Years ago, a client came to me after the worst leadership review of her career. She was a highly successful executive: smart, analytical, driven and exceptionally good at what she did. She understood numbers, systems and processes. Give her something complicated and she could break it apart, find the problem and work out what needed to happen next.
She hadn’t seen the poor results coming. She thought things were going well. The people around her seemed happy, they worked well together, and nothing had suggested that something was seriously wrong.
The numbers told her otherwise.
By the time we started working together, disappointment had turned into doubt. She questioned her team, then her own judgement and eventually herself. Everything had become tangled together, and she couldn’t see clearly anymore.
I think many of us know some version of that feeling. Something that has always worked suddenly doesn’t, and our first instinct is to wonder what has gone wrong with us.
What had changed wasn’t her ability
We didn’t begin with her results. We began by separating what had actually happened from everything she had started believing it meant.
She hadn’t suddenly become less capable. What had changed was the context in which her capabilities had to operate.
In her previous role, she had led specialists with clearly defined responsibilities. The work suited the way her mind worked. There were systems, measurable outcomes and problems that could be analysed and solved.
Then she moved into an executive role leading other leaders. On paper, it looked like the natural next step. In reality, it required something different from her.
We tend to think a new role begins when the title changes. It doesn’t. The title can change overnight. Understanding what the new role asks of us can take much longer.
Her instinct was still to look at the work. Her new role required her to look much more closely at the people doing it. She needed to listen differently, notice what wasn’t being said and understand that a team appearing happy wasn’t necessarily the same as a team performing well.
Those things didn’t come naturally to her. Not because she didn’t care about people, but because her previous environment had never required her to develop those particular skills.
She didn’t need replacing
This was where our work together could easily have gone wrong.
I could have decided that she needed to become a different kind of leader: more intuitive, more emotionally expressive, less analytical. But her analytical mind wasn’t the problem. It was one of the reasons she had become so successful.
So we worked with it.
The answer wasn’t to change who she was.
It was to add what her new role required.
We created structures that helped her approach conversations and people in ways that still made sense to her. She learned to separate what she knew from what she assumed, ask another question before reaching a conclusion and notice the person as well as the task.
Things began to change. The results improved, and so did the relationships around her.
What I remember most clearly from our final session, though, was that she was still unmistakably herself. Still analytical, still direct, still most comfortable with things she could understand and organise.
She hadn’t become somebody else. She was a new person in her old skin.
The role can change before we do
About a year later, we spoke again. She told me that what she had learned hadn’t stayed at work. She was listening differently to her husband, family and friends. She noticed things she hadn’t noticed before.
I was incredibly proud of her. I was also proud that I had seen what she needed without deciding that she needed to become someone else.
I’ve thought about her many times since, because I don’t think this is really a leadership story.
Our roles change throughout our lives. Careers change. Businesses grow. Children grow up. Parents get older. Relationships shift. Sometimes there is a new title to tell us something has changed. Often there isn’t.
Yet we keep bringing the same ways of thinking, behaving and solving problems that have served us well for years. When they stop working quite as well, it can feel as though something is wrong with us.
Perhaps nothing is wrong. Perhaps the role changed before we did.
The question then isn’t necessarily, Who do I need to become now? Maybe a better question is, What is this part of my life asking me to add?
There is an important difference between the two. Growth doesn’t always require us to discard the person we’ve spent years becoming. Sometimes it simply asks us to expand ourselves.
Has one of your roles ever changed before you realised you needed to change with it? I’d love to hear what happened.
Talk soon,
Pia
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