Individual Engagements
3 Concurrent
Duration Per Partner
9 Months Each
Behaviour Change
L3 Evidenced
Measurement Rhythm
Quarterly 360
Cohort
Partners, Big 4 professional services firm
Scale
3 individual coaching engagements
Methodology
Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centred Coaching
Duration
9 months, 3 concurrent engagements
The problem before ProventusHR
The first partner had been promoted to the role eighteen months earlier and was struggling with a specific transition: from delivery excellence to practice building. Her instinct was to stay close to client work, which she did well and which felt safe. The practice was not growing at the rate the firm required, and her direct team was not developing because she was not creating space for them to lead. The second partner had a different challenge: a practice transition from one service line to another, requiring him to build a new client base while maintaining the relationships that had sustained his previous practice. His 360 data showed that he was being perceived as unfocused, a reading he experienced as unfair given the genuine complexity of his situation. The third partner was preparing for the step from national to global role, a transition that required a significant shift in how she managed her time, her influence, and her visibility in an international context where her considerable reputation in India had little traction.
What the diagnostic surfaced
All three engagements began with a structured feedforward process. For each partner, RK conducted individual conversations with eight to twelve stakeholders before meeting the coachee to share the aggregate pattern. The discovery process for all three produced the same broad finding expressed in three different specific forms: each partner had a way of operating that had produced their success and that had, at the current level of challenge, become a limitation. The first partner's closeness to delivery had become over-functioning. The second partner's strategic ambition had become visible as restlessness. The third partner's ability to build deep individual relationships had become, at global scale, a bottleneck.
Each coaching engagement was built around one to two target behaviours, identified from the feedforward data and confirmed by the coachee. Quarterly 360 pulse checks tracked movement against the targets. The coaching sessions, fortnightly for the first three months and monthly thereafter, combined structured reflection on the previous period with feedforward conversations from stakeholders. Each coachee maintained a leadership journal and brought specific situations from the previous month to each session. The concurrent nature of the three engagements required careful design isolation: the three coachees were aware that their peers were also in coaching but were not in contact with each other about the content of their respective engagements.
Nine months of coaching across three concurrent engagements produced three distinct trajectories. The first partner's practice grew by 40 percent in the programme year, which she attributed in her final reflection to having learned to hold back long enough for her team to step forward. The second partner completed his practice transition and stabilised his client base, with 360 data at nine months showing significant improvement in the perceived focus dimension. The third partner was nominated for the global role she had been preparing for and accepted it within the coaching period.
Quarterly 360 pulse data across all three engagements showed consistent upward movement on target behaviours. The average stakeholder rating gain across the three engagements was 0.16 on a five-point scale. Each coachee submitted a self-written evidence narrative at engagement close documenting specific situations in which they had operated differently and the commercial or relational consequence of that difference. All three narratives were specific, dated, and referenced named situations. A partner wrote: My team used to wait for me to decide. Now they decide and tell me. The practice is larger, the clients are better served, and I work fewer hours. That is not a coincidence.
Partner-level coaching in professional services requires a specific quality of engagement: the coachees are highly intelligent, deeply experienced in advising others, and skilled at reframing feedback in ways that position them as already aligned with it. The coaching that produces change at this level is not the coaching that offers insight. It is the coaching that holds the evidence with sufficient patience and precision that the coachee cannot intellectualise their way past it.
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