What started as a desire to improve executive presence became a deeper understanding of leadership itself.
Customer Journey Series: Jim
This article is part of a customer journey series following “Jim,” a VP of Research and Development in a multi-national pharma company navigating shifting organizational demands, rapid leadership changes, and pressure to adapt and keep his team functioning.
His journey explores leadership presence, empathy, decision making, managing low performers, and helping talented employees grow.
Each post explores a real coaching conversation or leadership challenge from that journey.
This is the sixth and final post in Jim’s series.
In coaching, I watched Jim grow from an outstanding technical leader to an empathetic and encouraging mentor and people leader. Like many other science leaders, he relied on logic and focused on getting things done.
By the end of our coaching engagement, which lasted six months, he had done a wonderful job learning how to use empathy strategically to motivate his team and keep the right people on the right path for their own growth.
As we wrapped up coaching, I asked Jim to reflect on his coaching journey.
“What’s been helpful for me,” Jim said, “is breaking the coaching homework down into small actions, like the journal about emotions, and being aware of my impact on others, and defining my leadership values.”
In a way that Jim couldn’t have anticipated, he said, he didn’t work directly on leadership presence, which is what he wanted from coaching when he started.
Instead, we worked on the leadership fundamentals that contribute to leadership presence:
- Getting control of his own emotions
- Being more empathetic
- Incorporating emotions into the decision-making process and into communications.
“Actually, I have changed my whole leadership style because of coaching. I used to be very logical and expected others to be the same. But now I realize how important the emotional part is. How people feel about their job is really a huge part of performance.”
Ultimately, with Jim, what started as a desire to improve executive presence became a deeper understanding of leadership itself. Presence was not something he learned to project. It was something that emerged as he became more intentional about how he led other people.
Jim told me in our last session, “when I started coaching, I was just interested in executive presence, but now I realize that the fundamentals are really important.”
He went on. “Being a leader is really about dedicating myself to values and practices that help other people be their best, tuning into others and being aware of the impact of conversations and decisions.”
As I reflect back on Jim’s journey, what stands out to me is his transformation from a leader with a focus on logic and data to a real leader, focused on giving his team what they need to be successful. Instead of results, he prioritized making them feel encouraged, cared about, challenged in ways they could handle.
He really learned to listen to them and to deliver feedback in a way that would motivate them. Instead of being a logical scientist, he became a warmer, more encouraging, and more empathetic human being. Those were the traits that helped him motivate his team in a dynamic, global corporation.
As with most of my clients, Jim learned to focus less on what he needed from his team, and more on what they needed from him to be successful.
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