March 2023 – Nourse Leadership Strategies

Coaching Case Study: Newly Promoted COO

In this case study, I share my experience as an executive transition coach supporting a Chief Operations Officer (COO) and how I helped her prevent career derailment.

Susan is a recently promoted COO in a large healthcare system. Her boss promoted her to her first C-Suite position mainly based on her experience, technical brilliance, and ability to clean up operational challenges. However, the skills that helped her reach her dream job were different from the right skills to enable her to succeed. Struggling in her new role, she realized she needed more support than her CEO could provide, so she engaged me as her executive transition coach.

Susan’s Perspective

Based on conversations with Susan and her direct reports and an assessment of her personality type, I began to make sense of the situation. She struggles in her new role because her people will not step up and take responsibility for their functional areas. Fiercely loyal to her boss Steve, she wants to improve her business results but is still trying to figure out how to do this with the team she inherited.

Nothing was changing despite her efforts to involve herself in the day-to-day functioning of her subordinates’ organizations. She was frustrated with her staff and refused to recognize them, believing they would slack off even more if she did this. More importantly, Susan was frustrated that her talent for fixing broken organizations used to be valued by her employer but is now frowned upon. She feels the rules changed on what constitutes effective behavior for leaders somewhere along the way, and nobody told her. Susan wonders whether it was a mistake to take on this role and has considered stepping back into her former position.

Coaching Assessment Discoveries

As an executive coach, I always collect information from both my client and key stakeholders as an initial attempt to clarify the focus of our work. I administered the Hogan Personality Assessment so Susan could discover her strengths, potential derailers under stress, and core values. Among her insights from Hogan:

Tendency to isolate herself, work alone, and avoid reaching out to others in the organization.
Conscientious about her work, but also reluctant to delegate
Set very high standards for herself and others
Under stress, would become very risk-averse, fail to innovate and become overly reliant on her boss’ approval before acting

The Hogan Assessment provided some valid hypotheses I could test through behavioral interviews with her key stakeholders. Her raters suggested she struggled with delegation, building collaborative relationships with her peers, and having high standards for her team but not communicating those standards to them. Her boss, Steve, also mentioned that she was too dependent on his approval at times before taking action to address critical priorities they had already discussed.

Coaching Approach and Strategies

Once we debriefed her feedback report, Susan decided to set three primary development goals:

Improve her capacity to delegate and coach her team
Build stronger collaborative relationships with her peers
Shift her approach to her role from doer to leader

Based on her goals, we explored several strategies in our coaching sessions:

Susan practiced delegation conversations with me as if I was one of her direct reports.
She developed a system for delegation including a way to track tasks such as due dates, assigned staff, and notes on their level of performance.
Committed to stress management practices such as mindfulness, exercise, and yoga.
Left her office more often to informally stop by colleagues and direct reports’ offices to chat and build relationships.
Gaining greater clarity from the CEO on goals in her new role for the next 3, 6 and 9 months.
Recognizing when she was overusing her strengths.

Coaching Engagement Outcomes

At the end of the six-month engagement, I collected some feedback from selected stakeholders about changes they noted in Susan’s leadership skills. Based on this feedback, Susan achieved most of her goals and shifted her reputation to a strategic leader. Her direct reports felt more engaged and supported by her, with greater clarity about her expectations. As a result, they were more willing to step up and take on additional responsibilities, freeing up more of Susan’s time to conduct strategic planning and proactive relationship-building with her boss and peers.

Promotions can be a time of great excitement as leaders increase their compensation, achieve a new title, and expand their scope. However, given their greater visibility and heightened expectations at the C-Level, they may also present an opportunity for derailment. Executive transition coaching is one way to help new leaders adapt to their new role and thrive.

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Dr. Kevin Nourse is an executive transition coach specializing in helping newly hired or promoted executives thrive. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, an executive and team coaching firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 442-420-5578 or kevin@nourseleadership.com.

Executive Transition Coaching: Recent Research

Leadership Transition Study Design

The researchers conducted a qualitative study of six people receiving coaching to support their transition into C-suite roles within global corporations. In each interview, they explored participants’ new roles, experiences, and challenges at each transition stage, and the experience of being coached. The study participants were employed by financial services, media, retail, insurance, and food and beverage organizations.

Key Study Findings on Leadership Transitions

The researchers identify two major findings from their study:

Executives experienced substantial and unprecedented challenges, mainly as a result of interactions with others, including their boss, triggering a variety of emotions from confidence and elation to overwhelm and self-doubt.

Executive coaching helped research participants manage their frustrations, gain new perspectives, and solve problems in a safe space, leading to lasting, positive change.

Consistency of the Study Findings with Other Sources

These themes are consistent with my work as an executive transition coach working with healthcare and pharmaceutical leaders. For example, I recently coached a new healthcare leader who was formerly a full-time physician. The shift in her role and joining a new organization with a very bureaucratic culture were overwhelming and frustrating. We explored the need for her to adapt her leadership style in working with non-clinical colleagues, adapting to and learning from setbacks, and how to pick up on critical unwritten rules for communication. As a result, my client was more successful in her attempts to sell her ideas and enlist support from key stakeholders.

The study’s findings align with other researchers who have suggested the three most effective approaches to supporting leaders in transition, including executive transitions coaching, support from internal mentors, and a customized assimilation plan. In that regard, it truly takes a village to support the successful integration of a leader into a new role.

McGill, P, Clarke, P. and Sheffield, D. (2019). From “blind elation” to “oh my goodness, what have I gotten into” … Exploring the experience of executive coaching during leadership transitions into C-suite roles. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 17(1), pp. 3-18.

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Dr. Kevin Nourse is an executive and team coach specializing in coaching newly hired or promoted executives successfully integrate into their role. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, an executive and team coaching firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or kevin@nourseleadership.com.