I spent thirty years signing off accounts. Now I sit with the part of leadership that doesn't reconcile.
Executive coaching for senior leaders in transition.
THE WORK
Most coaching promises better performance. This isn't that.
I work with senior leaders at the point where the old answers have stopped working — a new role, a restructure, the quiet recognition that what got you here won't take you further. The work is slower than that suggests, and more useful.
We meet for ninety minutes at a time. There is no model to apply, no programme to complete. There is a question, held carefully, until it changes.
THE CENTRAL IDEA
Sacramental resistance.
A phrase I've come to use for the central discipline of this work: the refusal to reach for the solution.
When a leader brings a problem, the room fills with the urge to solve it — theirs and mine. Most coaching obeys that urge. I try not to. The interesting material is on the other side of the impulse to fix, and you can only get there by staying with what's uncomfortable for slightly longer than feels reasonable.
It is sacramental because something is being honoured. It is resistance because the pull to move on is constant.
Orientation.
You know the work, the role, the people. The map and the territory agree.
Disorientation.
Something changes — outside you, inside you, often both — and the map stops matching. Most leaders try to redraw it quickly. The work asks you not to.
Re-orientation.
A new shape emerges, but only if the middle phase is held long enough to be useful. Skipped, it returns later as a louder version of itself.
THREE PHASES
A partner six months from a planned retirement who realised, in our third session, that she didn't want to leave. She wanted to leave the version of the role she'd been doing for nine years.
A newly-appointed MD who could write the strategy but couldn't deliver the all-hands. We spent two sessions on what he was afraid would happen if he stopped performing competence.
A founder whose company had succeeded past the problem it was built to solve, and who hadn't said so out loud to anyone — including himself.
SOME OF THE WORK
I trained as a Chartered Accountant and spent most of my career in senior finance and consulting roles, latterly as a Partner in a Top 20 UK firm. I still hold both roles — partner and coach — and the tension between them is, I think, part of what makes the work useful.
I hold a Master's in Executive Coaching from Hult Ashridge and am an accredited Senior Practitioner of the EMCC.
ABOUT
If you know what you need.
A first conversation is forty-five minutes, by phone or in person. No charge, no follow-up unless we both want one. You'll know inside twenty minutes whether this is for you.
graemecopestake@tc-group.com
If you don’t
Write to me anyway. The first email doesn't have to make sense. Often the ones that do least, matter most.
TWO WAYS TO BEGIN