A new book by Chandell Labbozzetta, CEO of Life Puzzle, links a four-stage leadership maturation model to a pilot program that tracked leadership growth with repeat assessments, giving Learning and Development teams information they can present to finance departments.
-- Life Puzzle co-founder and CEO Chandell Labbozzetta has released The Leadership Paradox: What Extraordinary Leaders Do When the Strategy That Built Everything Stops Working, published by Life Puzzle Press in October 2026.
The book draws on data from a pilot of Life Puzzle’s leadership program, in which participants’ progress was measured at fixed points rather than judged through self-reports or manager impressions. It also sets out a method organisations can use to show what executive leadership development returns for its cost.
Training and Development budgets are often among the first to be questioned when finance teams review spending, as workplace futurist Aaron McEwan warned recently. A common reason is that leadership programs are usually evaluated through feedback forms and subjective impressions, which give finance departments little to compare against the money spent.
Labbozzetta developed the book alongside a pilot of Life Puzzle’s leadership program, in which participants’ progress was tracked against the four-stage map at set points during the program rather than assessed through feedback forms alone. The approach is intended to give Learning and Development teams evidence of leadership growth that they can present to finance departments when training budgets are reviewed.
“Finance teams don’t object to leadership development. They object to spending money they can’t account for,” said Labbozzetta. “When you can show where each leader started, where they finished and what changed in the business, the conversation with finance becomes a conversation about results instead of a request for faith.”
The book is organised in three parts, The Architecture of Survival, The Shift and Stewardship, and is built around the four-stage map Labbozzetta introduces in Chapter One. In the first stage, Survival, a leader succeeds by being the most capable person in the room. The second, Decision Bottleneck, describes what happens when that model meets scale and every decision runs through the leader, who becomes the ceiling on their own team. The third stage, The Shift, covers the identity work of letting go of being the answer, and the fourth, Steward Leadership, describes what becomes possible on the other side.
The central argument of the book is that lasting change in management and leadership happens at the level of identity rather than skills. Labbozzetta writes that a new behaviour installed on top of an old leadership architecture tends to revert under pressure, which is why many programs produce short-term improvement that fades. The book aims to show leaders the architecture underneath their habits so that growth and leadership capability hold up when conditions change.
The Leadership Paradox has been available on Kindle since October 16, 2026. Paperback and audiobook editions are scheduled for release through Amazon in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, and through Audible. The paperback ISBN is 978-0-99-702549-1. It is Labbozzetta’s third book, following Confident Closing and The Talent Alchemist.
About Life Puzzle
Life Puzzle is a Melbourne-based leadership, sales training and coaching firm located at 19/644 Chapel Street, South Yarra, Victoria. Co-founded by Chandell Labbozzetta, the firm delivers a multi-tiered Leadership and Influence Program for executives, managers and emerging leaders, along with executive coaching, sales training and NLP certification. Labbozzetta has worked with boards and executive leadership teams for more than two decades and is a master trainer of NLP, Hypnosis, Time Line Therapy® and Coaching. More information about the book, including the free five-minute Stage Awareness Assessment, is available at https://lifepuzzle.com.au/the-leadership-paradox/
The Kindle edition of the book is available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HMHP5BLG
Contact Info:
Name: Chandell Labbozzetta
Email: Send Email
Organization: Life Puzzle Pty Ltd
Address: 19/644 Chapel St Nth, South Yarra, Victoria 3141, Australia
Website: https://lifepuzzle.com.au
Source: NewsNetwork
Release ID: 89207684
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