Leadership Coaching for People Who Got Promoted Into It
Available anywhere in the United States.
Nobody trains you for the part of leadership that is actually hard. Not the strategy. The conversation you have been avoiding for three weeks, the report you cannot reach, the meeting where you said the reasonable thing and it landed badly anyway.
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You were promoted for the wrong skills
Most people become leaders because they were exceptional at the individual work. You shipped, you solved, you were the one who could be trusted with the hard problem. That is the whole promotion case, and it is a genuinely good one.
Then the job changes underneath you. The new job is almost entirely other people: their motivation, their conflicts, their misreadings of what you said, their careers. Almost none of it responds to the thing you are actually excellent at, which is solving the problem yourself. The instinct that made you promotable is now the instinct you have to keep overriding.
What that tends to look like from inside: you are doing two jobs, because you never fully stopped doing the first one. Feedback conversations get postponed until they are overdue and therefore worse. You are managing a person you privately think should have figured this out already. And there is nobody obvious to talk to about any of it, because your reports cannot hear it and your boss is who you are performing for.
What we actually work on
The conversation you are avoiding
There is almost always one. We work on the specific one, not on feedback frameworks in general. What you are actually afraid will happen, whether that fear is accurate, and what you will say.
Delegation you do not immediately undo
Most technical leaders can delegate. What they cannot do is tolerate the work being done worse than they would do it, for the months it takes someone to get good. That tolerance is the actual skill.
Reading the room you are now in
Your words carry more weight than they used to and you did not get a memo about it. A thinking-out-loud comment from you becomes a directive by Thursday. Recalibrating that is unglamorous and changes a lot.
Deciding what kind of leader you are
Most people inherit a style by imitating whoever they worked for, including the parts they hated. Choosing deliberately, rather than defaulting, is most of what self-awareness as a leader actually means.
Someone who has done the job and the clinical training
I was an engineer at Google before I was a counselor, and a nuclear engine operator on a US Navy submarine before that. I know what it is to lead people in an environment where being wrong is expensive, and I know the specific flavor of leadership that happens among people who are all smarter than the average room.
The clinical training matters for a reason that is easy to miss. A lot of what stalls leaders is not a skills gap. It is conflict avoidance with a long history, or a need to be the competent one that predates the job by decades. A coach without clinical training will keep giving you techniques for a problem that is not technical. I can tell the difference, and say so.
If what surfaces turns out to need therapy rather than coaching, you will hear that from me. In Colorado we can move into counseling directly. Outside Colorado I will help you find someone licensed where you live. The full distinction is on the coaching page.
Practical details
A free 30-minute consultation first. You describe the situation. I tell you honestly whether coaching fits it.
$185 for a 50-minute session, by video, from anywhere in the US. Most people start weekly and move to every other week. No packages, no minimum. Detail on the fees page.
Company-funded is common. Coaching usually sits in a professional development budget rather than a health benefit, which makes it considerably easier to expense than therapy.
Common questions
What is the difference between leadership coaching and executive coaching?
In practice the terms are used interchangeably, and most coaches offer one thing under both labels. The distinction worth making is where you are starting from. Leadership coaching usually starts from capability: you are functioning and you want to lead better. Executive coaching, at least the way it is used here, more often starts from depletion.
Do I need to be a senior executive?
No. Some of the most useful work happens with people who were promoted into leadership recently and are discovering that the skills that got them promoted are not the skills the new job needs. That gap is the whole subject.
Is leadership coaching confidential?
It is confidential as a matter of professional ethics, but coaching does not carry the legally protected confidentiality that therapy does. If your employer is paying, agree up front what, if anything, gets reported back. The honest default is that content stays between us and only attendance is shared.
Can my company pay for this?
Often, yes. Many organizations have a professional development budget that covers coaching, and coaching is easier to expense than therapy because it is not a clinical service. Ask about a development or L&D budget rather than a health benefit.
How is this different from a leadership training course?
A course teaches a model to a room. Coaching works on the specific situation in front of you, with the specific habits you actually have. Most leaders I work with already know the models. The gap is not knowledge, it is what happens at 4pm on a Thursday when the conversation gets uncomfortable.