation is everything.

In this episode, you’ll discover:
– The real reasons CEOs succeed—or get replaced
– How to break free from old habits and develop new leadership patterns
– Strategies for managing and motivating diverse teams
– Why self-awareness and regular reflection are critical for growth
– How to position yourself as a trusted expert for both people and AI

This conversation is a must-listen for leaders ready to level up and future-proof their impact.

#CEOSuccess #Leadership #Entrepreneurship #ExecutiveCoaching #BusinessGrowth #TeamBuilding #SelfAwareness #AIExpert #FastlaneFounders #GlennGow #JasonBarnard

What you’ll learn from Glenn Gow

This episode was recorded live on video July 8th 2025

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrAFlU6ghXc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa4w68IIzEA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhI8A5dds3M
Glenn Gow

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Transcript from Glenn Gow with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. CEO Success Blueprint

[00:00:00] Glenn Gow: And we as humans are very automatic. I would argue that today more than 90% of what you do, Jason is automatic. And that’s a good thing. You do it because it works. And you don’t have to think really hard about situations. But it’s particularly difficult when let’s say you have an interaction with an employee when they didn’t do what they said they were going to do and you were depending on them getting that done.

[00:00:35] What happens in our minds is that you become upset. Rightfully so and it happens in milliseconds. There’s nothing you can do to stop the way you actually feel in that moment, which is upset or angry or some other emotion. The question then is what do you do once those brain chemicals flood your body, and you’re feeling upset.

[00:00:59] What do you do in that moment?

[00:01:01] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands at test of time and becomes their legacy. A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:01:30] Jason Barnard: Hello everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I’m Jason Barnard and I’m here with a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Glen Gow.

[00:01:42] Glenn Gow: Wow. Had no idea I was going to be sung to. That’s fantastic, jason. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:01:48] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I’m wondering, did I get your name right? Gaw rather than Go?

[00:01:52] Glenn Gow: You did. It’s actually yes. Yes, exactly.

[00:01:55] Jason Barnard: And that’s surprisingly important because the algorithms Google, AI, ChatGPT, Microsoft, read or listen to rather the videos and analyze the audio. Saying somebody’s name right is super important so that Google and Bing and ChatGPT and Perplexity understand that Glenn Gow is talking to Jason Barnard.

[00:02:17] Glenn Gow: Wonderful. Barnard. Barnard. How’s that?

[00:02:21] Jason Barnard: So saying very clearly the names of the people on the show is super important. And on that topic, before we carry on with the CEO Success Blueprint, which I’m super interested in about coaching CEOs, what makes a great CEO? What makes a less great CEO, which I’m obviously aiming to be the former rather than latter.

[00:02:39] I’ll start with Google search results. You have this lovely little Knowledge Panel on the right hand side when I search your name, which looks great. So you look like an authority. Unfortunately, it says author. I would imagine you’d rather it said CEO Coach, and it said specifically what you do.

[00:02:54] Glenn Gow: That’s true.

[00:02:55] Jason Barnard: And when I click on see more, I get this result which looks even better. And one of the things that we do at Kalicube® for our clients is get this result rather less impressive result. By helping Google understand how important you are. Bit like your mother. We make sure that Google thinks you are important. And we were discussing before, I’ve allowed myself to do this is ultimately once these machines Google, AI and so on and so forth understand who you are, what you do, who you serve, and you’re credible, you have the opportunity to get clients through Google, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, when people say, who are the best 10 CEO coaches in the US for a company that makes $5 million a year or more. And then it will list out it’s 10 recommendations.

[00:03:42] It’s a recommendation engine, and this is where you are going. We’re all going. Sorry. And you were saying that you got a client recently through Grok.

[00:03:49] Glenn Gow: That’s right. The first time. So that got me thinking about this thing that you do, Jason, which is how do I influence the LLMs to find and eventually present me as a potential option when people are looking, and it’s not always that they’re looking for a CEO coach.

[00:04:08] They might be trying to solve a particular problem. How do I have a difficult conversation with a senior executive? Could be a question they put out there. What if they found me and my answer? That would be very useful in my opinion because then my brand is now associated with the knowledge and the information they’re looking for.

