If you’ve ever wondered what leadership coaching is really like, these customer journeys offer a glimpse into the experience.
This summer I’ve decided to blog about six customer journeys. Each journey is an idividual path toward confidence, empathy, trust, alignment, and leadership presence.
These stories are as different as the people themselves who came to me. Each one came at a different time in their career. It’s a good reminder that inflection points look different in different industries and different organizations.
Some were in very large, Fortune 500 companies, and some were in very small organizations or in the middle. The pace of discussions, learning, and change for each one reflects their own personal needs and that of their company. Some of them worked with me for six months to a year, with some follow ups as they encountered changes.
It’s part of my job to match the speed of coaching to the speed of the client’s needs. When people are dealing with fast and furious changes, they need a safe space to process changes quickly and learn lessons for being effective even as the work moves faster.
Others take time to experiment and try new techniques to see how they work before turning their attention to the next challenge.
All of them experienced immense career growth. Whether it was increased confidence and better management of their own emotions, or better communication and learning to tailor their message to the person hearing it, they all became better communicators and more confident in their ability to motivate and handle challenges from their teams.
In spite of the variety of people and situations, a few themes emerged that are common across almost all of these customer journeys.
Confidence and Managing Yourself
Whether emotions are running too high or not showing up at all, they affect satisfaction, engagement, communication, and performance. Strong leaders learn to manage their own emotions rather than being managed by them. They also pay attention to how others are experiencing change, pressure, and uncertainty so they can communicate more effectively and make better decisions.
Leadership Values
I always encourage my clients to define their leadership values. It helps them articulate the kind of leader they want to be and how they want to show up for their team. It’s also useful when things are stressful to have a list of ideas you want to hold fast to. I have put each client’s leadership values into the first post about them, even though it often took us a few months to find the right values to guide them.
Dealing with Low Performers
Performance is a big part of leadership, and so nearly every customer journey has a story of how they handled low performers. No two employees or situations are exactly alike. There are a lot of lessons learned here that are applicable to other situations.
Managing Up
As you grow in leadership, handling the people above you can get tricky. Handling another executive is not like handling your direct reports or other people under you or at your level. It requires more finesse. It’s often useful to have skills like validation, patience, alignment, and figuring out how they really feel—because they won’t always tell you directly. Understanding what makes each one tick is a really important job for moving up.
Follow the Blog Series Ahead
For each of six customers, I have six blogs planned. They will be published on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so each one will be spread over two weeks.
To honor my commitment to confidentiality, all names have been changed, and details are anonymized to protect the privacy of my clients.
Once the journeys have been published, you can simply click the links below to follow the story. I’ll make links live as the series rolls out.
Bookmark this page to come back and see how the story is developing.
At the end of the summer, I’ll gather them all into a PDF so you can download them and read through them all together.
Susan: Biotech sales leader managing fast changes and pressure from above.
- From High Performer to Organizational Leader
- What Low Performers Actually Need from Leaders
- Your Boss’s Stress Is Not Your Stress
- Leading at Scale
- Build Leadership Success from the Foundation Up
- What Susan Ultimately Learned About Leadership Growth
Kami: A sales leader in pharma managing competitive changes and new leadership.
Oliver: a CTO in a pharma company scaling up and handling a growing team and issues of trust.
Carrie: A finance executive navigating a new job, constant leadership changes, and finding her place in a new organization.
Karen: A first time manager learning to manage herself and others effectively.
Jim: an SVP of Research in a large fortune 500 who learned the foundational skills for leadership presence.
I hope you enjoy reading about these customer journeys as much as I have in revisiting and writing about them.
Continue the Journey
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