How LEAP Turns Good Intentions Into Measurable Results – An Interview with Tiffany Boyle
Tiffany Boyle is the Commissioner of Revenue for Newport News, Virginia. She was the first African American woman elected to the role and was reelected unopposed for her two most recent terms. Separately, she is the chief executive officer of Emerge Initiatives, LLC (a limited liability company), an adjunct professor, and the creator of the LEAP Framework (Learn, Execute, Adapt, Persevere), a system that teaches leaders how to turn motivation into measurable results.
In this interview, Tiffany Boyle shares the moment that sparked LEAP, why motivation alone rarely creates lasting change, what leading inside government taught her about accountability, and the one habit she believes separates teams that talk from teams that deliver.
Tiffany Boyle, Keynote Speaker, Leadership Strategist & Creator of the LEAP Framework
What first led you to create the LEAP Framework, and what problem were you trying to solve for leaders?
LEAP started long before it had a name. During my first campaign in 2017, a man stood up at a small event, asked people in the room to film him on their phones, and told everyone not to vote for me. He questioned my qualifications and brought up some of the hardest chapters of my past.
In the few seconds before I responded, I learned more about myself than I had in years. I learned what actually makes me angry and how to stay calm inside a public crisis. I also learned that someone else’s opinion of me doesn’t get to decide who I am. When I stood up, I didn’t address him. I spoke to the room about my values. That was the beginning of Learn.
Over time, I noticed the leaders around me weren’t short on ideas or inspiration. They’d been to the conferences and read the books. What they lacked was a repeatable way to move from insight to action and to keep moving when things got hard. LEAP is the system I built to close that gap, first for myself and then for every team I work with.
Where do you see leaders most often getting stuck between knowing what to do and actually following through?
Most leaders don’t get stuck at the knowing. They get stuck at the deciding. Somewhere between the idea and the first step, they start waiting for more data, a better time, permission, or certainty that the plan will work. Waiting feels responsible, so it rarely looks like avoidance. But a decision you keep revisiting is a decision you haven’t made.
The second sticking point is ownership. On many teams, everyone agrees on what should happen, but no one is assigned to make it happen by a specific date. Good intentions spread across a group become nobody’s job.
The third is the dip right after launch, when the excitement fades and the results haven’t shown up yet. That’s where a lot of good initiatives quietly die. Nothing failed. People just stopped.
LEAP addresses each of those directly. Learn forces an honest look at where you actually are. Execute means making the call and moving, even imperfectly. Persevere is built for exactly that unglamorous middle stretch.
“A decision you keep revisiting is a decision you haven’t made.”
How has leading inside government shaped the way you teach execution, accountability, and how to make decisions?
Government taught me that execution isn’t optional and accountability isn’t abstract. As Commissioner of the Revenue for Newport News, I oversee a $2.9 million operating budget and a team of more than 40 people, and my office is responsible for assessing nearly $300 million in revenue for the city. That work touches residents and businesses every day. Deadlines are set by law. Mistakes affect real households. You can’t motivate your way through a tax season. You need systems.
Public office also teaches you to decide in the open. Any choice can be questioned by the public, the press, and your own constituents, so you learn to make decisions you can explain clearly and stand behind. I was reelected unopposed for my two most recent terms, and I believe that comes from consistency more than charisma. People trust what they can predict.
That’s what I bring into every LEAP workshop. I’m not teaching accountability as a theory. I’m teaching the same habits I use to run a public office. That means clear ownership, visible commitments, honest reporting on what’s working and what isn’t, and the discipline to follow through when no one is applauding.
“People trust what they can predict.”
Why do you think motivation alone so often fails to create lasting behavioral change?
Motivation is an emotion, and emotions are temporary by design. You leave a great keynote feeling like you can change everything, and by Wednesday your inbox, your calendar, and your old habits have taken over again. Nothing is wrong with you. The feeling did its job and faded.
The problem is that we treat motivation as the engine when it’s really the spark. Lasting change runs on structure. That means knowing exactly what you’ll do, when you’ll do it, and what you’ll do when it gets hard. Motivation asks, “Do I feel like it?” Structure asks, “Is it on the calendar?”
I’m not against inspiration. I just don’t trust it to carry the load. That’s why LEAP puts a system under the feeling. Learn turns enthusiasm into an honest, specific starting point. Execute converts it into a decision and a first step. Adapt keeps you from quitting when the plan meets reality. Persevere is the discipline to keep going after the motivation runs out, because it always does.
