I had the privilege of working closely with Jeff McCord when he hired me to serve as Director of Coaching for Your Enneagram Coach. Over that time, I got to know Jeff not only as a leader and colleague, but as a friend. And one of the highest compliments I can give him is this: Jeff is the same leader backstage as he is front stage.

What you see is what you get.

Jeff is a high-trust, high-performing, emotionally healthy leader. He creates environments where people feel both deeply valued and called to do excellent work. A lot of leaders tend to lean heavily toward either people or tasks—they can care for people but struggle to execute, or they can drive results while leaving people behind. Jeff is unusually gifted at both.

He genuinely loves people, and he knows how to get things done.

One of Jeff’s greatest strengths is his ability to live at the intersection of vision and execution. He can see the big picture, think strategically about where an organization needs to go, and then translate that vision into practical systems, priorities, and action. That combination makes him an exceptional executive-level leader.

Jeff also has an incredibly broad range as a coach and consultant. I’ve watched him move seamlessly from one-on-one coaching and pastoral care to couples work, team development, mediation and peacemaking, organizational strategy, and business growth. He has the emotional intelligence to sit with someone in a deeply personal moment and the strategic intelligence to sit at an executive table and help leaders solve complex organizational problems.

And he is brilliant at both.

But what I appreciate most about Jeff isn't simply what he can do. It’s who he is while he does it. He is humble, curious, thoughtful, emotionally present, and deeply committed to the people he leads. He doesn't use people to accomplish a vision; he develops people as he accomplishes it.

If I were building an organization and looking for an executive-level leader who could help shape vision, build healthy culture, develop people, navigate conflict, create strategy, and actually execute, Jeff would be one of the first people I would call.

I trust him deeply. I loved working with him. And I would gladly do it again.

Jeff brought me in as a consultant to help launch the Complete Enneagram Leadership Coaching System, his certification program for people who wanted to become coaches in business environments. We collaborated closely on the go-to-market strategy: positioning, messaging, launch frameworks, sequencing, paid acquisition, and the funnel. Just as importantly, we worked to make sure the product actually delivered on what the marketing promised.

The thing I remember most about working with Jeff is how he thinks. He asks some of the best questions of anyone I've worked with, the kind that cut straight to the core of a problem and pull the whole conversation into focus.

One defining moment came when we identified the deeper customer problem together. These coaches didn't just want more training; they wanted to build viable businesses and generate real income as coaches. That insight changed how we positioned the offer. But Jeff didn't stop with the marketing. When I challenged him that the product itself needed to deliver on that promise, he went back and built that capability into the system. That's a good example of how Jeff works: he connects what the market needs with what the business actually has to build and deliver.

Jeff understands the disciplines behind successful go-to-market strategy and knows how to work with specialists to turn those ideas into execution. He takes feedback seriously and puts it to work quickly. With this project, he took deep subject-matter expertise and helped turn it into a clear, compelling offer for a well-defined market.

What makes Jeff unusual is the combination: he can see the strategic opportunity, ask the questions that bring clarity, assemble the right expertise, and then build the systems needed to deliver on the promise.

Any organization looking for a senior leader who can turn ideas and expertise into scalable products, teams, and systems would benefit from having Jeff at the table.

I spent years next to Jeff as his COO and Chief of Staff at YEC.

One of his major strengths is how he handled the moments where there wasn't an obvious answer. When GDPR and the broader wave of privacy changes hit, we watched page views drop, click through rates soften, and email deliverability get shakier almost overnight, with no clear playbook for what to do about it. Jeff didn't pretend to have it figured out, and he didn't freeze either. He pulled the leadership team in, pushed us to actually understand what was happening in the data instead of guessing, and made the call on how to adjust our marketing and email strategy once he had enough clarity, even though the ground was still shifting under us.

What made that possible was how he worked with the people around him. He wanted to be told the truth, even when it wasn't flattering, and he made it safe to do that.

For someone considering Jeff for a senior leadership role, I'd say this: he's the kind of leader who brings calm and clarity to the moments that would rattle most people, and he builds the kind of team around him that can handle the next hard moment too.