Can Coaching Help With Leadership Transitions?
Short answer? Yes. Here’s how.
Transitioning into leadership is often viewed as a milestone. But what if you chose another path?
To see it as just another job. One you showed up for, executed, and in return, collected a pay check?
Would you arrive with a 90-day plan? Would you set the bar two stories higher than you currently stand? Would you end the day berating yourself to “make an impact”?
Or would you just… go home?
I can feel your inner over-achiever crawling out of its skin right now, but stay with me.
Leadership transitions are some of the most emotionally charged and high-stress periods of an executive’s career.
And whether you’re on-boarding or off-boarding, executive coaching can be the differentiator between succumbing to it, or taking another path.
It’s “Not Enough"
Let’s start with on-boarding.
A true onboarding period is meant for information gathering, understanding the culture, and learning the layout. That’s it. No more.
But when onboarding leaders step into a brand-new role, they almost always fall prey to the subconscious mindset that says:
I am not enough.
So what happens? You try harder, work longer, and force yourself to master things you could have no possible way of knowing.
An effective coach will have accounted for this default trip-switch in consciousness, and built in goals to guide you down the other path.
How?
By asking one disruptive question:
"What are you running from?"
This question places the unconscious purview of inadequacy front and center.
For example, (I’ve seen this MANY times) a leader might insist they need to learn everyone else’s job on their team, as well as their own, during on-boarding.
When pushed on what they’re running from, they might realize (for example) that they’re trying to disprove a former boss or a parent who barraided them for doing the bare minimum.
An executive coach will illuminate this belief, then guide them back to something more true.
(for example, “you are more than enough. You wouldn’t have gotten the job if your weren’t”)
By challenging the truth of their narrative, the leader realizes that doing what’s required is a wonderful thing, as it’s an embodiment of completion.
And if meeting a requirement is completion, that renders anything extra, run-off. A waste of energy. A deficit.
So why is this important?
Because shifting from a state of “proving” your worth, into recognizing that there is nothing to prove is what opens up the brain’s faculties, allowing you to gather more information about the market, your team, your new company, and the context. Which is the entire point of on-boarding.
What About Off-Boarding?
The most common pitfall for departing leaders is rushing into the next move (new position, new company, new lawsuit) without taking the time to adequately process emotion.
Think of it like a marriage. If you broke up with your wife, even if the split was completely amicable, you wouldn’t go out the next day and marry someone else.
You would take the time to be by yourself and process the transition.
Yet when it comes to career, executives seem to want to “get married” the moment the divorce papers are signed.
To stop you from making a mistake, an executive coach will (should) structure a recovery period to process the emotion, and return to a neutral state, where productive decisions can actually be made.
Here are three simple ways to do it:
Name the Arena
There are five primary emotions. Sadness, Anger, Fear, Enjoyment, and Disgust. Which do you feel the most right now? This lets you know what arena you’re playing in.
Locate the Sensation
Next, locate where the emotion lives in the body. For example, you might realize you feel anger in your solar plexus.
The solar plexus is the zone of personal power, so it makes sense that you might feel anger there, believing that you’ve just been stripped of your power.
Win The Staring Contest
Next, close your eyes and have a "staring contest" with the sensation in your body.
Like a screaming child, when the emotion receives your full attention, it stops screaming and moves on.
It will either move to a different location in your body, evolve into a different feeling, downgrade in intensity, or go away all together.
Now you can safely look at the meaning you’ve assigned to the situation and systematically disprove it.
From Winning to Leading
When you choose to process your emotion, rather than white-knuckle a leadership transition alone, the visible shift in how you show up is profound.
You enter the workplace grounded, free from the need to establish dominance or security, allowing key strategic relationships to form faster
You stop trying to unconsciously "win" every single interaction with peers, superiors, and subordinates, building connections rather than victories
On-boarding becomes about the team and job at hand, taking the pressure off of you, and allowing the business unit to achieve success quicker
When internal pressure is removed, you gain access to a wealth of new visceral information.
You think more creatively, listen on a deeper level, and meet your new team exactly where they are.
What To Do If You’re In An Overwhelming Leadership Transition Right Now
Ask yourself:
"What am I making this situation mean for me?”
Then follow it up with…
“Is this true of everyone walking the planet?” (The answer will be no)
Exposing the narrative you’ve written for yourself is the first step toward stepping out of the stress of a leadership transition and onto a calmer, peaceful and WAY more productive "other path."
