The Leadership Trait That Wins Championships and Kills Consulting Dependency

You're paying because honesty has become too expensive for insiders.

Nick Saban didn't have political cover.

Every decision he made was second-guessed by millions of people with opinions and access to a keyboard. He benched five-star recruits on national television. He cut team captains. He told boosters worth hundreds of millions to stay in their lane. His win/loss record was public. His salary was public. His every move was dissected by sports radio hosts and online analysts who never coached a practice.

People assume coaches like Saban operate from positions of strength. In reality, they operate from positions of significant exposure. Every decision faces public scrutiny. Every failure gets documented. Every Saturday delivers a verdict.

Curt Cignetti walked into Indiana, a program where losing was the identity. Across the first 136 seasons, Indiana had an overall winning percentage of just .418. Never recorded a single 10-win season. Spent only seven total weeks ranked in the AP Top 25. The entire history of the program.

On his first day, Cignetti looked players and staff in the eye and said: what you've been doing isn't good enough. He had no political cover. No accumulated goodwill. No relationships to cash in. Just the willingness to name reality and deal with the consequences.

Two years later, he won a national championship.

So here's the question that may bother many executives: why do Saban and Cignetti say hard things directly, while your organization needs to hire a consulting firm to say what everyone already knows?

The answer reveals something uncomfortable about how most companies actually work.

What Consulting Really Buys

Most executives believe they hire consultants for expertise. Frameworks. Best practices. An outside perspective.

Sometimes that's true. Real expertise exists. Pattern recognition from seeing the same problems across dozens of companies has genuine value. I've written before about what you're really paying for when Big Four shows up, and the partners with decades of experience watching transformations succeed and fail do bring something internal teams can't replicate.

But there's another reason companies hire consultants. One that gets discussed less often.

You hire consultants because your organization has accumulated years of political debt. Social contracts that make honesty expensive for insiders. Relationships where telling the truth costs more than staying quiet. Sacred cows that everyone knows are broken but nobody can touch because the person who built them is still powerful.

The consultant doesn't always know more than your best people. They just don't owe anyone anything yet.

McKinsey research shows that only 26% of leaders display behaviors that instill psychological safety at work. That means 74% of organizations have environments where speaking up carries risk. Where employees calculate the cost of candor before opening their mouths. Where the truth is known but not safe to say.

That twenty-something from McKinsey? She's not necessarily braver than your VP of Operations. She just isn't bound by the same rules. She has a shield that didn't protect the two people who were sidelined for disagreeing with the CEO. She isn't worried about which topics are career-ending to raise. She doesn't have to sustain working relationships that would fracture when she names the obvious.

In those moments, you're buying someone with a clean political balance sheet.

The Moment You Know

My guess is that most executives reading this have had this moment at some point in your career.

You knew what needed to be said. You saw the problem clearly. You had the solution. And then you did the math.

Who built this process? What's their level? How much political capital do they have? Who would I need to convince? What happened to the last person who raised this? What's the upside if I'm right? What's the downside if I'm wrong? What's the downside if I'm right but the timing is off?

So you stayed quiet. You watched the problem get worse. You watched someone else get hired to eventually say it. You may have even gotten blamed when it finally broke.

You responded rationally to the incentives in front of you. That's organizational physics.

People respond to incentives. Most companies spend years, sometimes decades, accidently incentivizing silence over candor. Promoting people who don't make waves. Punishing people who name problems without also having solutions. Creating cultures where disagreeing with leadership is technically allowed but practically expensive. And, even if you've done a great job of eliminating that culture, your new hires may bring that baggage with them.

The consultants who show up aren't braver than you. They just haven't been trained yet.

What Saban and Cignetti Actually Have

Saban got fired from the Miami Dolphins. Cignetti spent years building a track record at schools nobody paid attention to. They've both experienced the downside of leadership decisions made public.

They kept making those decisions anyway.

What elite coaches possess is clarity about what winning requires and willingness to absorb the cost of saying it.

When Saban benches a five-star recruit, he's not doing it because it's easy. He's doing it because he's calculated that the cost of playing someone who isn't ready is higher than the cost of angry parents, recruiting implications, and locker room politics. He's made a judgment about what winning actually requires and decided the political cost is worth paying.

When Cignetti tells a team that losing is no longer acceptable, he's not protected by tenure or relationships. He's exposed. If it doesn't work, everyone will know. His record will show it. His next job opportunity will reflect it.

It worked. He engineered a 7.5-game improvement from Indiana's 2023 to 2024 season, the fourth-best improvement by a first-year head coach since 1996 and the best by a Power 4 coach since 2012. The next year? His team went 16-0 and he won it all.

Elite coaches accept the exposure. Most corporate leaders optimize for protection. That gap explains a lot about why consultants stay busy.

The Courage Deficit

Here's what I've observed across twenty years in corporate environments, from the Air Force to Fortune 500s: organizations develop courage deficits the same way they develop technical debt.

Every time someone stays quiet to avoid conflict, the deficit grows. Every time someone regrets raising an uncomfortable truth, the deficit compounds. Every time a sacred cow survives because nobody wants to fight that battle, the interest accrues.

After enough time, the deficit is so large that internal people can't afford to pay it. The balance is too high. The relationships are too entangled. The political cost of honesty exceeds what any individual can absorb.

That's when you call the consultant.

Not always because they're smarter. Sometimes because you need someone without accumulated debts to clear the backlog.

