Coach Me! Your Personal Board of Directors

23 Coaching an Executive Client Out of Micromanagement

Tom Kolditz

Tom Kolditz is a director at Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University, named the top university by the Association of Leadership Educators. A retired Army general holding a PhD, he received the Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership in 2017, and has ranked among the top 25 global coaches for 3 years.

My favorite client, Riley (not their real name), has an enormously challenging leader role. A politician elected by a voter base of 5 million people, helping to encourage the commerce of 440,000 businesses, with full emergency management responsibility in a geographic area the size of Rhode Island. They have an employee structure of 22,000 and a budget exceeding $5 billion. Their strategic reach exceeds that of all but a very small handful of global CEOs. The sum of economic and political responsibility is roughly analogous to that of the Prime Minister of New Zealand.

Despite such weighty responsibility, this leadership role was the FIRST for Riley, who has an academically heavy background in public policy and law. Eager to be coached, they were a few months into the role when we had our interview and I agreed to coach them. Riley had two things that reinforced my decision to work with them. First, they were passionately driven by purpose, with no perceptible motivation other than engaging and representing as much of the citizenry as possible – regardless of political party. They had no obvious ...