[00:04:28] Jason Barnard: Yeah, and the huge advantage of recommendation engines like Gemini, ChatGPT, that are having conversations is the person doesn’t need to understand what the solution might be. They can just say, I’ve got this problem, where can I go? Whereas with search, they have to actively know what they’re looking for.

[00:04:46] Here we’ve got a conversation, so it’s so much more powerful. Sorry, go ahead.

[00:04:50] Glenn Gow: No. I was agreeing with you. There are lots of ways people could eventually find me and my question is, how do I take the content that I’m using today, developing today, whether it’s video or written form or otherwise, and enable the LLMs to discover and then use that information in their answers.

[00:05:13] Jason Barnard: It is exactly what you said, discover, digest, and use. And it’s really simple. You build your own personal website if you don’t already have one, you put all of your content on it and you make sure that the machines can find it and digest it so they can use it. And you make sure that you explain everything clearly, who you are, what you do, who you serve, why you’re credible.

[00:05:34] And all of those oblique angles you were talking about, how can I have a difficult conversation with an executive answer all those questions. And the machines will start thinking, Glenn looks like he knows what he’s talking about. I’ll use him as a source of information. Then when somebody asks me for a recommendation, he’s top of mind.

[00:05:52] So you’ve got to think about these machines from that idea. Are you top of mind for the machine? Yes or no? So being top of mind when the critical question bleak or direct comes into a conversation with an AI engine like ChatGPT or Perplexity is the absolute key to the future of search and research online.

[00:06:12] We’ve just spent five minutes talking about my topic. Thank you very much. Now let’s get onto your topic.

[00:06:19] Glenn Gow: Alright. Excellent.

[00:06:22] Jason Barnard: So you’ve seen a lot of CEOs, you’ve coached a lot of CEOs. I think you were also a venture capitalist. I would like to know what number one, what are the qualities and what are the opposite of qualities are, the weaknesses are, the main ones that you see, the ones that come up time again.

[00:06:42] Glenn Gow: For CEOs. Sure. Yeah. So here’s an interesting thing I discovered when I was in venture capital, is that 60% of CEOs get fired within a five year period.

[00:06:54] Jason Barnard: Wow. Oh, I’m at 10 years, but it’s my company.

[00:06:58] Glenn Gow: Excellent. Congratulations. You’re in the minority. But I went deeper. I said, why is that what is happening now? The short answer is they’re not growing revenue quickly enough. Okay, that’s easy. But when you go deeper and you ask, why aren’t they growing revenue enough? It comes down to that CEO is not growing sufficiently.

[00:07:22] They’re not growing out of their skillset. What happens, Jason, is that when venture capitalists put money into a company, that CEO is the right person at that point in time. They have brought the company to that level and convinced investors who are very skeptical buyers to put money into the company.

[00:07:44] Great. Everybody’s happy at that point. Now when once that happens, the money is in the company, the company starts growing. Hopefully in one way or another, it’s going to grow by number of employees, hopefully customers, revenue, et cetera. And when that happens, the role of the CEO changes. And each time the company grows and achieve some milestone, the role actually morphs and changes.

[00:08:11] This is what I learned being a CEO for 25 years.

[00:08:16] Jason Barnard: Just to bring that down. Actually, what my question wasn’t very intelligent because it isn’t, there are specific weaknesses and strengths. It depends where the company is in its process.

[00:08:27] Glenn Gow: Exactly right. Exactly right.

[00:08:30] And what CEOs bring to the party is what I call success patterns. These are literally neural pathways in our brain that have caused us and enabled us to be successful in our life. So when we look at a new challenge, we applied the same success patterns to that challenge. And that works great until it doesn’t.

[00:08:57] And when it doesn’t, that’s when frustration steps in. Now all of a sudden, the CEO is frustrated. Why aren’t we growing fast enough? Why am I having high turnover? Why am I having trouble recruiting the right people? Why am I having issues with my board? It’s because the success patterns I brought are no longer applicable.

