Five observations from executive coaching practice
Over the past decade, my work in consulting and executive coaching has given me the privilege of engaging with over a hundred senior leaders at the Vice-President level and above. These were leaders already entrusted with complexity and sustained change – often unfolding on multiple fronts at once. They had led major reorganisations, navigated market shifts, driven growth agendas, absorbed regulatory shocks, managed succession, and steered institutions through periods when the ground itself was in motion. Having also held leadership roles earlier in my career – and having had a ringside view of many accomplished leaders, I noticed recurring patterns in how success was built and sustained. By any reasonable measure, these leaders were highly successful, and represented the kind of leadership potential organisations willingly and confidently invest in.
And yet, over time, a discernible divergence emerged.
About thirty per cent or so of this population began to move differently. Not conspicuously faster, but with greater coherence. Their decisions aged well. Their influence widened. Their careers acquired a certain inevitability. Curiosity demanded attention. Through repeated coaching conversations, reflective interviews, and careful listening, five themes began to recur. They did not present themselves as tools or competencies. They surfaced more as stable orientations of mind.
1. From “Am I at my best?” to “Am I among the best?”
Many leaders speak fluently about being “at their best”. The outliers subtly resisted the inward pull of that frame. Their reference points lay beyond themselves. They asked where excellence was being practiced at the highest level – across industries and geographies. They benchmarked themselves against demanding peers, credible data, and competitive realities. Comfort was treated with suspicion. Data mattered, but so did judgment.
Excellence, in their vocabulary, was never self-declared. It was comparative, contextual, and continually recalibrated. These leaders recognised that performance and potential measurement at this level and beyond will be calibrated to peers both internally and externally given the leadership risk involved. They invested and enhanced their networking capacity to keep an eye on such relative metrics.
2. The Geometry of Influence
As seniority increased, these leaders recognised a familiar paradox: formal authority contracts even as responsibility expands, especially during periods of change. Their attention therefore flowed upwards and sideways – towards boards, peers, regulators, partners, external influencers, and trusted advisers. Managing teams remained necessary, but shaping alignment across shifting power structures became decisive.
This was not politics in the pejorative sense. It was leadership architecture – designed to hold when structures were under strain. It broadened perspective, strengthened a 360-degree view, and expanded networks well beyond the organisation. They accepted that the ability to succeed at this level and beyond was directly proportional to their ability to effectively work with peers and influence them. They abstracted themselves to take a helicopter view of the organisation and aggressively enrolled into enterprise level cross functional initiatives.
3. Health as a Strategic Asset
Prolonged change exacts a physiological cost, and the outliers appeared acutely aware of this. In coaching conversations, health surfaced not as lifestyle aspiration but as strategic infrastructure. Sleep, exercise, recovery, family and emotional regulation were treated with deliberateness. They respected the adage, lived well to work well and acknowledged that mental and emotional health is the pre-requisite for long marathons at the top. They understood that judgment degrades before intellect does, and that stamina is a prerequisite for clarity. Energy, for them, was not incidental. It was a resource to be stewarded. They recognised that the long, deep work required at the senior levels demanded a healthy body capable of sustaining the load. They kept re-working on the meaning of work life balance every few years, taking their family into confidence. In coaching conversations, they deep dived into the Temperance virtue of the 24 VIA assessment and probed more to arrive at a detailed action plan.
4. Think Balance Sheet
Where many leaders respond to pressure by narrowing their focus to quarterly scorecards, outliers widened their lens. They thought in balance-sheet terms, consciously building intangible enterprise value while navigating uncertainty. They were willing to take calibrated risks – investing in people, capabilities, culture, and relationships whose payoff lay beyond immediate reporting cycles.
Trust, reputation, strategic optionality, and institutional coherence were treated as assets to be accumulated, not collateral to be spent. They distinguished carefully between risk that compounds value and risk that merely flatters short-term performance. Having mastered P&L responsibilities earlier in their careers, they began honing balance-sheet judgment. In doing so, they behaved less like managers of outcomes and more like stewards of continuity through change. They acknowledged that the real shift from a COO to CEO lay in the capacity to enhance the balance sheet mindset.
5. Innovation as Disposition
Finally, innovation did not announce itself through grand initiatives. It appeared in how work was done. These leaders experimented with meeting design, decision processes, talent conversations, and even their own thinking. Assumptions were questioned and habits interrogated. Innovation, in this sense, was not disruption – it was attentiveness. This enhanced their capacity to question. They recognised that leadership at the top is less about having adequate answers and more about asking the right questions. Many moved from knowing what they did not know into the more demanding territory of not knowing what they did not know. It was a steep climb, but they persisted in getting used to ambiguity and the discomfort of not having all the answers but enhanced the inquisitive capacity to ask more questions. They used the data from networking to push the envelope of team conversations and had the hunger to raise the bar continuously.
Closing Reflections
In the end, the distinction between the exceptional and the successful is rarely dramatic. It reveals itself quietly over time, in what leaders choose to attend to – and what they refuse to neglect. For coaches, this offers less a catalogue of techniques and more a discipline of inquiry. Progress at senior levels is seldom about adding capability, and more often about refining orientation: asking better questions, especially when change renders easy answers unavailable. It is about stepping out of the confines of the organisation and peeping into the outside world to be on top of the rate of change. The outliers neither escaped complexity nor sought to master change. They accommodated it without being diminished by it, remaining coherent while the ground shifted beneath them.
What ultimately set them apart was a steadiness of attention – knowing where to look, what to preserve, and when to move on by pivoting on these five minds. In times such as these, such leaders do not merely adapt. They endure.
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Mohan AVK is a graduate from Tata Institute of Social Sciences with over thirty-five years of work experience as a leader, coach, consultant, trainer and teacher. He consults extensively in organisational transformation, leadership development and performance enhancement initiatives.
He lives in Pune.
