How our coaches approach leadership transitions, organizational change, and developing leaders at every level.
Three real coaching stories:
Vignette A: The Over-Detailed Communicator. A newer leader wanting to grow into the next level. His problem was communication - senior leaders loved his work but not how he communicated it. He didn’t come across as having executive communication. Through coaching, they identified he was giving way too much detail. He learned to adjust detail level to suit the audience, ask more questions, and speak to people at different levels in ways they best comprehended and preferred. Ultimately, leaders started accepting him more and he had more success.
Vignette B: The Silent Advocate. A leader wanting a promotion, title change, and more money but having trouble articulating her value and advocating for herself. They worked together for her to figure out what words she wanted to use, how she wanted to speak to leadership, and what arguments to present. She felt more comfortable, and was able to get the pay raise and title change she was looking for.
Vignette C: The Chronic Settler. A woman changing organizations - leaving one and joining a new one. She always ended up taking lower pay than she should have, then was upset doing the job at below-market rate because she settled. Her goal was to build confidence to advocate for herself and negotiate. In the end, she negotiated $10,000 more than the original offer plus additional benefits she would never have asked for. First time in her career she actually negotiated the salary and benefit package she wanted.
AI fluency is the biggest one. How do I get ready? What am I getting ready for? Reference the AI Career Navigator content - it covers everything relevant. Lead with AI fluency for decision-making (what AI can and cannot do). Frame as readiness - leaders asking what should I be preparing for.
A lot of organizational coaches who call themselves organizational coaches are actually consultants. They come in with playbooks, they come with “thou shalt do that,” and they try to put the square peg of their playbooks into the round hole of that company.
What coaches do - they actually understand, or they work hard on understanding, specific context, specific organizational context of the change that is going on. Understanding that change is perpetual. But at that specific moment, what are the components? What are the three pillars - people, processes, and tools - that are in play?
They still bring their own perspective, they still bring their own experience. Nobody hires them just to ask questions. But they mostly rely on those leaders who’ve been steeped in these companies’ change, vision, mission to drive what they’re driving - with contributing from their coaching stance.
The #1 reason is lack of drive from the C-suite. Lack of involvement from the top of the organization. Lack of visibility at that level. Lack of commitment, and lack of accountability and driving accountability at that level.
In many cases, top leaders think that they gave commands and their orders are to be executed. But change is pervasive, and especially if you are turning a Titanic around, it has to have all the attention of a captain. And the captain cannot be on the top deck with the orchestra. The captain should be at his post, driving this change and taking accountability and responsibility.
The #1 pattern: Leaders don’t do change management at all. They don’t communicate. They don’t define stakeholders. They don’t communicate and over-communicate. Change hits people as a surprise. When surprise hits people, they push back. And sometimes the people who push back have the power to push back. So the change effort stalls or collapses entirely.
From the book and practice: Sponsors delegate the uncomfortable conversations rather than having them personally. Organizations buy a methodology (ADKAR, Kotter) and treat it as a checklist rather than developing the capability to use it. The most confident sponsors are often the least prepared - confidence masks a lack of understanding of what change actually requires of them personally. Teams that have been through multiple failed change initiatives develop “change fatigue” that looks like resistance but is actually learned helplessness.
Leaders: Start with process before people. Announce change without building readiness. Measure adoption instead of capability. Treat resistance as a problem to overcome rather than data to understand.
Coaches: Try to coach the change initiative instead of coaching the leader. Over-facilitate instead of developing the leader’s own facilitation capability. Accept the stated problem without questioning whether it’s the real problem.
Resistance isn’t the enemy of change. Apathy is. When people resist, they’re still engaged. When they stop caring, you’ve lost.
Also: The most successful change initiatives I’ve supported didn’t follow their change management plan. They developed leaders who could navigate whatever emerged.
Coaching can’t fix a fundamentally flawed strategy. If the change shouldn’t happen, no amount of leadership development will make it succeed. Our job is to help leaders see the difference.
Also: There’s no formula that guarantees change success. But there are patterns in what works.
Change management is a capability, not a project. It’s not something you deploy once; it’s something you develop in your leaders so they can navigate whatever comes next.
The feedback itself is nonsensical. 'More strategically' - is that a different subject? A different attribute of their thinking? And by how much - 5%, 10%, 100%? Redo completely? The recommendation makes no sense. The more disturbing thing is that a leader who receives this recommendation does not ask a question. 'When you say more strategically, what do you mean? How would you think about this more strategically? What points would you take?' It almost by proxy might mean some other deep-seated problems within the organizational culture, where these conversations might be perceived as - maybe even incompetence.
One of the few manifestations of an executive thinking strategically is starting with outcomes. Not 'starting with why' - but starting with outcomes. In the context of what got you here won't get you there and the Fluent Coach framework - the ability to deliver, focus on numbers, making systems work got them here. But at their present level, they need to start thinking with outcomes in mind. When someone else does the work now, what will the impact be? What outcomes will we get? What side effects will there be? What do we need the organization to be? How do we respond to the risk? All the questions that people don't usually have to ask at lower levels surface here. Making sense of the cacophony of these questions, structuring them, and arriving at structured outcomes and responses - that might be one manifestation of strategic thinking.
In terms of outcomes and their desirability. Not what I do and how I do it, but why I do it, who benefits from it, how, and what the implications are.
Mostly under stress - 'I can do it better, faster than you.' It hits so many wrong buttons: team disempowerment, not recognizing that their people are actually better and faster by now.
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