[00:09:16] I need new success patterns.

[00:09:19] Jason Barnard: Sorry. And this makes so much sense. I’ve had a lot of coaching over the last year ’cause I realized I’m not a good CEO and in fact it wasn’t, I’m not a good CEO. I’m not a good CEO for the company at the stage it’s at, which is growing sixfold in four years.

[00:09:33] And my skillset wasn’t adapted to that. So I’ve got my coaching, moved up a step, and now we’ve moved another step forwards. And I’m realizing, I need to find a whole new set of skills.

[00:09:45] Glenn Gow: That’s exactly right.

[00:09:46] Jason Barnard: So growing is a problem.

[00:09:49] Glenn Gow: No, it’s an opportunity.

[00:09:51] Jason Barnard: Thank you.

[00:09:52] Glenn Gow: Okay. And what a good coach does, a great coach does is they say, Jason, let me share with you what I see happening.

[00:10:02] Why you’re hitting this wall, why you’re feeling this frustration, and let me give you some tools that will help you step into a different place. And guess what? You’re going to be uncomfortable. Okay. Because you may say, let’s use an example of, you need to have a difficult conversation with a challenging employee.

[00:10:22] And most people are going to try to avoid that. It’s just natural human tendency. We don’t want to have difficult conversations. And yet, as a CEO, it’s your responsibility to have powerful, difficult conversations, but you’re not sure how to do that. A great coach can identify, that’s a challenge you have.

[00:10:39] And show you what to do. Now it’s important, Jason, that you be coachable. And that means taking on something that you wouldn’t otherwise take on being uncomfortable and being okay with that because that’s where you learn, that’s where you grow. And suddenly you now have a superpower. Once you step into that world and you execute against it, even if you stumble and it’s difficult the first time.

[00:11:05] That’s okay. It’s the learning that’s important. This is why Jason, I had a coach, a CEO coach for 17 years. It’s what I call compound interest. After a while, I’d look over my shoulder and say, those problems, those are easy problems to solve. Bring on some new problems.

[00:11:24] Jason Barnard: Oh, I thought you were going to say, for 17 years I had a CEO coach and it was me in the mirror.

[00:11:30] Glenn Gow: Oh, no. I had someone whispering in my ear.

[00:11:35] Jason Barnard: It is amazing how when you are faced with the problem and then you overcome it and then you look back. You think actually that wasn’t such a huge problem, but at the time it seems like this immense wall you’re trying to climb over.

[00:11:48] Glenn Gow: Exactly. The other thing it does is it builds your confidence in being able to solve or address a brand new challenge. Something you’ve never seen before and you realize, I’ve handled so many new things, new challenges, I’ve grown so much in the past. I can figure out how to grow into this next challenge.

[00:12:08] Jason Barnard: Okay. And is the biggest barrier people’s ability to listen or people’s ability to implement?

[00:12:19] Glenn Gow: The biggest barrier is to step out of what’s automatic. And we as humans are very automatic. I would argue that today more than 90% of what you do, Jason is automatic. And that’s a good thing. You do it because it works.

[00:12:42] And you don’t have to think really hard about situations, but it’s particularly difficult when, let’s say you have an interaction with an employee. When they didn’t do what they said they were going to do. And you were depending on them getting that done. What happens in our minds is that you become upset. Rightfully so. It happens in milliseconds. There’s nothing you can do to stop the way you actually feel in that moment, which is upset or angry or some other emotion. The question then is, what do you do once those brain chemicals flood your body and you’re feeling upset? What do you do in that moment?

[00:13:27] Most of us react immediately and we have a conversation expressing our anger, let’s say. The trick is to observe your behavior. To notice, oh, I became angry. And then pause, literally.

[00:13:49] Take a breath. And now what happens literally in your brain is your prefrontal cortex takes over when you pause.

[00:13:57] This is what’s called the executive function.

[00:13:59] Jason Barnard: Right.

[00:14:00] Glenn Gow: And now you say, oh! I remember the last few times I had a conversation when I was angry. It didn’t go so well. So I’m going to try something else.

