At first, empathy was deeply counterintuitive for Oliver. He had built his career on being the person with the answers. To become a strategic partner, he would have to change his leadership style.
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 fifth post in Oliver’s series.
Looking back at Oliver’s journey, Oliver’s desire to be more than just a “tech guy” led him to rethink his whole approach to his work.
“I used to think my role was to solve problems. But being a problem solver was keeping me in the role of a subject matter expert. Only when I stopped trying to be the expert could other people see me as a leader,” he told me.
What Oliver had discovered was that his expertise created distance. He solved problems too quickly.
When he did, other people felt threatened, as if he was trying to control or take over their job or their results. Working with him made them feel they might lose their ownership.
So, the more expertise he demonstrated, the less collaborative people became.
Strategic Partnership Begins When People Trust You with Their Problems
In coaching conversations, Oliver discovered that strategic partnership begins when people trust you with their problems.
Through his own experiences, he realized that empathy was the tool that:
- Built trust
- Reduced fear
- Encouraged openness
- Helped people be honest about risks they faced
- Improved collaboration.
Once he understood how to use empathy, he shifted his focus from solving problems to listening, aligning, facilitating, and building systems of trust.
At first, this was deeply counterintuitive for Oliver. He had built his career on being the person with the answers. People came to him because he solved difficult technical problems quickly and confidently. Slowing down and resisting the urge to solve problems at first felt unnatural.
But over time, he started noticing something important. The more he listened, the more people relaxed. The more they felt understood, the more openly they talked about the operational risks, delays, fears, and political tensions they were dealing with.
Instead of resisting him, they started inviting him into larger strategic conversations.
Then, he taught his team to use listening and empathy to build trust. Over a few months, Oliver and his team built incredible influence across the organization.
Strategic Partnership Required Systems Thinking
When Oliver stopped focusing only on IT systems and solutions, he started focusing on:
- organizational systems,
- communication systems,
- trust systems,
- decision systems.
He learned how to use flow charts and decision trees to communicate ownership and data systems.
His vision of protecting the whole company with IT systems that served every department’s needs for risk reduction, brought the whole company together and helped him solidify his influence and executive leadership.
Influence Expanded When Others Felt Ownership
When Oliver learned to design solutions that preserved departmental control while creating organizational alignment, trust grew.
He made sure that he was there to protect them and the company. His personal commitment to each and every leader to help them mitigate risks helped break down silos and increase collaboration across the organization.
As he focused on others, trust in him grew.
Commercialization pressures quickly intensified, and departments became increasingly protective of their processes, timelines, and data. Oliver realized that trust grew when people believed he was helping them succeed—not trying to take control away from them.
By helping teams preserve ownership while reducing operational risk, he gradually became someone leaders turned to early instead of someone they resisted until it was too late.
Strategic Partnership Is About Trust
Over time, Oliver realized that strategic leadership was not about having the best answers. It was about creating enough trust, clarity, and alignment for people to solve problems together.
Once departments stopped feeling controlled and started feeling understood, collaboration became possible.
That shift expanded not only his influence, but the company’s ability to scale safely through commercialization.
In the end, Oliver’s growth had very little to do with technology itself. The real shift was learning that leadership at enterprise scale was less about being the hero with the answer and more about creating the trust, alignment, and structure for others to solve problems together.
Watching Oliver, I was reminded how every strength can be a weakness. He was an excellent problem solver, but that strength held him back when he overused it and tried to impose solutions on others.
Once he realized that real influence was about listening, empathy, and collaboration, he became someone the whole organization turned to—not because he had the answers, but because he helped others find them.
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