An 85% solution, from someone who couldn't move without 100%

Where he started

Dan came to coaching partway into a newly created leadership role, and underwater in it. He's a senior technical consultant in supply chain and logistics, the kind of person who does, in his words, "really detailed, thorough work."  The role was new enough that the firm was still inventing what it meant, and he'd recently been in and out of work for months dealing with a serious family health situation. He was, as he put it, "a bit overwhelmed, trying to catch up to everything," and adrift on where his time should go.

What he wrote down in the first session was simple: improve my ability to prioritize. A million things to do, everything changing, figure out where to invest my time.

What the work looked like

The prioritizing was real, but it wasn't the thing. Underneath it was a habit Dan named himself: he was an "info collector, hoarder," gathering more and more until the knowledge became, in his words, impossible to use. More information always felt like the responsible next step. It was usually a delay.

He connected it to the move he was in the middle of: "I do really detailed, thorough work, but making that transition to a leadership role, it's not all about doing everything yourself to the 100% mark. It's affecting my ability to be an effective leader, because I'm still operating under behaviors that are better suited to my earlier roles."

Rather than talk him out of the habit, we tested it. Notice the moments when he wanted to gather more, explicitly make the decision with incomplete information, and write down what actually happened. Nothing bad happened. That was the whole finding, and it did more than any amount of reassurance would have.

Then the ground moved. Halfway through, the new role was wound down. Instead of ending the work, it changed the question, from "how do I prioritize inside this role" to "what role should I be building instead?" Dan called it a blessing in disguise, and the rest of the coaching was about mapping a role that fit him and making the case for it.

The moment it clicked

He puts it at the fifth session. We did a new-role brainstorm, and he wrote down, for the first time, the three kinds of work that actually energize him: getting in early while a problem is still being shaped, helping teammates get unstuck, and being the quality check that catches what others miss.

In his words: "I knew there were things that each person is really motivated by. But having the time and space in the coaching sessions to focus on my thinking, and how I understand and process things, gave me the time to actually put down in writing for the first time what that was. If you don't make the space for something, then you're not going to get to it."

What it's worth over two years later

We spoke again about two and a half years after we finished. He's on a different track at the same firm that's been through a lot of change, and the things he built in coaching are still in daily use.

He checks new projects against his three energizers before taking them on. He uses the same knowledge as a warning, too: knowing the early, white-space phase of a project is where he lights up reminds him he still has to push through the execution he enjoys less. He preps his teams with the same two questions we worked with, what problem are we solving, and how will we measure success. And he's loaded his values and his three energizers into the AI tools he uses as standing context, telling them where he is in his own thinking:

"I'm more conscious about describing where I'm at. Hey, I'm looking for divergent thinking right now, I want to expand on different ideas. Or the reverse, I need to make a decision, so it's time to converge and get the 85% solution."

In his words

"What we give time to is what ultimately matters. If you have some gap you want to improve on, or you want to deepen your understanding of yourself, you've got to make the time for it. Coaching helps because you have a neutral third party who can help you unpack your thoughts and give you other ways to consider things. Someone who can ask critical questions, critical in the critical-thinking sense. And it's forced time, where I know that for that hour I'm blocking out other distractions."

- Dan Jamieson, Principal Technical Advisor