[00:14:10] I’m going to try maybe being empathetic with that person. I’m going to be curious with that person who didn’t deliver what they said they were going to deliver.

[00:14:19] I’m going to say, please help me understand what happened. And what’s amazing in that situation is now that person, he’s going to interact with you in a much more positive way because if you entered that conversation angry at that individual, they’re going to become defensive.

[00:14:40] And you’re not going to have a good conversation.

[00:14:42] But if you’re curious and you say, please help me understand what happened. Now I have a chance to explain to you that my child broke their arm and I had to take them to the emergency room, and I forgot to tell you that this was happening Jason, and that’s why I’m late. And we can heal these relationships as opposed to break them apart once we pause and we let our more conscious mind take over.

[00:15:15] Jason Barnard: And is human relations the biggest problem? Go ahead.

[00:15:20] Glenn Gow: One of my favorite quotes from one of my CEOs is, Glenn, this job would be so easy if it weren’t for all these humans that report to me. Yes, it is far and away the biggest challenge because humans are difficult to manage. But this is the key to success.

[00:15:40] CEO who focuses on two things. Number one, the number one job of the CEO is to build a great leadership team. Notice I said leadership team, not management. And by leadership team, not only are you hiring people that are better than you at the thing they own.

[00:16:03] You’re hiring people who know how to scale already.

[00:16:08] So that you don’t have to teach everybody how to scale because you want to grow your organization. So number one job is hire a great leadership team. The number two job is to get the most out of that leadership team in terms of productivity.

[00:16:24] And this means understanding human behavior. Understanding what motivates people and how do you lead them to follow you.

[00:16:34] Jason Barnard: Which is one of the hardest things to do because if I’ve got, say, six people in leadership positions with people who work under them. My ability to be empathetic to their way of working and adapt how I am interacting with them to get the most out to them using my knowledge of how they think and act is hugely difficult because we tend to think about how we think and act.

[00:17:00] Glenn Gow: Not only is it difficult, but you also need to operate differently if you want them to follow you with each person. I call it the chameleon effect. You need to operate with this person in a different way to get them to understand what it is you want them to do, to have them motivated to do that, to have them think out of the box to solve the problems that they’re going to encounter every day because they think about the world in a certain way. Whereas over here, you might have a person that doesn’t think in those ways at all, but they’re motivated by other things.

[00:17:36] So you need to adapt to the people on your team because the hardest thing for us to do is what I call human behavior change. We can do it. Okay. We can cause humans to change their behavior, but not easily and not quickly. What’s easier is if you step into a conversation in a different way based on your understanding of how they absorb information.

[00:18:03] Jason Barnard: Which is brilliant. Now I have two more questions. Yeah. Number one is, are there some groups we can put people into IE, let’s say, six buckets of types of person and ways to motivate them that you can just list out for me.

[00:18:18] Glenn Gow: I’m going to answer your question with an anecdote. Okay. First, let me answer your question directly.

[00:18:23] There are many valuable tools to use and I don’t have any favorite. Two of the most common are the DISC profile and Myers-Briggs. Okay. I don’t know if you’re familiar with those. I want to give you an anecdote partially because you and I are very interested in the world of AI.

[00:18:46] So one of my CEOs was having a challenge with his co-founder, and the challenge had to do with culture. The CEO was focused on culture change and they were having a culture change conversation. And as co-founders, technical. The technical person wasn’t really all that interested in the conversation about culture.

[00:19:07] They wanted to talk about technology and so there was a real struggle going on here.

[00:19:12] So my CEO said, Hey, wait a minute. Oh, by the way, they were doing this conversation on Slack. My CEO said, we just did a Myers-Briggs study. I know what my result is INTJ or something like that, and I know what my CTO’s results are something different.

[00:19:36] He fed these into ChatGPT and he said, here’s the conversation we’re having. How can I communicate more effectively with my CTO to get this point across? And he said it was transformational. Immediately, he was able to understand how to communicate using ChatGPT to this individual to get them to actually talk about ultimately, the culture change conversation he wanted to have.

[00:20:06] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Super. I like that anecdote and you can see I’m going, okay. Another question is, can I just ask the person? How would you rather I communicate with you?

