The Challenge: A new, high-performing manager felt stuck in the doing of their role. While they were the primary problem-solver for the team, they struggled to delegate and felt overwhelmed by growing interpersonal challenges within the team. Their reliance on their own technical expertise created a bottleneck that stalled both their team's development and their own path to a strategic role.

The Outcome: "Molly helped me see my technical skills as a safety net I no longer needed to cling to. Her ability to reflect my own patterns back to me allowed me to step back so my team could step up. I now spend my time on the strategic work I enjoy, and my team is more capable than ever."

The Coaching Partnership: We held ten 60-minute coaching sessions every two to three weeks (for a total of eight months). Through these sessions, I helped the coachee see areas in their behavior and mindset that were holding them back.

• Reflecting Patterns: I reflected back the coachee’s language around perfection and control. This allowed them to recognize how their rigid mental model of ideal leadership was undermining their confidence while reinforcing their team’s dependence on them to solve all the problems.

• Guiding with Frameworks: We used the results from the coachee’s CliftonStrengths assessment to reframe how they could fully embrace their leadership role. We used their own strengths, and their understanding of the strengths of their team, to move the coachee away from fixing team behaviors and toward aligning individual strengths with project needs.

• Supportive Challenge: I guided the coachee through a mapping exercise of their communication flows. By challenging the assumption that they needed to be the fixer, the coachee identified specific habits to let go of.

• Iterative Guidance: Between sessions, I provided resources like communication scripts and other pro tips so the coachee could test new ways of asking open-ended questions in high-stakes meetings.