Coaching for the Move into Leadership
For the expert now responsible for people, whatever the field.
The transition
What do you do when the technical skill that earned you the leadership role isn’t the mastery required to be a great leader?
For experts stepping into leadership
Physicians·Law Firm Partners·Accounting & Advisory Partners·VPs & Senior Executives·Founders·Engineering Leaders
The approach
The move into leadership can be isolating. You spent years becoming the expert, the one with the answer and the final word. Now you have to build judgment in the people around you, and few have a place to think out loud, experiment, and work through the hard moments. My role is to be that place, with the support and accountability to stabilize in the role first. Then you grow into the leader you want to be.
Phase one
Stabilize
Get your footing: your time back, your team functioning, and the support and accountability to make the role sustainable. Most leaders need this first.
Phase two
Transform
Build the leadership range the bigger role requires, so your team executes without you as the bottleneck, and you become the leader worth promoting again.
What we’ll build
A clear point of view
How you want your leadership to shape your work, your people, and you.
The capacity for hard conversations
Performance, conflict, and standards, addressed without dread or avoidance.
A leader who keeps growing
Sharper decisions, stronger presence, and the growth that earns the next role.
Sustainable rhythms
Lead without trading away your work, your health, or your life.
Anchored by
The Leadership Circle Profile 360
A research-based 360 assessment of how your leadership lands with the people who work for you, alongside you, and above you. We run it at the start and again at the end. The data drives the six months, and shows the change.
Coaching
Six months of 1:1 coaching, a weekly 50-minute session.
Leadership plan
A written development plan tuned to your role and your world.
Between sessions
Access for the conversations that can’t wait.
I came to Rich in the midst of an incredibly turbulent time, struggling to manage work, life, and self. Rich was a lighthouse in that storm, helping me see obstacles I was creating for myself and cutting to the root cause of issues I would not have discovered until much later. After working with Rich I am a materially better leader, show up better for myself and family, and am better prepared with a sense of mission.
Rich got me out of my own way. Instead of focusing on short-term challenges, I learned to realize the big-picture end result and wasted less time as a result. He helped me find more space for creating by partnering to implement structure only where it was truly needed, not just to fill space.
About Rich
The command, the certainty, the reflex to have the answer: the things that made you the expert are the things that get in the way once you’re leading people. Rich Smith coaches leaders through exactly that, and he’s been there himself.
He’s an operator who coaches. An Army career: West Point and an infantry command in combat. A business career: Wharton, a finance director at Amazon, then a CFO who chose to reorganize a failing company rather than shut it down. He knows the pressure you’re under because he was under it, and he made the same move you’re making: from being the one with the answers to leading the people who have to find them.
That’s his edge. He can work the tactical problems of the job, the hard conversation, the team that isn’t performing, the decision you keep avoiding, and the deeper ones underneath: why you hold on, what you’re protecting, who you think you have to be. Most coaches can only do one. He does both, because he lived both.
Developing a leader on your team rather than working on your own step? See succession planning