Leadership & Performance coaching

A senior manager inherited a team led by two tenured, high-performing assistant managers. New to the specifics of the work itself, they doubted their ability to judge whether it was being done right, so they started doing more of it themselves. Door shut. Off the floor. A growing reputation for being cold, when the real issue was that they didn't trust others, or themselves, to get it right without being fully hands on.

Our work together focused on this leader initiating a new habit: walking the work area and staying visible to their team, building rapport and trust. They learned that holding a team accountable doesn't require knowing how to do every part of the job better than the team members. They also drew a hard line with a boss whose own stress was expressed unprofessionally. My client directly asked for the respect they were owed. Six months later, they were promoted to Director. A year and a half after that, to VP.

External VP search typically runs into six figures before relocation, signing bonuses, or a single day of onboarding. None of that guarantees fit. This engagement cost a fraction of that, built precisely around this leader's development needs, not a generic curriculum, and the organization kept a leader who already knew the business, the team, and the culture.

This manager suffered from high turnover of entry-level staff and genuinely didn't know why. Cold, strident, closed off, according to everyone but them. Nobody on the team was going to be the one to tell them, and the revolving door was assumed to be a hiring problem and a generational flaw.

Our work together focused on this leader taking an honest look at their own impact, not their intentions: tone, expression, the moments they came across as more intimidating than they meant to be. They designed new habits around setting expectations early, patiently, and warmly, before frustration set in, addressing problems in the moment instead of waiting until frustration boiled over. They started asking the people most likely to tell them the truth without flinching, including their own kids at home, how they were coming across.

There are many ways to measure the impact of these kinds of leadership behavior changes. One powerful marker can be engagement survey data. In a case like this, a manager's eNPS score moving from a low double-digit negative to a strong positive, sometimes over a single review cycle, is the kind of shift that moves a needle at the leadership level, not just on the team itself. For a manager with high team turnover, low commitment, and limited self-awareness, coaching can make a dramatic difference in team performance outcomes.

A manager was direct, confident, and effective, exactly the traits that made the team successful. But those same traits worked against them with peers, managers of other teams whose work overlapped with theirs, who didn't report to them and weren't moved by speed alone. Decisiveness read as pressure. Every attempt at cooperation ran into resistance, and the resistance never resolved, it just got avoided.

Our work together focused on this leader designing a different way to use their strongest traits, decisiveness and competitiveness, aimed differently: slowing down just long enough to understand what the other leader was actually constrained by. Outcomes emerged that enabled both teams to achieve their respective operational goals, essential to the executive under whom they both reported. The traits didn't need to be dialed back. They needed a different target.