About Brian
Experience, theory, contemplation, and reflection guide my perspectives on leadership, learning, and life.
My work sits at the intersection of leadership and learning, and doesn’t avoid the difficult elements or emotions that drive organizational behavior, including those related to loss, identity, and the unconscious influences on our work.
I coach executives, consult to organizations, and design and offer leadership development experiences that explore what most programs might avoid — into the grief, anxiety, and existential challenges that drive the work of leadership and how we actually behave under pressure, when the outcomes are uncertain.
The path here
After studying philosophy and starting my career in advertising at McCann Erickson, I found myself drawn not to how organizations present themselves, but to what actually happens inside them. That question led me to law — first as an investigator and prosecutor examining leadership failure at the SEC and as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, then as defense counsel for international banks seeing the same dynamics from the other side. I spent years analyzing what happens when leadership fails and toxic cultures took over.
The scale of greed and crime often surprised me. But I learned more from what drove it. The fear I witnessed wasn't simply about losing money or status. It was existential — the terror of losing who you are. This didn’t result from a lack of skills, capability, or training. It came from a lack of awareness of what was really going on within themselves and the invisible dynamics shaping the work and the systems around them.
That recognition led me toward leadership itself. In senior advisory roles to Presidentially-appointed and Senate-confirmed leaders at the U.S. Departments of State and Treasury, I felt the weight of that responsibility firsthand — navigating interagency politics, high-stakes decisions, and extreme uncertainty as we oversaw missions and trillions of dollars through the global financial crisis, COVID-19, and the beginning of multiple global wars and conflicts. I also learned how to build and manage a culture that supported people, while balancing the need to deliver results for our external stakeholders, while considering the extra scrutiny, integrity, and accountability public service at the most senior levels required.
To go deeper, I trained as an executive coach, then as a specialist in adult development, adaptive leadership, and organizational behavior. I wanted to understand not just how leaders perform, but how they grow, and why most leadership development training often fails to produce lasting change. I studied group relations and systems psychodynamics in the Tavistock tradition and learned to see the unconscious dynamics shaping how organizations actually function. And I became a certified grief educator, because loss kept appearing at the center of every significant leadership challenge — but no one was naming it. That led me to terror management theory and the research on how awareness of our mortality quietly shapes human motivation, identity, and behavior in ways most leaders never see.
Special Assistant U.S. Attorney (E.D.N.Y.) Brian Sano
U.S. v. Cioffi and Tannin (Bear Stearns), 2009
Courtroom sketch by Elizabeth Williams
How I work
I pay close attention to what is present, what is avoided, and what is trying to be said but has not yet found a voice. In moments of tension, conflict, uncertainty, or change, my role is to help create enough space for people to stay with ambiguity or complexity long enough for new understanding to emerge — rather than rushing toward premature solutions.
This might sound simple. It is not. It requires holding multiple perspectives at once, tolerating not-knowing, and being willing to name what others are sensing but won't say. It also requires noticing whatever I’m feeling or thinking and what we can learn from that. Whether I'm coaching an executive one-to-one, consulting to a leadership team, or facilitating a group to discuss a case study or study a novel together, the underlying practice is the same: I aspire to help people see more clearly what is actually happening — within themselves, between each other, and in the systems they're part of — so they can respond with greater awareness, honesty, care, and skill.
I draw on established research and theory from various fields, but I stay grounded in lived experience. My approach often involves creative and contemplative methods — literary fiction, photography, reflective practice — because the most important dimensions of leadership rarely yield to conventional analysis. They have to be felt before they can be seen. And they have to be seen before they can be understood.
What guides the work
Three values run through everything I do: curiosity, courage, and care.
Curiosity keeps the work open and alive — resisting the pull toward judgment or premature solutions. Courage allows difficult truths, tensions, and losses to be named and held rather than avoided. And care ensures that people and the systems they are part of are treated with respect and humanity, even when meaningful change requires discomfort and letting go.
A Contemplative Orientation
My work is shaped by a lifelong exploration of contemplative practice — most visibly through Miksang contemplative photography, a discipline rooted in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of meditation and awareness. Miksang teaches a way of seeing that is direct, unbiased, and free from the habitual labels we place on our experience. It has profoundly influenced how I show up in every space I enter — with intention, presence, and an openness to what is actually here rather than what I expect to find or ignore.
This isn't a distraction from my professional practice. It is the foundation of it. I take that same quality of intention and attention to each coaching conversation, program I design, or group I facilitate. That directness makes them genuine and transformative.
Interested in working together?
If you are navigating something that conventional approaches haven't been able to address — or if you're curious about what a different kind of partnership might look like — I'd welcome the conversation.
