Founder of Paul Mac Leadership | Creator of the F.I.R.E.D. Leadership Framework | HR Consultant | Leadership Developer | Career Development Coach | Corporate Trainer | Public Speaker | Team Builder
Once is a bad fit. Twice is bad luck. Four times, each time for behaviors that had appeared on the job description that hired him, starts to look like data. Paul McCarthy could have filed it under a difficult run of employers. Instead he spent the next eight years building a case, and refused to sell a single hour of it while he was doing so.
But McCarthy’s argument isn’t that four employers got Paul McCarthy wrong. His experience raised a much bigger and more uncomfortable question: what happens when organizations recruit leaders for qualities they say they want, but aren’t actually ready for those qualities when they show up?
The Consultant Who Turned On His Own Industry
Paul McCarthy is the founder of Paul Mac Leadership, a Canada-based practice built around a question most of his profession would rather not be asked out loud. Over twenty-five years he has supported more than 100 organizations across fifteen industry sectors in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Dubai and Sri Lanka. In November 2023 he published the argument as a book, The F.I.R.E.D. Leader: Reinventing the Future of Leadership.
His thesis has remained remarkably consistent: are we firing and marginalizing the types of leaders who have the leadership qualities we will increasingly need to successfully navigate ongoing disruption?
For McCarthy, his own experience was the catalyst, not the evidence. What followed was eight years specifically researching that question, built on decades of experience working in leadership and leadership development and hundreds of conversations with leaders, hiring and recruitment managers, Chief People Officers, Heads of Learning and Development and CEOs.
Kent, London, KPMG, and the Long Route to Saying It Out Loud
He read anthropology and sociology at the University of Kent, then took a master’s there in social policy and information technology. The training shows in how he works: he treats organizations as cultures to be observed rather than machines to be tuned.
His consulting career subsequently took him through government, business transformation, coaching, talent management and leadership development, including senior work with Deloitte and KPMG in Canada. Across more than two decades, he worked inside and alongside organizations and began noticing a recurring contradiction between the leaders organizations said they wanted and the organizational environments into which those leaders were being recruited.
He increasingly came to believe that the leadership playbook had evolved, while many of the systems used to identify, recruit, onboard and develop leaders had not evolved with it. More recently, as he has taken F.I.R.E.D. further into the market, he has increasingly heard the same concern directly from leaders and organizations themselves: the existing playbook isn’t working.
He founded Paul Mac Leadership in 2019. Alongside it he now works as a senior consultant with Canvas, part of a global community of over 100 practitioners supporting large-scale transformation inside Fortune 500 companies, and as a fractional global executive advisor to the search and consultancy firm Eaton SAKS International.
“I had been fired four times as an executive leader for demonstrating many of the very qualities I had been hired for.”
For McCarthy, the significance wasn’t whether he was somehow “too much.” It was the hypocrisy the experience appeared to expose in the leadership system itself. Organizations could actively recruit for particular qualities and then misunderstand, suppress or reject those same qualities once a leader began demonstrating them.
His experience, he came to believe, was unlikely to be unique. It became a starting point for examining what could be a much broader systemic problem affecting leaders and employees far beyond his own career.
Eight Years Before He Would Sell a Word of It
The restraint is the part of the record that surprises people. For eight years McCarthy researched, interviewed and argued the case without turning it into a product. He ran primary and secondary research, collected case studies, and held hundreds of conversations with leaders, hiring managers, chief people officers, heads of learning and development and chief executives.
“For eight years, I deliberately didn’t commercialize the idea. All I was trying to do was create the conditions for a global conversation about something we weren’t talking about publicly.”
Those conversations increasingly coalesced around five behavioural qualities: Fresh Thinking, Inquisitive Nature, Real & Accountable, Expressive & Challenging, and Direct & Transparent. Together they became the F.I.R.E.D. Leadership framework.
The qualities are deliberately behavioural rather than personality-based. Fresh Thinking is about having the courage to disrupt established patterns of thought. Inquisitive Nature means asking why, going deeper and refusing to settle for the first answer. Real & Accountable is about dropping the professional mask and owning your behaviour. Expressive & Challenging is the willingness to respectfully push back and challenge the status quo. Direct & Transparent is about cutting through politics and hidden agendas.
The paradox at the centre of McCarthy’s argument is that few organizations would say they don’t want these things. Yet when leaders actually demonstrate them, those same behaviours can be interpreted very differently: questioning can become “difficult,” challenging can become “disruptive,” directness can become “abrasive,” and thinking differently can make someone an organizational outsider.
