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An Excerpt from The Ten Toughest Leadership Problems: And How to Solve Them

by Dr. Katie Best

An excerpt from The Ten Toughest Leadership Problems by Dr. Katie Best, published by Basic Venture and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Leadership & Management category.

As an executive coach, Dr. Katie Best has helped countless leaders achieve powerful results. But getting the right coaching isn’t always possible, whether because the problem is too urgent or because the resources aren’t there. That’s when leaders can turn to this book.
 
The Ten Toughest Leadership Problems and How to Solve Them is an essential self-coaching handbook for leaders at any level. Best helps leaders struggling to avoid burnout, make good decisions, increase influence within their organization, align with or shift a company’s culture, improve employee performance, engage staff, manage teams, implement strategy, lead change, and navigate the hybrid workplace. Her SOLVE framework breaks problem-solving into five manageable steps: state the problem, to untangle complex, interrelated issues; open the box, to gather information; lay out the solution, to make a plan to fix the problem; venture forth, to put that plan into action; and elevate your learning, to further develop relevant skills.
 
The product of two decades of coaching and executive education work, this practical book equips leaders with the tools they need to solve these ten common problems and any other tough challenges they may face.

The Ten Toughest Leadership Problems was longlisted in the Leadership & Management category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is adapted from the book's Introduction.

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WHY YOU NEED THIS BOOK 

Because I am a leadership coach and consultant who’s been working with leaders for nearly two decades, it’s typical for me to open my emails or LinkedIn and find a message from someone I’ve worked with before but haven’t heard from for ages. Sometimes, they’re just saying hi. Other times, they’re wanting to chat about some new leadership problem they have run into that they need some help with. 

This means it wasn’t a surprise when one day, about five years ago, I received a “hello from the past” message from Simon. Simon was someone I’d worked wit about a decade before, when he was responsible for business development for the business school I was then working for, and I was designing the programs he was (very successfully) trying to sell. 

When he emailed me, as well as having moved companies a few times, he had moved up the ranks considerably and was now for the first time at C-suite level as the chief commercial officer in an organization selling consultancy and training. Throughout the intervening period, he’d done very well for himself. We went for coffee, and he reminded me why I’d enjoyed working with him before: he was friendly, very capable, and funny. I was happy he’d gotten back in touch. Initially, it was to ask me to coach him and some members of his team. I was very happy to. 

However, this was during a good period for the company—things were going well. They were in a business where things could change quickly, and two months later, things were going less well and now the company couldn’t afford coaching anymore. But Simon felt very frustrated—he could have coaching when everything was going well and he barely needed it, but as soon as things were difficult and he needed more help on how to motivate his team through the tough patch, and how to talk about strategy and change, and his team members needed more help on how to be resilient, there was no budget available for coaching! He was incredibly frustrated as, when he took on the C-suite role, they knew he was new to this level and he had been promised support. But now, if he wanted coaching, he would have to go through a lengthier justification process, pitching for the money that no longer sat in his budget. He feared that, by the time he got the coaching agreed, he would have made many suboptimal decisions as he tried to solve the problems flying at him as a result of the downturn in the market and of being new. 

That’s the irony of leadership coaching—many of the people who need it the most can’t access it—their companies won’t pay, or can’t afford to pay. Or their companies are willing and able to support the coaching, but by the time the sign-off is given by a boss, and then HR, and then a purchase order is raised, and a contract is signed, the problem is worse, has headed off in a totally different direction, or has disappeared but without the leader learning how to handle it and fearing it coming back. It’s hard for Simon, and people like Simon, to get leadership coaching because companies don’t always understand the value that it adds—it’s expensive, and it’s hard to prove through numbers how much it adds to the bottom line. What was coaching, what was luck, and what would have happened anyway? And yet leaders who experience great coaching speak highly of it, many of them seeing it as critical to their success. 

And it’s not just about not being able to access help through a leadership coach. It can often feel like drawing attention to your weaknesses if you admit that you need help. In organizations with cultures that are reticent to admit problems, doing so can make you look like a poor performer (when you’re probably just more honest!). Leaders write in to Dear Katie—my newsletter advice column—with a tough problem for which they feel they are receiving no organizational support. They receive an answer without having to admit to anyone else what problem they are facing. 

There are lots of reasons then: a lack of budget, time pressure, a sense of failure if they admit that they need help, which means that leadership can feel very lonely. They can’t admit to problems, they can’t ask for support from their organizations, and they can’t work out how to handle a situation they haven’t faced before. 

But don’t worry! It’s not all doom and gloom. What you are holding in your hands (or listening to on your headphones) is here to help you and others like you to handle your leadership problems. This book is going to support you as you figure out what’s going on, what your possible solutions are, and how to choose one that fits your environment. Because the solution that is right for the CEO of a ten-person human rights charity may be quite different from the solution that’s right for the store manager of a coffee shop or the HR director of a large accounting firm. It’s going to help you figure out what further problems you could run into when you try to implement your solution and how to handle them. And, excitingly, it’s going to show you how you can leverage the new skills you learn to improve your leadership ability well beyond the point of where you are now. 

 

Excerpted from The Ten Toughest Leadership Problems by Dr. Katie Best, published by Basic Venture. Copyright © 2025 by Katie Best. All rights reserved. 

 

About the Author

Dr. Katie Best is the founder and director of KatieBest Associates, a leadership development consultancy that works with leaders at companies including EY, Goldman Sachs, and Verizon. She leads the MBA Essentials executive education program at the London School of Economics, and is a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London, where she earned her PhD in management. She lives in London. 

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