In this episode, Elena Armijo explores the value of conflict with executive and leadership coach Mark Hunter, founder of Pinnacle Coaching and author of The Brink: How Great Leadership Is Invented. With three decades of coaching experience, Mark brings a grounded, practical lens to one of the most misunderstood leadership skills: learning to work with conflict instead of avoiding it.
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Elena opens with a coaching reflection that reframes conflict as a signal, not a failure. When teams treat tension as data, they gain access to what is often left unspoken, including unmet needs, misalignment, and values trying to surface. She also unpacks generative conflict as a capacity builder, an essential ingredient for innovation, trust, and cultural clarity.
With clarity and deep care for teams, Mark reframes conflict as a powerful leadership tool, especially inside executive teams where roles are designed to hold healthy tension in service of better outcomes. He introduces generative conflict as purposeful disagreement aimed at optimizing a shared goal rather than protecting ego. He outlines a grounded yet disciplined approach: start where the team is, understand how conflict currently operates through a listening tour, define what healthy conflict looks like, and name the willingness required to practice it consistently.
Elena and Mark examine the somatic dimension of conflict. Drawing from decades of leadership and team development work, Mark makes a compelling case that avoidance is often the true source of nervous system strain. When conflict is vilified or suppressed, tension accumulates beneath the surface. In contrast, when conflict is normalized and practiced with skill, it becomes regulating, steadying, and even energizing for a team.
This conversation invites leaders to build cultures grounded in trust rather than control, to replace reactivity with curiosity, and to cultivate the capacity to fight alongside each other in service of something greater than ego.
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This podcast was produced by the following amazing team:
Ulrich Wolvaardt, Audio Engineer
Aaron Boykin, Musician & Artist (Get updates about Aaron’s music via Instagram)
Jo van Eeden, Project Manager
Elena Armijo
President and Founder, Pinnacle Coaching
Mark is an executive and leadership coach, published author (The Brink – How Great Leadership Is Invented – Morgan James Publishing, 2014,) and a leadership consultant and trainer. As the President and Founder of Pinnacle Coaching, his career has spanned 30 years working globally with top-tier business & organizational executives and prominent thought leaders. He spent over 17 of those years training high-level coaches to do what he does through Accomplishment Coaching’s ICF (International Coach Federation) accredited Coach Training Program, where he was a Senior Team Leader.
In his private practice, his clients are C-level executives in the private sector, civic leaders in the public sector, professional athletes and teams, startup innovators, visionary creatives and front-line disruptors in their respective markets. His specialties include leadership training & development, mastery of dynamic communication, effective relationship and team building, crisis leadership, culture reinvention and implementation, market disruption, inclusivity initiative implementation, radical innovation, thought leadership and working with fear and the unknown as assets in unpredictable environments.