Stan, one of her VPs, is a weak link in the team. She knows it, and so do others. A very nice guy, he is just not the kind of performer the team needs in that position. The momentum they have experienced keeps the overall picture looking good enough to hide what everyone at that level knows to be true. Stan is over his head and should be replaced. Other team members resent the fact that he is there for two reasons. First, they feel like their efforts are making him successful, and thus feel that the situation is not fair. But second, and more demoralizing, they know they could all be at a different level if Stan were replaced. They feel like they are being cheated of what they could all have if a real star were in his place.

So, they feel deflated about where they are, resentful of Stan, who is such a nice guy, and resentful of Maria, who will not do anything about him. When I asked Maria why she could not fix the situation, she said, “I just cannot pull the trigger with him. He is so nice. He is fifty-five years old, at the pinnacle of his career, and it would kill him. Where would he go? I don’t know. I know I should do something, and I have to, but so far, I just have not been able to do it. I just keep putting off the inevitable.”

His boss, Kenneth, does not understand this reality and is a bully. He goes off on David when schedules are not where they are supposed to be, berating him and not helping at all. After those interactions, no matter how motivated David was about the work itself, the company, or his own goals, he feels terrible about all of it, and sadly, mostly about himself. He gets sick over the fact that Kenneth has that much power over how he feels.

Unfortunately, not only does it affect him, but David takes it home as well. Too often when he gets home, he is not able to shake their last interaction, and Kenneth has now entered into David’s home and his marriage. Too many nights when he gets home, he is not as available to his wife and kids as he would like to be as the crummy feelings about his work situation linger.

Ryan feels as though he spends more and more time and energy on the things he cares less about, and less time on the things he loves. There are more meetings and appointments and deadlines—which drain his energy as soon as he sees them on his calendar—than there are activities that energize him. He is finding that most of his time is spent doing things that do little to engage his passion, talent, vision, or even best skills and abilities. This is not why he went to grad school.

Similarly, Ryan’s personal life feels the same way. He and his wife often fall into bed and collapse. They remark about how it seems they never have time for each other, and are not spending time doing the things they love to do together with the people they really love being with the most. Their lives, just as his work, have become a treadmill. His work is part of the problem, too. He is often working on e-mail at night, taking calls at dinner, or checking his BlackBerry when they are out on a date or taking that walk they finally had time for. Ryan’s wife frequently asks, “Do you have to do that now?” He feels like he has to, and then sometimes wonders why. His scariest thought is to project his current life ahead for twenty years. He envisions himself doing then what he is doing now—feeling like all he does is work and that it is somehow missing the mark.

For a long time, Sophie’s creativity and all the good things were so exciting and energizing that they kept people on board and glad to be working with her. But lately, the enthusiasm for having to work around her lack of structure and order is growing thin. Her colleagues are getting tired of it, and the negatives have begun to wear them down to the point that they are no longer glad to be working with her. In fact, some gravitate toward projects in which they will not have to depend on her at all, and her boss is getting close to done.

Lately, however, his appreciation has taken on a different tone. It seems not to be as much about the work as it is about her. He comments less about the good job she did on this task or that, and more about her personally. At first, she thought they were just compliments, and they felt good. Sarah liked that her boss thought so well of her. But now it seems that his comments about her feel seductive, and he has begun to comment less about qualities that affect her work, and more about her appearance, personality, and desirability.

Sarah does not know exactly how to express it, but she now feels very uneasy around him. He has begun to stay around later and later, after everyone else is gone except the two of them. She is feeling increasingly uncomfortable. But she also feels that if she were to mention anything she would be out of line, since he hasn’t done anything specific enough to which she can confidently point. She just knows in her stomach that his behavior is improper. As time goes on, going to work begins to make her feel sick. Yet, she feels as if she can’t do anything about it, and so she doesn’t.

Kevin has hit a ceiling. Finally, he has to call it what it is, as that is what his boss called it when he told him that Kevin was not going to get the next promotion. He had not wanted to admit that, but now that the words were out there, he knew they were true. He was not getting better. He had hit a plateau in his performance and seemed to be unable to break into the next level. Kevin knew it was possible, as others with whom he had started had made it. But, for some reason, his performance has progressed not upward, but in a flat line.

Having gone to all the seminars, and read all the sales books, Kevin was a little stuck as to what to do. He knew the techniques, the strategies, the tricks. But somehow they were not getting him to that next level. He thought he was smart enough—and talented enough—but whatever was wrong was also real. He had hit a wall.

Often, when we see scenarios like these, we know something must be done. So we train people in the appropriate business practices, skills, and disciplines that apply to the individual problems that are quickly visible in all of these situations. These are important issues to tackle. Take a browse through the business book section in the airport and you will likely find good sources to address all of these situations with some helpful answers. But is that just treating the symptoms? Is that all there is? Is there something more, or something better you could do? More to the point, if you are one of these people or have one of these issues in your own life, is there something that you could do to be better and not ever be in that situation again?

As a business leader once said to me, “There is something missing from the way that we do training to fix problems. We give people a lot of content—the ‘what to do’ in specific problem areas—but for some reason that does not seem to be enough. A lot of times my people do not seem to be able to do what the training tells them to do. They don’t seem to keep it going past the seminar and the initial enthusiasm of it all. I have seen it over and over again.”

I agreed. While content training is important, there is an even bigger problem than a lack of knowing what to do. The bigger problem is this:

Whatever “it” is, whether in ethics, time management, or sales, the person is the ultimate piece of equipment, not just what he or she knows. There is a big difference between going to a seminar on anatomy and being able to do open heart surgery. One requires knowledge only, and the other experience, ability, and character. The page that says, “cut here” doesn’t turn you into the person who can pick up the knife and slice someone open to heal them. The CEO knew the VP was underperforming, and yet could not pull the trigger. Something was missing inside.

So, if there is more to rectifying these situations than just the obvious ethics or management-training content, what is it? How would each individual turn into the person who can go do it, whatever it is in each of these contexts? Is there a magic bullet, a path?

Yes, there is.

What is that one answer—or issue—that drives all of these other problems?

That one answer is called “boundaries.” In each one of the scenarios, the issue in common is that no matter what their positions—from CEO all the way to assistant—the people above had lost control of themselves in one way or another. They all lacked an internal core from which they were able to define themselves, and then express that “defined self” in a way that made life work. While there were six different situations mentioned, one issue underlies all those problems: lack of boundaries. The issue of boundaries is one of the biggest issues that all of us will face in business and in life.

Here is the key. What the people in each scenario do not realize is that while they think they have certain situational problems, if we looked back over time and could see the video of their entire careers, or their entire lives for that matter, we would see that this is not the first time they felt that way. We would see that is not the first time that being controlled by external forces had affected their performance and well-being. And the common denominator in all of their past situational problems was themselves. They actually had done the same things in different situations over and over again. Once, when I pointed out to a fifty-year-old leader of ten thousand employees how this issue was affecting his performance, he said, “You have just described my entire career since college.” It was only then that he was able to change the pattern that had held him back for three decades. He realized, at that moment, that he did not have a problem with one of his key reports. He realized that he had a problem with himself.