The Uncomfortable Math

Let's do the calculation most executives avoid.

That consulting engagement you're planning? The one where you bring in outsiders to assess the situation, identify opportunities, and make recommendations? Start by asking: does my internal team already know the answer?

Often, they do.

Your senior people have seen the problems. They've discussed them in private. They've complained about them after hours. They've proposed solutions in memos that went nowhere. They've watched new executives arrive with fresh eyes, identify the same issues, and eventually learn to stop talking about them.

The consultant's "discovery phase" often reveals what your organization already knows but can't say. You're paying to hear your own insights from someone your organization will believe.

That's expensive. Not just in dollars. In signal.

Every time you bring in outsiders to say what insiders already know, you're telling your best people: honesty is expensive here. You're confirming that the path to influence runs through external validation, not internal courage. You're training your high potentials to save their observations for their next employer.

The Smart Way to Use Consultants

The best executives use consulting engagements as leadership development.

They're intentional about it. They tell their high potentials exactly what's happening: I'm bringing in outside help to clear political debt you shouldn't have to spend this early in your career. I want you working alongside them. Help get the answers right. When the dust settles, you take the internal win and the relationships. They leave. You stay with more credibility than you started with.

That's how you use consultants to build leaders instead of creating dependency.

The partner at McKinsey doesn't stay. Your VP does. If the VP is the one who worked with the consultants, synthesized their findings, translated them into your culture, and drove the implementation, the VP gets the credit and the credibility. The consulting engagement becomes a leadership accelerator instead of an admission of internal failure.

The executives who do this well ask themselves: who on my team is ready to grow their political capital? Who needs the cover of external validation to take the next step? How can I structure this engagement so the outside help amplifies my people instead of replacing their voice? And most importantly, who am I willing to take on some heat for if this doesn't work out?

The Real Stakes

This isn't just about consulting fees. It's about what you're building.

Every time you hire someone external to say what your internal team already knows, you're making a choice about culture. You're signaling that honesty requires external protection. You're confirming that the way to get heard is to leave and come back with a business card from a firm that costs $500 an hour.

Your best people are watching.

Some will leave. They'll go somewhere their insights don't require external validation. They'll find organizations where naming problems earns respect instead of political cost.

Some will stay and adapt. They'll learn to play the game. They'll save their real observations for the consultants who will eventually ask. They'll become experts at knowing what to say in which room.

Some will just wait. They'll disengage. They'll stop offering insights because offering insights hasn't worked. They'll collect their paycheck and save their energy for outside-of-work activities where their judgment is valued.

None of those outcomes are what you want.

Building What Saban Has

Sometimes you need outside help. Sometimes the political debt is too high to clear internally. Sometimes speed matters more than culture building. Sometimes you genuinely need expertise you don't have.

The goal is to build organizations where you don't always need outside help to hear the truth.

That means rewarding people who disagree. Not just tolerating disagreement, actively rewarding it. Promoting people who raised uncomfortable truths. Celebrating the kill of sacred cows by internal teams.

That means protecting builders from political operators. When someone attacks a high performer using minor gaps as ammunition, executives need to recognize what's happening and defend the builder. The signal you send in those moments matters more than any values statement.

That means being honest about the cost of honesty. If raising problems in your organization is politically expensive, acknowledge it. Don't pretend you have an open culture while punishing people who test it. Either fix the incentives or be honest about what they are.

Both Saban and Cignetti built cultures where players knew the standard and knew the consequences. The best players wanted that clarity. They chose to be in an environment where performance mattered more than politics, where the truth was told early and directly, where hiding from problems wasn't an option.

You can build that same culture in a company. It just requires the same thing it required from Saban and Cignetti: willingness to be exposed rather than protected.

The Questions Worth Asking

Before your next consulting engagement, ask yourself:

Does my internal team already know what the consultants are going to find?

If yes, why can't they say it? What would it cost them? What's the political debt that's preventing internal truth-telling?

Can I structure this engagement to build my people instead of replacing their voice?

Who on my team should be alongside the consultants, building credibility and relationships that stay after the engagement ends?

What would it take to make this the last time I need outside help to hear what's already known?

The real question isn't whether to hire consultants. It's what you're building that makes consultants necessary.

The answer usually isn't about frameworks or expertise. It's about courage: the organizational courage to hear hard truths from people who have to live with the consequences.

Saban and Cignetti built that by accepting exposure instead of seeking protection. They created environments where the truth was told because the cost of silence was worse than the discomfort of hearing it.

You can build that too. Start with one decision: the next time someone tells you an uncomfortable truth, reward them for it. Visibly. In a way that everyone watching understands.

That's how you start paying down the courage deficit.

FAQ

Why do organizations keep hiring consultants if internal teams already know the problems? Organizations accumulate political debt over time. Social contracts, relationships, and power dynamics make it expensive for insiders to name uncomfortable truths. Consultants provide a clean political balance sheet: they can say things that would cost internal people too much to say themselves.

What's the difference between needing consultant expertise and needing consultant permission? Expertise means you genuinely lack knowledge or pattern recognition and need outside insight. Permission means you have the expertise internally but can't access it due to organizational dynamics. The former requires knowledge; the latter requires someone without political debts.

How can executives use consulting engagements to develop internal leaders? Be intentional about including high-potential internal leaders in the engagement. Let them work alongside consultants, help shape recommendations, and take credit for implementation. The consultants leave with a fee; your people stay with increased credibility and political capital.