I was Trained to Solve Technical Problems.
People Showed Me What Matters.

By Kursten Faller

I started my career as a highly trained engineer, and if I am honest, I chose that path in part because it allowed me to avoid dealing with people. The work was technical, logical, and predictable, and you could rely on systems, models, and data to get to the right answer.

That worked well until it did not.

At first, working with others was manageable. Teammates were solving similar problems and thinking in similar ways. The real shift came when I moved into a leadership role and became responsible for managing people, and that is where I hit the wall.

I remember being genuinely surprised that people did not think like me. They did not want to push as hard, work late, or grind through problems to hit deadlines. The more pressure I applied, the more resistance I encountered. What I thought was commitment and drive was experienced by others as intensity and friction. At one point, an administrative assistant was uncomfortable even coming to my desk to drop off mail, and it later turned out she was a distant cousin and we had nearly attended the same family reunion. That moment stayed with me.

The strange part was that I was still getting results, in many cases very strong financial results. But I was getting them through force, through effort, and through what I can only describe as sheer determination. At the same time, the multinational organization I was working in was struggling, and I could see projects all around me that were underperforming or failing outright.

It took me time to understand what was happening. This is what I now refer to as the fake superstar. Someone who delivers visible results, often impressive ones, but does so in a way that creates friction, burnout, and damage around them. The outcomes look strong on the surface, but underneath there is a trail of strain that the system eventually has to absorb.

At the time, I could see the results, but I could not yet see the cost.

 

"The strange part was that I was still getting results, in many cases very strong financial results. But I was getting them through force, through effort, and through what I can only describe as sheer determination."

I refused to let go of my systems view of the world, so I assumed there had to be more to the system than I could see. I went after every course and certification I could find. Project management, risk management, program management, portfolio management. My list of credentials kept growing. Each one added something useful, but none of them solved the problem. Projects were still hard, execution was still heavy, and results still required force.

After nearly a decade of working this way, I realized I was not going to find the answer inside that environment. It was deeply engineering focused, not human focused, and surrounded by people who thought the same way I did. So I left and started my own consulting practice.

At first, I took whatever work I could get. Some of it was technical. Some of it was running projects. Within a year, I found myself stepping into advisory roles and acting as an embedded senior leader inside client organizations. Every day I was learning, although I did not fully recognize it at the time.

Most people would call that consulting. It is not. It is contract work.

Then, out of frustration more than strategy, I made a decision that changed everything. I signed up for a Crucial Conversations course.

It was a turning point.

For the first time, I began to understand that people were not reacting to facts, they were reacting to the stories they were telling themselves about those facts. I started to see how interpretation, emotion, and perception shaped behavior in ways that no process or framework could control.

That opened the door.

I continued down that path, learning more about communication, leadership, and human behavior. I was exposed to agile leadership thinking, and I began applying what I was learning in real time with clients and within my own team. By then I had built a small firm, and it became a kind of laboratory where I could test ideas in real conditions. Some things worked, some failed, and there were plenty of moments where I had to step back and rethink everything.

 

"I began to understand that people were not reacting to facts, they were reacting to the stories they were telling themselves about those facts. I started to see how interpretation, emotion, and perception shaped behavior in ways that no process or framework could control."

The next major shift came when I hired my first coach.

She helped me see something I had been blind to. The way I was thinking had been shaped by an industrial mindset, one that made sense for systems and processes but did not translate to people. What seemed logical in a technical environment was often completely ineffective when applied to human behavior.

That realization led me deeper into social psychology and neuroscience, and things began to accelerate. I started to see patterns that others could feel but not articulate. Clients would describe situations like someone who gets great results but leaves a team unwilling to work with them, and I knew that dynamic well because I had lived it.

I also knew it could change.

What I began to understand is that the opposite of the fake superstar is not someone who lowers standards or works less. It is someone who still delivers strong results, but does so in a way that strengthens the system around them rather than depletes it. They create clarity instead of confusion, build ownership instead of dependence, and make others better rather than smaller.

They still perform, but they do it in a way that is sustainable.

That shift became the foundation of my work.

Around that time, I was introduced to Alan Weiss. Alan unapologetically refers to himself as the rockstar of consulting. My take is it’s well deserved. He has one of the strongest minds and critical thinking I have come across coupled with the confidence and unapologetic approach that is table stakes for top consultants.

At first, his world felt unfamiliar and uncomfortable, but I stayed close and paid attention. Over time, his clarity of thinking began to influence my own.

He once told me a story about Marshall Goldsmith, who Alan knew, and how early in his career he chose to spend time around Peter Drucker, helping wherever he could and learning through proximity. What he gained was not just knowledge, but a way of thinking. Drucker was not focused on proving how smart he was, he was focused on making a positive difference and helping others achieve their goals.

Something similar happened in my own experience. Through coaching, workshops, and ongoing interaction, I began to pick up how Alan thought, not just what he said, and that shaped me far more than any formal training ever could.

As my thinking evolved, my business evolved with it. I allowed my firm to shrink naturally and repositioned myself as a solo consultant supported by a small, high quality team.

That is when I truly learned to be a consultant.

Not by doing the work for clients, but by helping them see their problems clearly, advising them on how to solve them, and coaching them to shift their thinking and build their own capability. That is when I began to make the kind of difference I had set out to make decades earlier.

Alan later described my work to me in a way that stuck. He said that what I do is help leaders understand the human element in performance, the part that sits underneath strategy, systems, and technology and ultimately determines whether any of it actually works. Coming from someone with a background in psychology and decades of experience advising organizations around the world, that was meaningful validation of the direction I had taken.

 

"That realization led me deeper into social psychology and neuroscience, and things began to accelerate. I started to see patterns that others could feel but not articulate. Clients would describe situations like someone who gets great results but leaves a team unwilling to work with them, and I knew that dynamic well because I had lived it."

Over time, my work deepened. Clients began to see me not just as someone who could deliver results, but as someone who could help them understand why results were not happening in the first place. The work expanded into strategy, execution, and helping leaders adapt to a world where technology is accelerating and the human side of performance is becoming more important.

That eventually led to writing, including collaborating with Alan on multiple books, and now continuing that work together.

Looking back, I did not fully understand what I was doing at the beginning. I only knew that the path I was on was not sufficient. Even early in my career, it was clear that being technically strong was not going to be enough. There were too many capable people globally who could do that work just as well, or better.

What I did not anticipate was how quickly technology itself would begin to take on that role.

And now we are here.

The irony is that as technology becomes more capable, it is forcing us to become more human. The work that remains is not about processing information, it is about judgment, relationships, and trust.

For those who are willing to develop those capabilities, there is enormous opportunity.

For those who continue to rely on lower level cognitive work, the future will be much harder.

That is the shift I have spent my career moving toward, even before I fully understood it.

And it is the work I continue to do today.