What changes when a leadership framework has to work across corporate teams, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, and public offices?
The context changes completely, but the human behavior underneath it doesn’t. A corporate team, a nonprofit board, a solo founder, and a city office all deal with competing priorities, limited time, and the pull to put off the hard thing. The vocabulary and constraints change, and so does what counts as a result.
In a corporation, results might mean improving productivity and meeting deadlines. In a nonprofit, it’s mission impact on a tight budget. For an entrepreneur, it’s revenue and survival, often with no one else to hold them accountable. In public service, it’s trust, compliance, and serving residents well within rules you didn’t write.
So a framework that works across all of them has to be simple enough to travel and flexible enough to fit. LEAP’s four stages stay the same everywhere. I customize how each group applies them by tailoring the examples, the metrics, and the specific habits to the group’s needs. If a framework only works in one setting, it’s really just a set of tips. One that holds up in a government office and a startup is closer to a discipline.
When someone feels overwhelmed by a large goal, how do you help them identify the next right step?
Overwhelm usually comes from trying to hold the whole goal in your head at once. So the first thing I do is help someone put it down. We name the goal plainly, then I ask a much smaller question. “What is one action you could take in the next 48 hours that would move this forward, even slightly?”
The next right step should be specific, small enough to start today, and within your control. “Grow my business” isn’t a step. “Email three past clients and ask for a referral” is.
I also teach a simple tool I call the 1, 2, 3 LEAP. When you’re hesitating to walk into a room full of strangers or to make a call you’ve been dreading, you count one, two, three and move before your mind talks you out of it. Too many people spend years standing against the wall at the networking event, waiting to feel ready. Readiness tends to show up after you act, not before. Once that first step is done, momentum does some of the work for you, and the next step gets much easier to see.
“Readiness tends to show up after you act, not before.”
How can a leader tell when it is time to adapt the approach rather than keep pushing the same strategy?
Persistence and stubbornness look identical from the outside, so I encourage leaders to check the evidence, not their feelings. If you’re executing consistently and the results are moving, even slowly, keep going. That’s perseverance. If you’ve executed consistently for a reasonable stretch and nothing is moving, that’s information. It’s time to adapt.
I look for a few signals that a strategy needs to change. The same problem keeps showing up in different forms, the team is working harder for smaller returns, or the conditions the plan was built on have shifted. Adapting doesn’t mean abandoning the goal. It means changing the route.
Commissioners and Cans is a good example. It started as a drive to collect food and raise funds inside my own office. As we learned what the community needed and who wanted to be part of it, we kept adjusting how it ran, and it grew into a regional effort and then a statewide initiative. The goal never changed. The approach changed several times. In LEAP, Adapt means treating setbacks as data, not as a verdict on you.
What does perseverance mean to you when progress is slow and the work is no longer exciting?
To me, perseverance is keeping a promise to yourself after the feeling that inspired it is gone. Anyone can work hard in the first few weeks of something new. The real test comes in the middle, when progress is slow, nobody is noticing, and the work is just work.
In those stretches, I stop measuring by excitement and start measuring by consistency. Did I do what I said I would do today? That’s a question I can answer yes to, even when the bigger results aren’t visible yet.
It also helps to remember why you started. I’m now in my third term in office, and much of the work is unglamorous. It’s budgets, staffing, deadlines, and process improvements no one will ever applaud. That’s exactly where trust gets built. The hard, quiet seasons are often where you learn the most about who you are.
Perseverance isn’t grinding until you break. Rest is allowed. Quitting on the commitment isn’t.
“Rest is allowed. Quitting on the commitment isn’t.”
What is one leadership habit you believe can make the biggest difference between good intentions and measurable results?
End every meeting, conversation, and workday by naming the next action, who owns it, and when it will be done. That’s the habit. It sounds almost too simple, but it’s the biggest difference I see between teams that talk and teams that deliver.
Good intentions live in phrases like “we should” and “let’s circle back.” Measurable results live in sentences with a name and a date attached. When you make that translation a habit, accountability stops depending on memory or personality and starts happening automatically.
It works for individuals too. Before you close your laptop, write down the one thing you’ll do first tomorrow. You’ll start the next morning already in motion instead of deciding all over again.
This habit is really LEAP in miniature. Learn where things stand, commit to a specific action, adjust based on what happened last time, and show up again. Teams I’ve worked with have reported 20 to 30 percent productivity gains and 25 to 40 percent fewer missed deadlines, and much of that comes from small, repeated habits like this one. You can find the full framework in The LEAP Guidebook.
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