#188 Paul Glover: 33 Crimes, Five Years in Prison, and the Coaching Practice He Built From Nothing

Paul Glover is the No BS Executive Workplace Coach at Paul Glover Coaching, where he works with C-suite leaders and high-performing executives across the United States on performance, accountability, and organizational resilience. Rising to prominence over more than two decades of coaching work following a complete professional reinvention, he became known for a performance coaching model built around blind spots, outcome-contingent fees, and a refusal to allow clients the comfort of self-deception. His largest active client is a billion-dollar distribution organization.

Previously, Glover spent 30 years as a labor employment trial attorney in Chicago, earning a reputation as an aggressive courtroom litigator. His legal career ended in 1995 when he was indicted on 33 counts of white-collar crimes — including kickbacks, bribery, and tampering with government witnesses — and subsequently sentenced to federal prison. He refused to cooperate with prosecutors to reduce his sentence, and served approximately five years before beginning what would become a second career launched from scratch in his fifties.

Released in 2001 with his law license revoked and ineligible for reinstatement for 13 years, Glover rebuilt entirely as a coach, eventually building a national practice. He structures his engagements as one-year contracts with 50 percent of his fee contingent on clients achieving mutually defined goals — a model designed to give him skin in the game and eliminate the incentive to let clients off the hook. His coaching approach draws directly from his own reckoning with ego, echo chambers, and the moment accountability finally broke through.

Glover is the author of WorkQuake™, a book on surviving and thriving in the Knowledge Economy, praised by executive coach Marshall Goldsmith as agitating “the business status quo.”

Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.

So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.

I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.

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