With two teaching-focused degrees, I knew that the hardest problems are people problems and that those are best addressed with better training. So when my friend Jeromy approached me in 2014 with an idea for a new online learning platform, I got onboard.
We founded Niche Academy, and over the next decade, helped hundreds of organizations deliver better training. But as we worked with more teams, another problem kept surfacing—one that no existing training was solving.
It had to do with leadership.
Specifically, it was the weird tension leaders feel when two necessary things seem to pull in opposite directions.
Take accountability and empathy, for example. Both are necessary, but most leaders found it hard to do both. Some leaders were wonderfully empathetic… and allergic to accountability. Others enforced accountability with the tenderness of a freight train.
Consider the need for clear direction AND collaboration. Some leaders gave clear direction but paid little attention to ideas that weren't their own. Others were so collaborative that teams wondered who was in charge. No one was helping leaders navigate the need to do both.
In both of these examples, leaders are trying to do one right thing—and paying a price for neglecting the opposite right thing. That’s paradox.
And once we saw the pattern, we couldn’t unsee it. But when we looked for training that tackled paradox directly, we came up short. Every program we found either sidestepped the issue or gave it a polite nod on page 17 of the workbook.
So we built our own.
At first, we tried bundling it into our training software subscription. The value got lost somewhere between “click here” and “export CSV.” Worse, the people who needed the training most didn’t always need our software.
We pivoted. We simplified. We packaged it all together. One-size-fits-all, we told ourselves. Turns out: it fit no one very well, so we pivoted again to make it more flexible.
But the most daunting open question remained: the leadership development space is filled with giants. How could we possibly have seen something they’d missed?
I remember standing nervously in our first LPC booth at a conference, waiting for someone to ask what we did. A seasoned trainer finally stopped and gave me the look that says, “You’ve got about six seconds.”
I started with questions about her leadership challenges. She was kind enough to share and then let me link them to solutions based in paradox-aware leadership.
As we spoke I watched her expression shift. From skepticism. To curiosity. Then recognition. At last, her eyes lit up. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what we need.”
That moment was all the permission we needed.
The Leadership Progress Cycle was built to help leaders recognize and navigate the paradoxes they live with every day. Not through fluff. Not through jargon. Through simple, real-world tools that make leadership feel a little less like guessing and a lot more like growth.
It’s the training I wish I’d had.
And it’s the training I’m proud to offer now.
— Jared Oates
Founder, The Leadership Progress Cycle
