Leadership, in Christopher Hossfeld's view, has become a saturated conversation. As the founder of Barrel Strength Leadership, he argues that while organizations invest heavily in development programs, teams may still falter when volatility becomes inevitable. His work is informed by a perspective that, while companies annually spend resources on leadership training, factors like employee engagement and executive confidence in bench strength remain inconsistent. Within the context of that gap, the answer, he insists, lies in application.
Hossfeld believes that fatigue stems from an excess of abstraction and a lack of lived practice, a contradiction to the career he's lived. Commissioned as a US military officer, he spent more than two decades leading in environments where ambiguity was constant and the stakes were high. "I spent most of my time in light infantry organizations, where the task wasn't about a vehicle or a motor pool, but rather about engaging people every day," he recalls. Later, he led civilians through the transformation into becoming soldiers, guiding them to internalize values and shared purpose. As a company commander, he notes that he guided an organization through nine months of preparation, followed by six months of implementation.
"As we prepared, we saw all the things that would lead to our successes as well as the things that revealed our limits," he shares. "Crisis exposes both." That experience reinforced his conviction that leadership is proven in execution. In his view, while planning, training, and reflection hold importance, leaders ultimately earn trust through performance under pressure. During his final years of service, he evaluated other units before deployment, observing their exercises and delivering after-action insights. "I found that in order to deliver such insights, there has to be a well-established relationship with the individual. Trust becomes the blueprint, creating the conditions for honest assessment," Hossfeld shares.
Today, his leadership consultancy firm, Barrel Strength Leadership, champions that perspective. The name, Hossfeld explains, carries a dual meaning. "In whiskey, barrel strength refers to a spirit drawn straight from the cask, unfiltered and undiluted. Time and pressure refine its character," he explains. "Similarly, in the military sense, a barrel contains an explosion and directs its force with precision through rifling. The barrel, in essence, provides the direction." Together, these metaphors converge in his guiding principle: strength through insight.
Hossfeld highlights that organizations today contend with accelerating change, geopolitical uncertainty, technological disruption, and competitive friction. Leaders may not be able to script every contingency. They can, however, build teams capable of disciplined adaptation. Hossfeld frequently asks executives whether their companies can function effectively during their absence. Authority and responsibility, he emphasizes, must extend beyond titles.
In addition, he insists that managers must cultivate peer relationships across functions. "You may have a great team, but if you don't have a good relationship with other managers, that friction shows up in the mission," he says.
According to him, companies that empower collective decision-making outperform peers in resilience and speed. He observes that adaptive organizations consistently delegate authority closer to the point of action. Hossfeld reframes delegation as preparation for uncertainty, which can equip people with frameworks and context so that judgment remains aligned even when instructions cannot.
"I can give you the ingredients," Hossfeld says. "You decide the recipe." That metaphor reflects his refusal to impose formulaic solutions. Hossfeld has been a lifelong learner, drawn to history as a laboratory of human choice under constraint. His immersive leadership experiences use the past as a vehicle rather than a lesson. There, he believes participants can confront decisions made in situations marked by consequence.
Hossfeld resists positioning his work as a product. He frames it as a disciplined practice. According to him, leadership demands reflection, humility, and continuous growth. It requires attention to relationships within teams as much as strategies devised by executives, and calls for the courage to examine performance honestly and the commitment to refine it.
Ultimately, Christopher Hossfeld advocates for a sense of urgency grounded in possibility. In his view, organizations possess immense potential, and through clarity of purpose, distributed authority, and strength forged under pressure, they can translate discussion into actionable results.
