How We Can Help

People do not usually come to Sally Marshall Group with a tidy problem statement. They come with a situation — a transition that feels more complicated than it should, a pattern of behaviour in themselves or their team that is getting in the way, a decision that keeps getting deferred. The following are the challenges leaders most commonly bring. If yours sounds like any of these, it is worth a conversation.

You have just moved into a significantly bigger role

This is one of the most common starting points. The promotion into a first CEO or MD role, the move from a functional director to a broader executive position, the step from senior partner to managing partner. These transitions look like achievements from the outside, and they are — but they also produce a particular kind of disorientation that is difficult to talk about with the people who report to you, and awkward to raise with the board or the people who promoted you.

The challenge is usually that the skills and habits that got you to this point are not the ones the new role needs. You are used to being the expert in the room. You are not used to being the person who has to make decisions in areas where you are not the expert. You are used to doing; you now need to lead others who do. Those are genuinely different things, and the gap is larger than most people expect it to be when they are standing on the other side of it.

The coaching work in this situation is about helping you understand the new role clearly, identify the specific habits from the previous role that will not serve you here, and build the thinking and practice needed for the version of leadership this position requires.

You know something about the way you work needs to change

Most senior leaders are aware, at some level, of the patterns in their own leadership that are limiting. The tendency to take things back rather than let the team work through them. The reluctance to have the confrontational conversations until they have become unavoidable. The over-reliance on analysis and preparation as a way of managing anxiety. The difficulty delegating in a way that feels genuine rather than supervisory.

These patterns are visible to the people around you before they are visible to you. Coaching creates the conditions — the time, the honest outside perspective, the confidential space — to see them clearly and work out what an alternative actually looks like in practice. This is not therapy. The aim is not to understand why the pattern exists but to develop enough awareness to interrupt it, and to build the specific habits that would work better.

Your leadership team is not working the way it should

A senior leadership team that is not functioning well is usually the CEO's or MD's private problem. The dysfunction is visible to everyone on the team but rarely talked about directly. Someone dominates the meetings. Someone else has largely opted out of the collective decision-making and pursues their own agenda. There is a disagreement that is too important to ignore and too uncomfortable to surface properly.

This is the area where the choice between individual coaching and the consultancy work matters. If the issue is primarily how you are leading the team, coaching is the right approach. If the issue is the team's dynamics as a whole, the consultancy and team-coaching work addresses it more directly.

You are dealing with a specific high-stakes situation

Sometimes the work is not about long-term development. It is about getting through something specific: a board presentation that is going to be difficult, a restructure that is going to be handled poorly if the communication is not right, a succession conversation that keeps getting deferred because nobody wants to have it. These are areas where having someone to think with — someone outside the organisation, with no stake in the outcome, who can be honest — makes a real practical difference.

Coaching for specific situations is often shorter than a long-term engagement. Three to five sessions focused on the specific challenge can be sufficient, and the practice is happy to work in that format when it is what the situation calls for.

You have been in the same role for a long time and something feels stuck

Not all transitions are external. Some leaders arrive at a point in a role they have been in for years where the energy is different, the challenges feel less sharp, and the work that used to absorb them no longer quite does. This can be the beginning of a planned transition. It can also be a signal that the role needs to change shape, or that the leader does.

The coaching work in this situation is often about getting clear on what the leader actually wants — which is a harder question than it sounds when you are senior enough to have significant constraints on what is practical. It involves looking honestly at what is working and what is not, at what the next chapter of the person's career should look like, and at the specific decisions that would need to be made to get there.

Your organisation needs to develop its senior leaders as a group

Individual leaders develop faster and more durably when the organisation around them supports it. The Leadership Training & Workshops page covers the group formats — half-day workshops, full-day development days, and multi-session cohort programmes — that work at the organisational level rather than the individual level.

Working out which service is right

The services overview page gives a plain account of the three areas of work and how they differ. For many people, the simplest thing is a 30-minute introductory conversation: describe what you are working on, and the discussion itself will usually make clear which type of support — if any — is the right fit.

See also: What to Expect from Executive Coaching, Services Overview, and what clients have said.

Email [email protected] to start the conversation.