Coaching Case Study – Nourse Leadership Strategies

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.

# # # # #

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.

Successful executive coaches draw upon evidence-based theories to achieve tangible results for their clients. One helpful framework recognizes how leaders evolve according to predictable stages. Consider the case of a newly promoted leader who nearly derailed and how leadership stage theory informed our coaching approach.

Susan is a newly promoted healthcare leader to her role in revenue reporting with four staff members. As a new manager, she felt overwhelmed trying to learn all she needed to know about her role, manage her team, and respond to her boss’s demands. In her role only a couple of months, Susan damaged many key relationships because of her overly assertive communication style. Her manager, the CFO, voiced his desire for her to delegate more downward to join his strategic planning meetings with the CEO. Susan started to doubt the wisdom of taking the promotion and feels exhausted as she works most weekends trying to learn more about the technical aspects of her direct reports roles.

Overview of Stage Theory

Numerous theories explain the process of how one becomes an effective change leader. Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs developed an agility framework that explores leader evolution based on developmental stages. This type of model provides a valuable roadmap for executive coaches support the growth of their clients based on predictable stages of development. As leaders evolve through these stages, they are better able to lead increasingly complex change initiatives successfully.

The five stages include expert, achiever, catalyst, co-creator, and synergist.

Expert level managers focus on the subject-matter competence and solo efforts to get things done. As a result, they are generally capable of leading simple change projects. Approximately 45% of managers are functioning at this level.

Achiever-level managers are attuned to strategic views of their role and organization, as well as producing results. Research suggests that 35% of managers function at this level.

Catalyst-level managers can build capacity by developing and empowering people, building innovative organizational cultures, and adaptive communication capabilities. Approximately 5% of managers function at this level.

Co-creators are skilled at building shared purpose, collaborative relationships, and service to others. Researchers estimate that only 4% of managers function at this level.

Synergists embrace a holistic perspective that integrates their life purpose with their vocation. Only 1% of managers reach this stage of development. Synergists are capable of navigating the most complex types of organizational change and transformation.

Susan as an Expert Stage Manager

Through initial conversations with Susan it became apparent she was functioning at the expert stage of leader development. Susan experienced limits to her ability to lead change projects – mostly incremental process improvements. These limitations stem from her limited ability to think strategically, over-reliance on her capabilities versus leveraging others’ talents, and limited self-awareness.

Coaching Approach with Susan

As her executive coach, I began with a 360-degree assessment to help Susan understand how others perceived her. We then created a development plan and met with her manager to align on coaching’s successful outcomes. Our goal was to help Susan begin advancing toward the next stage of development: Synergist.

My approach to working with Susan included:

Enhancing self-awareness, including her assumptions, self-beliefs, emotional triggers, and unproductive patterns.
Reframing what it means to be a leader from subject-matter expert to building relationships with others and leveraging their talents to augment her weaknesses.
Building her skills in learning how to enlist and engage her stakeholders instead of overusing assertive advocacy skills and talking at them.
Adopting a broader view of her role to examine interdependencies with peers and the organization’s broader direction, including strategic priorities that could influence her focus.
Leveraging her talent better by explaining her expectations, providing feedback, and helping team members step up more so she could delegate more.

Coaching Outcomes

After working with Susan for six months, she achieved some notable improvements:

She became more aware of her emotional triggers and learned to avoid reacting at the moment, helping improve trust with others.
Focusing her efforts more on creating successful outcomes instead of overemphasizing her technical expertise.
Developing trusting relationships with her peers and building greater alignment, enabling her to break down silos that limited her department’s effectiveness.
More successful outcomes from change projects she was managing since she leveraged others’ talent and skills to augment her capabilities.

Stage theory is a valuable way for executive coaches to support leader growth by defining critical developmental milestones on the journey to the top. These frameworks can be a big difference in helping new managers accelerate their growth and impact as highly effective leaders.

# # # # #
Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience developing transformational change leaders in healthcare and other sectors. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or info@nourseleadership.com.