When I ask senior leaders what they struggle with, I hear about pressure, stakeholders, strategy and people. What I rarely hear named, but see constantly, is impatience.
Why It Hides So Well
Impatience looks like a virtue in most organisations. It gets called urgency, drive or a bias for action, and it's often part of what got a leader promoted. But at the top, the same impatience can quietly work against them:
- pushing change before the organisation understands why
- stepping in to solve problems their team should own
- writing people off before they've had a chance to grow
- expecting personal transformation to happen on a quarterly timeline
The Strategic Pause
Part of what coaching offers is a deliberate pause: space to breathe, sort through your own thoughts, and hear yourself through all the noise. Many leaders find that slowing down in the right places is exactly what lets them move faster where it counts.