© 2025 James Hardie – Course Correction Consulting Ltd. The EASE Framework™ is a proprietary model developed by James Hardie to support the creation of psychologically safe, empowered, and strategically aligned teams. All rights reserved.
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LEAD with EASE Meeting Magic is about leading without the comfort blanket of formal authority and hierarchy that you may have in your own organisation. You walk into someone else’s world with only clarity, curiosity and usefulness. This is the challenge most sales people face each day. Learning to lead in this context is crucial, because why should anyone follow you?
External meetings reveal real leadership because you cannot lean on your rank. Use EASE to structure networking as joint problem-solving: Explore their context, Align on the outcome and meeting outputs, Support with one tangible piece of value, Empower with a clear next step and written recap.
Avoid ego-driven signalling. Machiavelli’s warning about flatterers maps neatly to modern “impressive” networking, design for truth, usefulness, and momentum instead. Weak ties matter because they create opportunity flow, so treat each meeting as trust-building plus a micro-delivery, not a pitch.
One-liner: What if you could treat every external meeting as a joint mission planning session, not a status performance. An opportunity for influence and nurturing, a demonstration of valid expertise and capability
• Aim to Define the required hole, not your drill (consider their outcome, their constraints, offer your input, process and outputs).
• Bring three assets: insight, access, or execution, then offer one.
• Run EASE on the shared problem: Explore context, Align on outcomes, Support with options, Empower with next steps.
• Close with a written recap, owner, date, and “what success looks like”.
Definition: Meeting Magic is engineered trust plus momentum in every meeting.
Data point: Weak ties drive opportunity, a large-scale causal test varied ties across 20M people and observed 600,000 job moves. https://ide.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/abl4476.pdf and Veritasium on Networks https://youtu.be/CYlon2tvywA?si=QSNOordSBOWWgm_V
“Mastering the Art of LEAD with EASE” delves deep into the strategies and mindset shifts you need to realign your goals and reclaim your path, with EASE. This week, we use EASE outside the castle walls, where authority is replaced by influence.
LEAD with EASE Meeting Magic is about leading without the comfort blanket of formal authority and hierarchy that you may have in your own organisation. You walk into someone else’s world with only clarity, curiosity and usefulness. This is the challenge most sales people face each day. Learning to lead in this context is crucial, because why should anyone follow you?
If you are the boss how much of what you do is leadership? So what about when you are not the boss?
Machiavelli’s more sympathetic social advice is basically this: do not get drunk on your own importance. He warns leaders to design conditions for truth over flattery and not to be offended by the truth. In modern networking, ego-posturing is just flattery with better tailoring.
Take control and run the meeting with EASE:
Explore: “What outcome are you driving, and what is making it hard?” Listen for constraints, politics, timing. These obstacles can show you the way.
Align: Confirm inputs, process, outputs. “If we spend 45 minutes well, what will we leave with?” Establish Jobs to be Done, Pains to relieve and Gains to create in that order. This is your Value Proposition.
Support: Offer one concrete value move, an introduction, a template, a risk you can de-risk, a small experiment. Make it specific but move then needle.
Empower: Convert goodwill into momentum. Name the next step, owner, and date. Send the recap within two hours.
Key mental model: you are not selling a drill, you are helping them get a cleaner hole, with less mess, and less risk. You do not own their perceived outcome but you are part of its value.
Setup (status equity assumed): Perhaps you have established rapport, have industry expertise and are a considered a go to expert. You have earned enough credibility to challenge, not just “check in”. Challenger selling is essentially Teach, Tailor, Take Control as is explained at https://challengerinc.com/
The Problem as they see it: A COO says: “We need a new CRM.” You reply: “Maybe. But in firms like yours the failure mode is rarely the tool, it is adoption and workflow ownership. If we fix that, the CRM becomes a detail of the system that supports your people.”
Who has the problem? The COO, but also the Head of Sales Ops and frontline managers who will live with the process.
Who has the solution? Possibly not you. It might be a change partner, an integration specialist, or an internal process lead. Own the solution suggestion.
Your move (Teach, then introduce): “Here’s the risk I see and the metric it will hit. If you want, I can introduce you to X, they are excellent at workflow adoption. I will stay involved to ensure the outcome you want is what gets designed.”
Why the introduction is real value: It reduces search and evaluation cost, transfers trust, and accelerates momentum. Weak ties and bridging connections often spread topics and opportunities further than tight circles, which is exactly what a good introduction creates.
Close with control: “Two next steps, you decide. Option A, 30-minute diagnostic with me and your Sales Ops lead. Option B, I bring X in for a joint scoping call, then we agree who owns what.”
Related read on coursecorrection.co.uk: Why does leadership fail and how can we lead with ease coursecorrection.co.uk
For more on false flattery issues https://www.coursecorrection.co.uk/knowledge-centre/why-does-flattery-work
Lead with diagnosis, not features. Offer one small win before you ask for anything. Understand your offer and its fit. Consider Ideal Customer Profiles to qualify in advance and then you can be more confident about your position. When selling your solution, ideally you want to get a really happy customer outcome, so this is also about your qualification.
Respecting each other's time and the defining of a problem, aim for 25 or 50 minutes, always with a defined output and a next step. Then establish a larger event if needed.
Support with options: introduce, reframe, or share a tool, then set boundaries cleanly.