As a leader, you face complex and intricate challenges every day. At times it can be hard to pinpoint or even articulate these challenges. But until you can fully address and resolve them, they have the potential to stall your professional and personal growth, your career, and your team’s success. This is where professional coaching comes in.
Star individuals promoted into management roles often find themselves out of their depth. Dave Schoof explores how executive coaching helps them make the transition.
Rapid read
Promotion based on technical excellence does not automatically translate into effective leadership; losing hands-on work can cause new managers to micromanage and default to control.
Coaching helps high performers examine the gap between intention and impact, applying curiosity, empathy, and small behavioral experiments to build trust and psychological safety.
Leaders create more value when they shift from virtuoso to conductor, enabling others to make decisions, surface ideas, and perform at their best.
From virtuoso to conductor: How high performers can pick up the leadership baton
Carl is three months into the role of managing director of engineering at a multinational enterprise software firm, leading a team of 15 engineers. A self-avowed techie, he has built his reputation on technical brilliance and complex problem-solving. His promotion to MD is recognition of the impact he’s had on the team’s output.
However, over recent weeks, a string of complaints about Carl’s management has reached HR. His team, many of whom work outside HQ in remote time zones, are struggling with his leadership style. Meetings get scheduled at antisocial hours. Feedback describes him as unilateral and highly directive. He interrupts mid-sentence, and he’s been known to dress down colleagues in front of their peers. A culture of fear is setting in: people are reluctant to challenge his ideas, bring him problems, or speak up on calls. A few have quietly requested transfers.
Carl’s boss calls a meeting to walk through the feedback. Carl gets defensive, questioning not just his team’s opinions but their competence, something his boss rejects. He suggests redistributing his team so he can hand-pick a new one. That’s rejected too.
Things come to a head. Reports of toxicity in Carl’s team reach the C-suite, and some call for him to be fired, not least because the CEO has just launched a transformation program built around openness and learning. Leadership knows what Carl is capable of technically. They also know his management style is at odds with the direction the company is heading. The message is clear: get on board or get off the train. He and his manager agree to try executive coaching, even though both see it as a last resort.
The coaching journey
Going into his first session, Carl sticks to his guns. He reiterates his position firmly: the problem is his team, not him. They’re simply underqualified for the work he’s asking of them. The coach asks what it’s been like for Carl to receive this feedback. His answer is armored; more justification than reflection. He doesn’t know much about leading beyond bad examples, doesn’t understand why his team doesn’t move at his pace, and doesn’t know how to stop being the one who solves everything himself.
His coach tries a different approach: how does it feel to lead other people? Carl admits that he loves hands-on problem-solving and being MD has cost him the chance to do more of that. He is describing loss: grieving that he no longer gets to focus on the work he treasures. The coach observes that this is a common response. Moving from doing the work to leading the people who do it, leaders lose access to what made them good at their job. It’s normal to miss those things. As they talk, it becomes clear to Carl that he might be micromanaging, diving back into the technical details because he is missing the work, even as his team reads this as a lack of trust.
The coach uses a metaphor that challenges Carl to think more about what the leadership shift is asking of him: that he might no longer be the virtuoso musician, but rather the conductor. And as conductor, he is responsible for what the orchestra produces, rather than any single instrument. He offers Carl a way to frame the situation that aligns with the way he thinks: what if each person on his team is a puzzle worth solving, the way a piece of code has its own logic once you’re curious enough to find it? Carl has spent his career being curious about hard technical problems. Could the challenge now be to direct that same curiosity at people? If a team member’s behavior is a puzzle instead of a shortcoming, Carl reflects, the response may not be to jump in, direct, or correct, but to ask. This shift could close the gap between what he intends and what his team experiences.
What if each person on his team is a puzzle worth solving, the way a piece of code has its own logic once you’re curious enough to find it?
The coach and Carl devise a series of experiments. He will deliberately change his own behavior and track what happens, using the same discipline he’d bring to debugging code. When he feels aggravated in a meeting, he will pause before responding. When a report misses a deadline, he will change the question from why it happened to what got in the way. When he feels the urge to interrupt or shut someone down, he will take a breath to let the impulse pass.
They build role-playing scenarios out of the moments Carl struggles with most. His coach plays the team member, and when Carl reverts to typical behaviors and responses, the coach breaks character to explore the gap between what Carl intends and what the team member feels. Carl sees that his intention and his impact aren’t the same thing. They build new strategies together to close that gap the next time it shows up.
The impact
A few weeks later, Carl shares with his coach a conversation he’d been dreading with a team member he finds the hardest to work with, someone who tends to get under his skin faster than anyone else. Instead of railroading his colleague, he had listened. He used the empathy skills they’d been practicing instead of reaching for control. In listening, he uncovered something about what the team member needed, something that enables Carl to help him perform better. The shift shows up beyond his team too. HR has noticed morale rising in departments that work alongside Carl’s. Colleagues who used to route around him have started bringing him problems directly.
For Carl, something more personal is happening too. He hasn’t just rediscovered a love for the work. He’s found a passion for leadership. In shifting from virtuoso to conductor, he realizes he can achieve more by leading others than by muscling through alone. His team is stepping up, making calls, and surfacing ideas he wouldn’t have reached on his own. In his own words: “I have learned to leverage leadership to create something far bigger than me.”
Questions to ask yourself
Are you failing to get the traction you want from your team? Have you tried looking at the space between your intention and your impact?
Which person in your team do you find hardest to work with, and what might you learn if you approached them with curiosity instead of control?
Where are you still trying to solve everything yourself, and what would it take to trust someone else with it?
In the Coaching Corner series, we share real-world, practical coaching scenarios. Read on to discover the specific challenges highlighted in the cases and the insights that could help you navigate and find solutions to your own multifaceted challenges. How might these insights and questions apply to you?
Authors
Dave Schoof
International Executive Coach & Leadership Consultant
Dave Schoof spent 19 years in US counterintelligence before becoming an ICF Master Certified Coach. He is the founder of The Pivot, helping leaders navigate uncertainty and change.
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