Engagement Duration
9 Months
Kirkpatrick L3 Evidence
360-rated
Avg Stakeholder Rating Gain
+0.14
Stakeholder Check-in Rhythm
Quarterly
Cohort
Managing Director
Scale
Post-merger integration context
Methodology
Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centred Coaching
Duration
9 months
The problem before ProventusHR
The MD had come from a strong operational background and had been the driving force behind the acquisition. His stakeholders respected his technical judgement and his decisiveness. His 360 data, gathered six months into the engagement, told a more complex story. Direct reports rated him significantly lower on two dimensions: creating space for others and building trust through vulnerability. Board members who had participated in the 360 noted a pattern of the MD solving problems that his direct reports were capable of owning themselves, and of meetings that ended with his view rather than with a shared decision. The organisation was at a post-merger moment when the MD needed to be building a leadership team that could execute autonomously. Instead, the team had learned to wait for his direction. This was not a competence problem. It was a style problem driven by a specific set of beliefs about what good leadership looked like under pressure.
What the diagnostic surfaced
The coaching engagement began with a structured feedforward process involving twelve stakeholders: four direct reports, four board members, two legacy organisation leaders from the acquired company, and two external clients. RK conducted individual interviews with each stakeholder before feeding the aggregate pattern back to the MD. The discovery conversation was the most important session of the engagement. The MD arrived with a hypothesis about why his 360 scores looked the way they did: the pressure of integration. He left with a different hypothesis: the pressure was revealing a style that had always been present but had been manageable at smaller scale. At the level of MD, the cost was amplified.
The coaching architecture was built around two target behaviours identified through the feedforward data and confirmed by the MD as the areas of greatest leverage. The first was creating space for others to lead: specifically, holding a question rather than answering it, and leaving meetings with open action ownership rather than consolidated direction. The second was demonstrating productive vulnerability with the legacy leadership team of the acquired organisation, where trust was fragile and where his operational style was being read as a signal that the merger was a takeover in all but name. Each session combined a structured reflection on the previous month with a feedforward conversation from a rotating group of stakeholders. Quarterly 360 pulse checks tracked movement against the two target behaviours using the same instrument as the baseline.
The nine-month engagement ran fortnightly sessions for the first four months, moving to monthly once the behaviour architecture was established. The coachee maintained a leadership journal throughout, which became the primary source material for each session. The most significant shift occurred at month four, when a direct report handled a major supplier crisis without escalating to the MD. The MD noted in his journal that his instinct had been to intervene and that he had, for the first time, deliberately held back. The supplier crisis was resolved. The direct report had grown. The MD wrote: I realised I had been solving problems that were not mine to solve, and calling that leadership.
Quarterly 360 pulse checks showed a consistent upward trajectory on both target behaviours across the nine months. The aggregate stakeholder rating gain on creating space for others was 0.14 on a five-point scale, which places this engagement in the top quartile of outcomes in the ProventusHR coaching evidence base. Board feedback at the nine-month review explicitly referenced a change in how the MD was running his executive team meetings: from direction-led to dialogue-led. The acquired organisation leadership team reported a material improvement in trust, attributed by two individuals to specific changed behaviours that they named. One direct report wrote in the final 360: I have learned more in the past nine months than in the four years before. He got out of the way long enough for that to happen.
The ceiling on operational leaders moving to strategic roles is almost never a competence ceiling. It is a belief ceiling: the belief that the behaviour that produced past success is the behaviour that will produce future success. Coaching at this level is not about adding new capabilities. It is about making the cost of old ones visible at sufficient specificity that the leader chooses to update their operating model. The specificity is what makes it work. General feedback produces defensive self-justification. Specific, stakeholder-rated, quarterly-tracked data produces change.
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