,

The Coaching Behind the Crisis: What Happened in the Room

I wrote recently about a senior vice president who lost his succession plan one month before his transition. That post walks through the framework: how the four questions helped him find his footing when everything collapsed.

What it doesn’t show is what happened on my side of the conversation.

I want to share some of that here, because I think it matters. Not because my experience is the point, but because coaching through a crisis like this one sharpened something for me: the moments that look like emergencies for our clients are often invitations for us as coaches to notice what we’re doing with our own uncertainty.

When he called me, two days after the news broke, I could hear the speed in his voice before he said a word. He was already in motion. Already solving. And my first instinct, if I’m honest, was to match his pace. To be useful. To help him think through the options.

I caught myself. Not because matching his pace would have been the wrong thing to do, but because something in my body was telling me this wasn’t a thinking problem yet. It was a grounding problem. He needed to land before he could lead.

The pull to rescue

That instinct to be useful is one I’ve learned to watch in myself. It shows up most when a client is in real distress. They’re activated, the situation is urgent, and there’s a pull to meet that urgency with solutions. To step in. To rescue. It feels like helping. Sometimes it is. But I’ve been a coach long enough to recognize when that pull is about managing my own discomfort with their pain, not serving their actual need. (There’s a name for this pattern, and I’ll write about it soon. For now, I’ll just say: if you’ve ever felt the urge to fix someone’s problem before they’ve finished feeling it, you know exactly what I mean.)

With this leader, the actual need was simpler and harder than problem-solving. He needed someone to sit still while he figured out who he was in this new situation. Not who the board expected him to be. Not who his team needed him to be. Who he actually was, now that the plan he’d built his identity around had just collapsed.

I asked him one question in that first session: “Before we get to what you’re going to do, can we stay with what just happened?”

He resisted. Politely, the way senior leaders do. He pivoted to logistics, to timelines, to the names of two people who might be interim candidates. I let him go for a few minutes. Then I said, “I notice you haven’t taken a breath since we started.”

He paused. And in the pause, something loosened, and what surfaced wasn’t the strategy session he’d been bracing for. It was grief. He’d spent four months letting go of this role, psychologically handing it over. Our coaching had been intentionally focused on staying present while preparing for what came next, holding both timelines at once. And now he was being asked to step back into something he’d already released. That disorientation was real, and it needed to be acknowledged before any useful thinking could happen. This is the part of coaching that normally doesn’t make it into frameworks or blog posts. The willingness to not be helpful yet. To trust that the client’s system is processing something important, and that my job is to protect the space for that processing, not fill it with questions or models.

The moment that surprised me

Two weeks later, at our regular session, something unexpected happened. He’d done the work: reconnected with his values, slowed down his pace, brought his team into the conversation. All the things I’d written about in the framework post. But in our session, he said something that caught me off guard.

“I’m glad I lost my successor. Not glad it happened, but glad it happened while we were working together.”

I wanted to hear more.

He explained: the four months of transition planning had been comfortable. He was passing the baton, wrapping things up. Even though our work together had been focused on staying present during the transition, he admitted he’d been mentally drifting toward the next role. The crisis forced him to look at things he’d been avoiding: a role that was poorly designed, a team that had been holding back concerns, a leadership pipeline that had no depth. None of that would have surfaced if the handoff had gone smoothly.

What struck me in that moment wasn’t the insight itself. It was the quality of his voice. Two weeks earlier, he’d been running on adrenaline. Now he was speaking from a settled place. Not calm, exactly. Present. I notice that difference in my body before I notice it in the words. His breathing had slowed. His sentences were longer. He was thinking in the conversation, not performing for it. That settling is what I listen for as a coach. Not the breakthrough moment, not the dramatic shift, but the point where a client stops managing the crisis and starts actually being in their own leadership again.

What I took from this

Every coaching engagement teaches me something, but this one clarified a pattern I’d been sensing for a while. The leaders who come through crisis most whole aren’t the ones who solve it fastest. They’re the ones who allow themselves to be disoriented by it first. The disorientation is the data. It’s telling them that their old way of understanding the situation no longer fits, and something new needs to form.

My job in those moments is to resist the pull toward premature coherence. To let the not-knowing sit long enough for genuine clarity to replace the manufactured kind.

It’s harder than it sounds. I have my own relationship with uncertainty, my own instinct to organize and make sense. Sometimes the best coaching I do is simply catching myself before I impose structure on a client who isn’t ready for it yet. If you want to see how this leader’s crisis played out through the lens of the framework, that post is here. This one was about what happened behind it.

A Note from the Author

If this case stirred something in you—curiosity, recognition, maybe even a little unease—you’re exactly the kind of person I had in mind when I decided to open it up for live conversation.

In March, I’m hosting two free Case Study Debriefs on this same crisis:

We’ll walk through what happened, what was at stake, and how the Leadership Integrity Framework™ shaped both the leader’s choices and my own as a coach. You’re welcome to bring your questions, your own parallel cases, or simply your curiosity. This space is for executive coaches and corporate leaders who are committed to supporting others when things are not neat, not tidy, and not theoretical.

If you’d like to stay informed about future case discussions, workshops, and new resources, you’re also invited to join my WhatsApp community for short, thoughtful updates (no more than one or two a week):

I’d be glad to have you in the room.

Warmly,

Maria Wade