• A row of identical service trucks parked outside industrial garages at sunrise.

When Drive Becomes the Blind Spot: A Founder Examines His Own Leadership

Introduction

Most case studies describe a client. This one describes the founder of Spirit of EQ. Jim Vaive co-founded Varment Guard in Columbus in 1983 and led it for thirty-eight years, growing it to several hundred employees and a place among the top hundred companies in its industry nationally. The engagement documented here is his own: a decade of emotional intelligence certification and contemplative formation, undertaken after the growth years rather than during them. We publish it first among our case studies because it is the one where we can name the company, the behavior and the cost without protecting anyone. The pattern it documents is the one we encounter most often in senior leaders — a leader whose account of himself is coherent, sincere, and wrong in one consistent direction.

A weathered wooden beam above an open workshop door, sunlight falling through to the yard beyond.

Background Story

Two people opened a pest control and wildlife management company in Columbus in January 1983, after eight months of preparation, with a sentence painted above the door: Failure is not an option. That sentence ran the company for the better part of four decades. Varment Guard grew to several hundred employees and a fleet of roughly ninety black-and-gold trucks, kept deliberately identical for brand recognition. For the ten years preceding its sale it ranked among the top hundred companies in its industry nationally. Its founder presented eleven times to the National Pest Control Association, served on the Columbus Chamber of Commerce Small Business Council, and was nominated by the Chamber for the 2016 U.S. Small Business Administration Small Business Person of the Year. By the measures a business is usually judged by, the leadership worked.

An office at night seen through a partly open door, a single desk lamp still lit.

Challenges

The challenge was never performance. It was a gap that is structurally invisible to the person inside it:

  • A divided account of the same behavior: Jim experienced his drive as discipline. The people working for him experienced it as pressure they could not put down. Both described the same conduct, and only one description was available to him.
  • Certainty instead of confusion: He was never unsure of himself. He had an answer ready — high standards, accountability, commitment to the work. The explanations were sincere and wrong in one consistent direction: each made him the reasonable person in the story.
  • No felt signal: A leader failing in this way experiences no internal alarm, so nothing prompts correction. The behavior was visible to everyone. Where it landed was invisible to him alone.
  • Results that concealed the cost: Growth, national ranking and recognition all confirmed the approach, which made the unexamined strength harder to question rather than easier.

The Solutions

No workshop addresses this, and Spirit of EQ does not sell one that claims to. The sequence that did the work ran over roughly a decade, in two stages:

  • Emotional intelligence certification: Beginning with Six Seconds in 2014 and continuing through practitioner certification and Master Classes in Tuscany, Silicon Valley, Mexico City and Thailand, followed by five and a half years as Six Seconds Regional Network Director for North America alongside Lynette Vaive.
  • The limit of vocabulary: EQ training produced language for what he was feeling. It was necessary and insufficient. Nothing he had to face was a feeling he had failed to label.
  • Contemplative formation: Centering prayer training in 2017, the Jesus Prayer and Franciscan practice, seventeen years of his own spiritual direction, formal training in spiritual direction at the Haden Institute, and certification as a Narrative Enneagram teacher.
  • The missing instrument: Emotional intelligence can name a feeling. It has no mechanism for the distance between what a leader believes is happening in him and what is in fact happening in him. Closing that distance requires sustained interior attention that EQ frameworks do not contain.

That combination — emotional intelligence joined to contemplative self-knowledge — is the framework Spirit of EQ now teaches as Spiritual Emotional Intelligence, organized around Awareness, Belonging and Insight. It is not theoretical. It is a description of what this engagement actually required.

Outcomes and Data

The changes here are behavioral and specific rather than statistical:

  • Hearing a no: He registers a refusal the first time it is said. He previously did not.
  • Silence without steering: He can stay with a client in silence rather than guiding them toward a conclusion he has already reached.
  • Catching the protective certainty: He recognizes, usually in the moment, when conviction about another person is defending a position of his own rather than describing that person.
  • Treating strength as unfinished: He no longer regards a strength as settled because it has produced results. An unexamined strength is the one most likely to transmit something downward that its owner cannot see.
  • Abandoning force of will: He no longer believes people can be pulled along by it — the conclusion Jim Collins reached through research and Jim reached through consequence.
  • The work that followed: Master Certified Coach (ICF, 2021), Certified Spiritual Director, Certified Narrative Enneagram Teacher, and more than ninety emotional intelligence trainings delivered with Lynette Vaive.

What these results do not say. The company’s growth and national standing preceded the formation work and are not attributed to it. Nor is the harm undone. Jim’s drive was not fair to the people in the room. Most have gone on to successful lives in spite of him, and a few are still bitter, and they have the right to be. We include that because it is the finding rather than an aside to it. The harm was never intentional — unexamined leadership does not feel like harm from the inside. It feels like standards.

Conclusion

A competent, well-regarded leader with a coherent account of his own behavior can be the only person in the room who cannot see what that behavior costs. Emotional intelligence supplies the language for it. Contemplative practice supplies the access to it. Most of the leaders we work with are somewhere inside the version of this story that is still invisible to them, and the earlier it becomes visible, the less it costs the people around them. If any of this sounds close to your own situation, we would be glad to talk it through with you.

Book a conversation. Schedule a sixty-minute conversation with Jim Vaive at calendly.com/jim-792/60min, or email him at jim@spiritofeq.com.