Bernadette Boas coached Dana, a senior director at a Fortune 500 company who was passed over for VP despite strong results. Dana's identity was tied to execution and revenue, not vision or people development. After six months of identity-focused coaching, Dana landed a VP role at another company within 18 months.
Chapters
Let me give you an example and make this more concrete. I had a client, I'm gonna call her Dana. She was a senior director at a Fortune 500 company. She was sharp, driven, respected by everyone who worked with her. On paper, she was doing everything right. She was that high producer, that revenue generator, that massive task executor. When she came to me, she had just gotten passed over for a VP position she was absolutely qualified for. She was convinced it was internal politics, and maybe it was. But when we sat down with her diagnostic and I asked her the identity question, that is when for the first time she went absolutely dead quiet. She said, "I don't know how to answer that. I've never even considered it or given it a second thought." Well, that told me a lot. It told me that her whole leadership identity had been centered on her job title, on her completion rate, on her production. And what we discovered is that she was a high-performing executor with a leadership title. And at the VP level, that's not good enough. The organization needed someone that could lead with vision, with presence, have a point of view, develop their people, not just someone who delivers results. She didn't need more skills. She needed to know who she was and what she stood for. So we spent 6 months building that foundation. And within 18 months, she had the VP role. Yes, it was at a different company on her own terms with a level of clarity and confidence that she had never had before.
