The leader who stopped coaching halfway.
He came to me ashamed.
He came to me ashamed.
Two years earlier, this VP in a global pharma company had walked out of a coaching engagement at the four-month mark. He had told nobody. The company had assumed the engagement closed normally. The coach — not me, someone else — had been paid for six months and politely never asked.
I asked him what had happened at four months. He said the work had started touching something he was not ready to look at. He had stalled the cadence, then cancelled three sessions in a row, then never restarted. The shame was not about quitting the engagement. It was about what he had been hiding from.
We did not start coaching that day. We had three diagnostic conversations across two weeks. The work he had walked away from was the same work that was still waiting. The diagnostic surfaced it cleanly. The fear had a name. The pattern it produced had a name. The leadership behaviours that were collapsing his stakeholder relationships had a name.
He restarted the engagement. He did not walk out at the four-month mark this time, because we had named what he had walked out from the first time. The systemic work was the same. The willingness to do it was different.
Two months ago he was promoted to SBU Head. The numbers in his promotion case included a 23% improvement in stakeholder-perception score and a team retention number he had never produced before in his career.
The shame was the wrong response. The shame was the data. Most senior leaders who stall in coaching stall on the same threshold — the moment the work stops being about behavioural technique and starts being about an interior story they have been carrying since childhood. The threshold is the work.
If you have walked out of a coaching engagement before, the next coach you talk to should know about it. Not as confession. As diagnostic.
Where did you stop, last time, and what was the work you were standing in front of?