Kris Plachy — The CEO Sage
You have a difficult person on your team.
You already know what that costs you.
Here is the truth: you were never taught how to handle this. No one was. These resources exist to change that.
Every client I have worked with has at least one. A person on the team who creates tension, derails progress, or quietly drains the energy out of everything around them.
And most leaders have no idea what to do about it.
Not because they are weak. Because they were never given a real framework for thinking about it. You cannot manage a difficult person the way you manage everyone else. It requires a different kind of clarity, a different kind of conversation, and a different understanding of what is actually happening.
That is what this body of work is for.
The Resources
Book — Amazon
5 Truths for Thinking About Difficult People
Before you can handle a difficult person, you have to think about them differently. This short, precise guide cuts through the frustration and gives you the five foundational truths that change how you see what is happening and why. Designed as a desktop lookbook: brief lessons on one side, reflection questions on the other. Read it in an hour. Return to it for years.
Buy on Amazon
Book — Amazon
How to Coach the Difficult Person in Six Steps
Thinking differently is step one. Knowing what to actually say is step two. This guide walks you through a clear, six-step coaching process for the conversations most managers avoid. Difficult people create real dysfunction on real teams. This is the practical companion that tells you exactly how to move through it, step by step, with confidence.
Buy on Amazon
Online Course — Immediate Access
Be Better at Difficult People & Conversations
The books give you the foundation. The course takes you inside it. This digital course was built for leaders who are done avoiding the hard conversations and ready to lead them with skill. You will learn how to identify what is actually driving the difficult behavior, how to structure conversations that create accountability without chaos, and how to stop dreading the moments that come with leading a real team. This is the work that changes how you lead for good.
Enroll NowAbout Kris Plachy
Twenty years of watching leaders struggle with this. And a better way forward.
Kris Plachy is the CEO Sage. For over two decades she has worked alongside leaders and entrepreneurs who are building something real, and she has watched the same pattern play out again and again. The person who disrupts the team, the conversation that never gets had, the performance that quietly costs everyone around it.
This body of work was built from that experience. Not theory. Not templates. The actual thinking and the actual process that helps leaders stop managing around the problem and start leading through it.
