Over the six months I worked with him, Oliver made a profound shift from being a solver of problems to becoming a strategic partner for collaborative solutions.
Customer Journey Series: Oliver
This article is part of a customer journey series following “Oliver,” a CTO in a pharma company scaling up to begin commercialization for a new drug. Oliver was facing a growing team, fast growing IT expansion, and collaboration across a rapidly expanding organization.
Each post explores a real coaching conversation or leadership challenge from that journey.
This is the first post in Oliver’s series.
When I worked with him, Oliver was the CTO at a pharma company making the transition from startup to established company. Already publicly listed, the company was focused on acquiring the ability to satisfy FDA requirements and get a product to market.
Oliver came to me as a subject matter expert, but he wanted to be seen as more than that. Rather than seeing IT as merely an efficiency driver, Oliver saw IT as a process that could differentiate the company, transform it, and protect their brand at scale.
For him to realize that vision, he himself would have to transcend technology and become attuned to the fundamentals of leading people: using empathy to build trust, develop respect, and create alignment.
What Worked Before Isn’t Working Anymore
During the startup phase, Oliver was given a lot of leeway to determine what technology the company needed.
Now, as they were moving into enterprise scale, he found that he needed a more sophisticated approach to communicating with the leadership team.
“What worked before isn’t working anymore,” he told me in our first session. “Now they want participation and a voice in solving the problem. They want to make the decision.”
He continued, “When I come in with technological solutions to the problems I’m hearing about, it doesn’t go so well. They want to change something.”
At this point, Oliver’s goal was to not get stuck just being a techie.
“They see me as a Subject Matter Expert, not a leader or a thought partner. The people in other departments want to do the same things the same way all the time, and they don’t want to collaborate.”
Oliver wanted to be a strategic partner. He was a keen observer of how the new people driving growth were acting as opposed to the lean, close-knit startup team.
“Now that we’ve gone public, people are more afraid of getting blamed if something goes wrong. Especially in the clinical and legal departments, they don’t trust anyone. They’re just trying to protect themselves.”
The way Oliver saw it, the role of technology was not just to enable and optimize, but to differentiate and transform. It’s not just about making the same processes easier, it’s about significantly reducing risk by eliminating human error and seeking optimization in every part of the company, from finance and legal to clinical and manufacturing. Productivity and safety gains at scale would result in significant value to the company.
“The problem is getting people to open up. If people can trust me to share where the risks are, we can mitigate them and make everyone more successful. I just don’t know how to get people to drop their defenses and open up.”
How a Strength Can Become a Weakness
Oliver was a perfect example of how a strength can become a weakness when it is overused.
Oliver was excellent at solving problems. Intuitively he understood most problems and immediately envisioned solutions.
But to others, his intuitive problem-solving ability didn’t look like optimization or risk reduction. It looked like control.
So, I asked him to stop doing what he was really good at: solving problems. Instead, I asked him to focus on empathy, how the problem felt to the other person.
Because it’s difficult to try something new at work, I often suggest that people try new communication techniques at home first.
“Do you have kids?” I asked.
“Yes, I have two teenage daughters,” Oliver said.
“Perfect,” I said. “Your coaching homework for the next two week is to listen to your daughters and their complaints without trying to solve them. Just listen and try to guess how the problems of teenage girls feel. Just say, ‘well, that must be disappointing,’ or something like that, and don’t offer any solutions.”
I explained that if a teenage girl has a problem with a teacher or boys or other girls, the last thing they want is their dad telling them what to do. They just want empathy.
“They want to know that you understand how difficult their problems are and that you believe in them to solve them.”
Two weeks later, Oliver came back.
“My daughters love you,” he said.
Oliver’s Core Realization
Oliver recalled how hard it was at first to listen to the problems without shifting into problem solving mode. He had to hold back to focus on how they felt. But when he did, something else happened.
“I realized they didn’t need me to solve their problems. They needed me to understand them.”
They stopped resisting and started opening up. That was the first time Oliver realized empathy wasn’t just emotional support. It was a way to reduce defensiveness and build trust.
The more he listened, without telling them what to do, the more they shared and the safer they felt. They started being a little bolder and speaking up more for themselves.
“How can you apply that lesson in the workplace?”
“Do you mean for me to listen more and stop offering solutions at work? It’s my job to offer solutions.”
“It’s the same with your peers as with your daughters. If your goal is to be a strategic thought partner, the first thing you have to do is empathize with the problem and wait until they are ready to collaborate on a solution. If you jump to the solution too quickly, it can feel like you are trying to take control of their work, and they won’t want to trust you with what they are trying to do.”
Oliver had been a solver of problems for a long time. But suddenly, he saw that to be more than a technological problem solver, he had to stop doing what had made him successful up till now.
In fact, he saw that his expertise was exactly what was limiting him. Becoming a trusted advisor was more about trust than technology, and more about empathy than solutions.
“When you empathize, you help them see you as someone they can turn to as they need systems to evolve and improve over time,” I advised.
At the office, instead of dismissing or criticizing his colleagues’ concerns about blame, I encouraged him to empathize with them. Understanding their fears will go a long way to aligning with them.
Over the next few months, Oliver turned this key lesson into a new way of operating in his organization and achieved some extraordinary breakthroughs. Oliver stopped treating problems as technical puzzles and started treating them as human conversations.
What began as an experiment with his daughters would soon transform how he worked with peers, department heads, and executives across the company.
Oliver’s Leadership Values
One of the first things I ask coaching clients to do is define their leadership values. Leadership values become a compass during difficult decisions and help leaders consistently show up the way they want to be remembered.
Over the time I worked with him, Oliver’s focus expanded far beyond technology to the leadership principles that helped him work with everyone on the team.
- Trust
- Patience
- Alignment
- Psychological Safety: help people feel safe enough to solve difficult problems together
Continue the Journey
← Previous Post | Next Post →
Keep Learning
Return to Customer Journeys Hub
Explore the Leadership Framework