That led McCarthy beyond a question about leadership development to a question about the leadership system itself. If organizations say they need different kinds of leaders for a more disrupted future, do their systems for identifying, recruiting, onboarding and developing leadership talent actually recognize and reward those behaviours today—or quietly filter them out?
The book landed in November 2023 and was shortlisted as one of eight finalists in the leadership category of the 2024 UK Business Book Awards. Marshall Goldsmith, ranked the number one executive coach by Thinkers50, praised it for presenting five fundamental qualities rather than drowning readers in jargon. Professor Gary Hamel of London Business School described McCarthy as unusually bold in shining a light on the systemic failures of what currently passes for leadership development. Whitney Johnson and John Spence added their names, along with 45 more
He has since written a companion guide containing more than thirty activities organizations can use to assess their own readiness.
That word—readiness—has become increasingly important to McCarthy’s work. His question is no longer simply whether organizations are developing leaders for the future. It is whether the organizations themselves are ready for those leaders.
“We can develop all the future-ready leaders we want, but what happens if the organizations we’re developing them for aren’t ready for them?”
From Individual Behaviour to Organizational Conditions
The consulting record underneath it is quieter and, in his telling, more persuasive. One engagement involved a leadership team so dysfunctional it was close to disbanding. He was brought in to work out why.
McCarthy first worked with the individual leaders to recognize their own contribution to what was happening before asking the team to create a shared picture of how they wanted to operate. They identified the behaviours they needed from one another, agreed how those behaviours would show up in practice, and committed to holding themselves and one another accountable.
The team stayed together, retention stopped being a problem, and other divisions started asking what had happened to them. The organization brought him back to repeat the work across three different divisions.
The work wasn’t a F.I.R.E.D. intervention—the formal methodology did not yet exist—but looking back, McCarthy sees an important pattern that now informs it: individual behavioural change can influence team behaviour, which can begin to influence the wider organizational system.
That distinction matters. His 25-plus years of consulting experience provides the practitioner foundation underneath F.I.R.E.D.; it is not evidence that the F.I.R.E.D. methodology itself has already been proven.
He is notably unwilling to overstate what any of this establishes.
“But the book was never proof that F.I.R.E.D. worked as a methodology. It established the argument and opened the conversation.”
From Conversation to Commercialization
But McCarthy is no longer simply researching the idea or standing at the beginning of taking it to market. Over the last six months he has increasingly taken F.I.R.E.D. into conversations with the executives and organizations it was designed to challenge. He is talking directly with organizations about bringing the work into their environments, and says the early market signals have been encouraging. Conversations are already underway with leading organizations interested in exploring how F.I.R.E.D. could be piloted within their leadership environments, as well as in the academic environment to develop a series of world-first assessment tools in this area.
The next stage is moving from market conversations into formal pilots: working with progressive organizations and leaders willing to put the methodology into practice, challenge its assumptions, measure what changes, identify what holds up and what doesn’t, and refine the model as the evidence develops.
McCarthy is also interested in testing both sides of the equation. Can leaders deliberately develop the five F.I.R.E.D. qualities? And, just as importantly, can organizations identify whether their cultures, leadership systems and incentives enable those qualities—or suppress them?
The Question He Still Cannot Put Down
McCarthy’s four firings gave him a personal encounter with the contradiction he would spend the next eight years investigating. But his argument was never ultimately about four employers or one executive’s career. It was about the systems doing the identifying, recruiting, onboarding and developing—and whether those systems are equipped for the leadership behaviours organizations increasingly say they need.
Hundreds of conversations later, he says he has repeatedly encountered strong alignment around the value of the five qualities, alongside recognition that they are not always being deliberately identified or developed—and can still be misunderstood when leaders demonstrate them.
“The book was never intended to be the end point. It was the starting point for a conversation that no one was really having.”
Now that conversation is moving into its next phase. McCarthy isn’t looking for an organization to prove him right. He is looking for progressive organizations prepared to find out: to test the methodology, challenge it, contribute to the evidence and examine whether their own leadership systems are genuinely ready for the kinds of leaders they say they want.
Because the question underneath F.I.R.E.D. is no longer simply whether we can develop future-ready leaders. It is whether we are building organizations ready to let them lead.
Paul McCarthy is the Founder of Paul Mac Leadership and creator of the F.I.R.E.D. Leadership framework, based in Canada, and the author of The F.I.R.E.D. Leader: Reinventing the Future of Leadership. His work examines how organizations identify, recruit, onboard and develop leaders—and the organizational conditions needed for different kinds of leadership behaviour to thrive. To connect with Paul or learn more, visit his LinkedIn Profile.