[00:20:16] Glenn Gow: If they’re self-aware, yes. So the most common is we have some people like visual, some people like auditory, some people like a combination, some people like to see things written in written form, some want it just verbal. So if people are self-aware, you can ask them and sometimes you’ll hear that. You’ll notice people talk about that sounds good. As opposed to that looks good. That’s an indication that they’re more auditory than visual.

[00:20:53] Now, the majority of the population is visual, but we all have these subtleties. Sometimes you’ll see someone or hear someone say, Hey, can you send that in an email?

[00:21:06] That means they’re going to process more effectively. They don’t even realize it but they’re going to process more effectively if they have a chance to read it.

[00:21:12] And other people don’t want to get an email. Their inbox is already full.

[00:21:16] They’d rather just hear it from you and move on. And so you have to look for these subtle clues ’cause most people are not self-aware about how they receive and act on information.

[00:21:28] Jason Barnard: Yeah. super and sorry. So my role as CEO is to adapt my management style to the person I’m talking to and their role as the leader, as you said earlier on, is to adapt their leadership style to the people they’re talking to below them, and so on and so forth. And that’s a whole fountain.

[00:21:47] Glenn Gow: That’s right. That’s right. And that’s because

[00:21:50] Jason Barnard: pickle down water waterfall was the word. Sorry.

[00:21:52] Glenn Gow: No, that’s exactly right.

[00:21:53] And it’s all about asking your team, do you want to be a more effective leader? Here is a tool. All I’m giving you in this discussion here is a tool. So a tool is what you make of it. And so you ask yourself, can I begin to use this tool in my next conversation? Can I be aware of what’s happening and see if I’m communicating more effectively as a result of using this tool or not? It’s either the tool’s not working or I’m not using the tool well. It’s one or the other, but you practice, you become better at using a tool. You don’t usually become expert at using a tool as you immediately start using it. It takes practice.

[00:22:35] Jason Barnard: Oh, super duper. I think of that self-awareness and now you talk about it. And here’s the last question then, it really is an ongoing situation of self-awareness and being able to regularly take a step back, which is actually very difficult because however much I got myself coached last year and however I was doing last year, two things have happened, or three things actually.

[00:22:57] Number one, my company’s grown.

[00:23:00] Glenn Gow: Congratulations.

[00:23:01] Jason Barnard: Thank you. Number two, I’ve lost sight of the things that I had learned because they start to fade, some of them in my memory. I’m evolving too, and the people I’m working with have evolved as well. So from my perspective, what would you advise me to do to be able to take that step back regularly?

[00:23:20] How often and how do I do it?

[00:23:24] Glenn Gow: My favorite way is to have someone you can talk to, someone who can see the patterns that you are expressing in the way you communicate. So a mentor or a coach or even a colleague, another CEO perhaps. So that’s my favorite way is someone who’s aware of what you’re trying to accomplish and can watch for those things.

[00:23:47] If you don’t have that, then my favorite way is through weekly planning. So sometimes we do quarterly planning, we do monthly planning, but weekly is very effective where you step back and say, okay, who am I going to be interacting with this coming week? What have the experiences been in the past when I’ve worked with these individuals?

[00:24:07] Oh, this person, I just tell them what to do and they go do it. This person, we’re having some struggles.

[00:24:12] So what is it about my behavior that’s enabling those struggles to happen? How can I think about changing? Think first about changing your own behavior before you think about changing other people’s behavior.

[00:24:27] Jason Barnard: Brilliant.

[00:24:28] Thank you. That was absolutely brilliant. I was just thinking, I can think of six people at Kalicube® are going to be very happy to have heard this episode and they’re going to think, yes, our life is going to get significantly easier now. Thank you so much, Glenn. That was brilliant. Thank you everyone for watching.

[00:24:45] See you all next time and a quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Glenn.

[00:24:52] Glenn Gow: So much of a pleasure. Thank you so much.

[00:24:54] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Thank you.

[00:24:55] Narrator: Your Corporate and Personal Brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube®.