The Day I Asked to Be Let Go and What the Five Temptations Taught Me About Leading Right
There is a book that has sat on my shelf, and in my conscience, for years. Patrick Lencioni's The Five Temptations of a CEO is deceptively slim, but its weight is enormous. It confronts something most executives quietly struggle with: the quiet, insidious ways we prioritize the wrong things, our comfort, our reputation, our peace, over the results and people we were put there to serve. I have thought about those five temptations at every critical inflection point in my career. None more so than during the 2008 recession.
I was in a leadership role when the financial crisis began reshaping entire industries overnight. Companies were cutting everything they could reach. Our organization was no different. Layoffs were on the table. And I did something that still feels visceral when I recall it. I walked into my boss's office and asked him to let me go instead of members of my team.
“Let me go. Save the team. I will land on my feet and they might not.”
That was not bravado. It came from somewhere much deeper, from growing up poor in a small Central American country, where resilience was not a leadership concept, it was just survival. I knew in my bones that I could find another way forward. What I was not certain of was whether every person on my team had that same margin for error. So I asked him to protect them.
My boss, my mentor and now a lifelong friend, looked at me and said something I was not ready to hear: it is not your choice, and this decision is purely what the business requires. He was not going to let me go. The organization needed someone who could absorb the volume of what was coming, handle the complexity, and keep things moving, and that was me. The decision had nothing to do with sentiment. It was about function and results.
I will not pretend I received that gracefully. I was upset. Genuinely sick to my stomach. I had made an offer I considered selfless, and it had been declined not with gratitude but with clarity. It felt, in that moment, like the wrong answer.
But he was right. And Lencioni's framework helped me eventually understand exactly why.
The Five Temptations
For those unfamiliar with Lencioni's work, the five temptations are the traps that pull leaders away from what actually matters, usually toward what protects them rather than the organization:
Temptation 01Choosing Status Over Results
Protecting your position and reputation rather than driving the outcomes the organization needs. Leadership becomes about how you look, not what gets done.
Temptation 02Choosing Popularity Over Accountability
Wanting to be liked by your peers more than holding them, and yourself, to a high standard. Difficult conversations get deferred. Culture quietly erodes.
Temptation 03Choosing Certainty Over Clarity
Waiting for perfect information before making decisions. The need to be right paralyzes an organization that needs direction now.
Temptation 04Choosing Harmony Over Productive Conflict
Avoiding the hard conversations that produce real alignment. False peace is more comfortable and far more dangerous than honest tension.
Temptation 05Choosing Invulnerability Over Trust
Refusing to admit uncertainty or ask for help. The leader who never shows a crack never builds the trust that gets teams through genuine crises.
What I Almost Got Wrong
When I look back at 2008 with honest eyes, I can see the trap I nearly fell into. My offer to step aside felt like sacrifice, and part of it genuinely was. But part of it was also the comfort of a noble exit. The clean resolution. The story where I get to be the one who gave something up and walked away with my integrity intact.
My boss saw something I could not see from inside the emotion of the moment: that staying, grinding, and leading through the worst of it was the harder and more necessary thing. Choosing to leave would have protected my feelings while leaving the organization exposed. That is Temptation One in disguise, dressing up self-protection as selflessness.
What he asked of me instead was to subordinate my discomfort to the needs of the business. To accept that the decision was not mine to make. To choose results over the comfort of a graceful exit. That is the opposite of what Lencioni warns against, and it is, frankly, one of the most difficult things a leader can be asked to do.
I stayed. I was angry for a while. And then I got to work.
The Result, Years LaterA few years after that conversation, I took the reins as CFO of that same company and led it back from the brink of bankruptcy into profitability. The turnaround was real, the numbers moved, and the jobs that could have been lost were saved. Not because I was the hero of the story, but because I stayed in it long enough to do the work that mattered.
That outcome was only possible because a good leader made the right call in a painful moment, and because I eventually trusted it enough to fully commit. The confidence my mentor placed in me was not flattery. It was a demand. And demands like that are how leaders are forged.
I think about that often now, especially when I am sitting across from a business owner or executive team navigating their own version of a crisis. The temptations Lencioni describes do not announce themselves. They show up dressed as principle, as wisdom, as concern for others. The work is learning to see them clearly and choosing the harder right over the easier comfortable.
A Question Worth Sitting With
I share this story not to hold myself up as an example, but because most of us who have been in leadership long enough have our own version of this moment. A time when one of Lencioni's five temptations quietly pulled us in the wrong direction, sometimes without us even realizing it.
Maybe it was choosing harmony over a conversation that genuinely needed to happen. Maybe it was deferring a decision because you needed more certainty than the moment could afford. Maybe it was protecting your own comfort when the organization needed you fully in the arena.
The temptations are always there. The question is whether we are honest enough to name them.
Which of the five temptations has gotten the best of you lately?
