But better.  A bit of humility, more cognizant of people.  

He has had a learning journey since he transferred 6mos ago.  He got his ass kicked out of the facility he was leading, about lost his job, and it was by the skin of his teeth that he got me and my customer to take him back. I told him one twitch of inappropriate and he was done.

He is still very good technically though more in tune with the idea that a leader's job is about the people that we lead and inspiring those people to collectively succeed while building relationships with the team, the client, and the leaders we interface with.

We had a high stress event today. He lost his shit.  No surprise there.  But he did it professionally, assertively, and went very close to too far. Maybe he did go too far. But, I was able to pull the situation back from the edge and get the collective effort re-aligned so everyone involved, my team, the customer team, and a number of remote leaders, got everyone focused on the problem, and... we solved it.

After the event, he called and thanked me for pulling him back from the edge and commented about how I keep him focused and together we can deliver extremely well.

Most interesting to me was how I did not have the tension and the anxiety that had grown over the year plus that he worked for me the first time.  A year of batshit crazy bipolar autism spectrum nightmare not knowing from minute to minute if I was going to  get brilliant out of him, or raging insanity.

Just maybe... this will work.

Knock on wood.