After Forty Years Advising Executives, Dr. Marilyn Puder-York Reached a Different Conclusion About Leadership

After more than four decades advising senior executives, physicians, attorneys and organizational leaders, psychologist Dr. Marilyn Puder-York has reached a conclusion that challenges conventional thinking about leadership development. Her career included serving as a Vice President who led Citigroup's Employee Assistance Program, where she helped leaders navigate organizational change, workplace conflict and the pressures of significant responsibility. Long before emotional intelligence became a boardroom buzzword, she was already helping executives understand the human side of leadership.

But Puder-York says many people misunderstood her work. "People assumed I was helping executives become better leaders," she explains. "What interested me was helping people better understand themselves. Leadership was simply where that work became visible." The distinction matters because organizations typically invest heavily in teaching leadership techniques while giving far less attention to self-awareness. Puder-York's experience suggests that approach may be backwards.

Her clients rarely sought greater self-awareness. Usually, something wasn't working: a struggling leadership team, an unresolved decision, or professional demands following someone home. After thousands of such conversations, she noticed a pattern. Before people could lead others more effectively, they often had to understand themselves with greater honesty. The management lessons people expected were sometimes the smallest part of the conversation. What mattered more was what the person across from her began to understand about themselves.

That insight led to a core belief: organizations rarely become healthier than the people who lead them. This conviction followed her through decades of clinical practice, executive coaching and consulting. Her work attracted national attention, with features in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, CNN, NBC, CBS and Fox. She advised leaders across healthcare, finance, higher education and corporate America, and authored The Office Survival Guide. Yet those accomplishments aren't what she remembers most.

Again and again, Puder-York watched accomplished professionals arrive convinced they needed a better strategy, only to discover they were confronting habits, assumptions or fears that had shaped their work for years. Helping someone recognize one of those patterns could matter far more than offering another management technique. Asked what motivated her, she is direct: "I want to add value. The value generally is not my own narcissism." For Puder-York, recognition was never particularly interesting. Clarity was.

Today, she considers herself largely retired, with a lighter calendar and more selective about the work she accepts. But she hasn't lost interest in people or their problems. "I've worked very hard. I still care deeply about helping people. I just don't believe I have to live at the same pace to make a meaningful contribution," she says.

Her perspective feels particularly relevant now, as burnout, workplace well-being and emotionally healthy leadership dominate organizational conversations. Puder-York believes some of those conversations still begin in the wrong place. Organizations spend enormous energy teaching people how to lead others, while far less attention is given to helping leaders understand themselves. When she looks back, she doesn't measure her career by the number of executives coached, organizations advised or titles held. She thinks about what happened after meetings ended: someone returned to work seeing a situation differently, a conversation that had been avoided finally happened, a difficult decision was approached with more self-awareness. Those moments were difficult to quantify, but they were often the ones that mattered.

For more than forty years, Marilyn Puder-York was known as an executive coach and psychologist. Today, she describes the work more simply: helping people better understand themselves so they could better serve the people who depended on them. That shift in emphasis may be her most enduring leadership lesson.