Leadership for your Inflection Points
Executive Coaching
Executive coaching is a partnership between the client and the coach designed to help you grow as both a leader and a person. In my experience, those two are indistinguishable from each other.
The Inflection Point Method is designed to be flexible and accompany you through your journey, whether you're just starting out in your professional career or a CEO left wondering "What's next?"
Two things happen in this work.
The first is getting clear on where you actually want to go. Not goals; goals come later. This is the level underneath them, your values and the vision they point to. The life and the leadership you actually want, not the version you think you are supposed to want. And then the question almost no one gets asked: who would you have to become to live inside that vision? Not who you think you should be. Who you would have to be.
The second is finding what stops you. From the vision, or from something more immediate, the thing sitting in front of you right now. You know what you want to do, or need to do, or feel you should do, and somehow you don't. Sometimes there is a block in the way, one you can see or one you can't, and the work is to move it. Other times nothing needs removing. You need to see the thing differently, and when you do, the frustration you have been carrying loosens on its own.
The method is how we work through both. It looks like a grid, four tidy boxes, and on paper it can read as rigid. In the room it is the opposite. It is fluid. The same leader moves across it, sometimes inside a single conversation: what do I need to navigate here, who is it I actually want to be, and what is happening in me right now that keeps me from being that person.
The Map
Four territories
These aren't personality types; they're situations. The same leader moves between them, sometimes in a single season.
New Territory
Focused on new opportunities or positions; can lean toward mentoring.
Complexity
Coaching that focuses on an external problem, more akin to exclusive advisory services. The need here is usually seeing the whole board at once.
Identity
A focus on developing who you want to be as a leader, not just what you want to accomplish.
Depth
The question underneath the other three. This is where my ICF certification and training does its quietest and most important work...helping you pause long enough to notice what's actually happening, and to lean into it.
The work often moves between territories. What presents as an external challenge frequently reveals an internal one. The modality shifts based on what's actually needed; staying responsive to that, rather than rigidly applying one approach, is the essence of the method.
How It Starts
Coaching begins with a clear picture
Before we set a single goal, we get clear about where you actually are. What your strengths are, how you have used them. Maybe finding out things about them you weren't aware of...and what their costs may be. Early in an engagement, I assemble what I like to think of as a leadership baseline, drawn from our first conversations, the way you describe your situation, and, when it's useful, how the people around you experience your leadership, taken from surveys and interviews.
It's not a scorecard. It's a starting point. Most leaders at inflection points are working from an incomplete and maybe even outdated read on themselves. The work goes faster when we can both see where you actually are, including the parts that are hard to look at.
From there, the plan is yours. We build on what's real rather than what's assumed. All done confidentially and without judgment.
In Their Words
What clients say
"His calm presence and willingness to stay with what was unfolding helped me slow down, listen more closely to myself, and connect with aspects of my experience I had been bypassing. 10 out of 10."
"Through our work, I became aware of things I hadn't considered that led me to make choices in line with my values, making change more sustainable."
"I would highly recommend Michael to mature professionals looking for thoughtful, meaningful conversations that go beyond action planning."
Begin
How an engagement begins
It starts with a conversation, not a contract. We talk about where you are, what's shifting, and whether this work is the right fit...for both of us. If it is, we design the engagement around what you're actually navigating rather than a package off a shelf.
Let's have a conversation