THE GROWTH EDGE
The Leadership Edge
Development Insights for Leaders Who Do the Work
July 2026 • Issue #4
There’s a pattern I see in nearly every leader I coach who’s stuck at a transition point. They’re working harder than they did a year ago, getting less done, and quietly wondering if they’re losing their edge. They’re not. They’re holding on to the version of themselves that earned the promotion, while the role in front of them now requires a different one. The harder they work the old way, the more obvious it becomes that the old way isn’t matching the new job.
Last month’s posts circled this idea from three angles. The leadership identity shift names the underlying dynamic: every level requires you to let go of what made you valuable at the previous one. The post on difficult conversations addresses the skill most often avoided during these transitions — the direct feedback that the new role demands and the old role didn’t. And the coaching conversation framework gives you five questions that flip a manager’s default from “let me solve that for you” to “let me help you think through this,” which is the single most important behavior shift in moving from doer to leader.
The research this month points in the same direction. Manager coaching skill correlates strongly with team outcomes, but most managers default to advice-giving because that’s what got them promoted. The companies and the individual leaders who close that gap are the ones still moving forward when the rest of the org plateaus.
What We Published Last Month
The Leadership Identity Shift: When What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
A newly promoted VP of Engineering, drowning at her new altitude not because she lacked the skills but because she couldn’t stop being the technical hero. This post walks through the identity work behind every leadership transition — IC to manager, manager to director, director to VP — and names the four patterns that signal a stalled transition. If you’ve ever felt like the new role doesn’t fit, this is why, and how the shift actually happens.
Read it: The Leadership Identity Shift →
Having Difficult Conversations Without Making Them Worse
The conversation you’ve been avoiding isn’t going to get easier with time. It’s going to get more expensive. This post lays out a four-part framework — prepare, open, deliver, close — with specific language for the opening sentence that determines how the whole conversation lands. Plus the three conversation types leaders avoid most and the cost of avoidance in each. Practical enough to use this week on the one you’ve been putting off.
Read it: Having Difficult Conversations →
The Coaching Conversation Framework: Five Questions That Change How Leaders Develop Others
A director who solved every problem her team brought her built a team that couldn’t solve problems without her. The fix wasn’t a coaching certification — it was five questions, used consistently in one-on-ones. This post walks through them and shows the two-month shift one leader saw: from answering 60% of her team’s questions to 30%, with six fewer hours of weekly work and direct reports who started developing into leaders themselves.
Read it: The Coaching Conversation Framework →
Worth Knowing: What the Research Is Saying
Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2026. A systematic review of 136 articles on leader role transitions concluded that successful transitions depend on three distinct processes: behavioral adjustment (learning the new skills), identity transformation (becoming the new version of yourself), and social validation (others starting to see you in the new role). The review’s central argument is that most leadership development focuses only on the first one — and that’s why so many otherwise-capable leaders stall after a promotion.
This maps directly to what shows up in coaching. The leaders who get unstuck the fastest are the ones who work on all three at once — building new skills, letting go of the old identity, and intentionally signaling the shift to the people around them. The leaders who stall are usually the ones treating it as a skills problem when the real work is identity. If you’re in transition, the question isn’t only “what do I need to learn?” It’s “who do I need to become, and how will others know I have?”
Harvard Business Review, January–February 2026. In a piece focused on leaders moving into bigger roles, HBR’s Nihar Chhaya named what many newly promoted leaders feel but can’t articulate: the work that earned the promotion is the work you have to stop doing in order to succeed at the new altitude. The article frames five strategies for protecting time and leading at scale — most of which involve resisting the pull back to the work that feels comfortable, productive, and visible.
The phrase that stuck with me from the piece was “leading at scale.” It’s not the same as managing more people. It’s the discipline of letting your influence travel through systems, decisions, and people you’ve developed — instead of through your own output. Most leaders intellectually agree with this and still feel guilty when they’re not producing visible deliverables. That gap between belief and behavior is what coaching actually addresses.
SHRM, 2026 Talent Management Executives Survey. Over 40% of talent management executives identified “ensuring managers provide objective, constructive performance feedback” as a top challenge in 2025 and 2026. Separately, 46% of leaders said leadership and manager development is a top priority for 2026 — the highest level in years. The recognition that manager capability is the bottleneck is widespread; the investment to fix it is still uneven.
For an individual leader, the practical implication is that the manager capability gap is also a career opportunity. The leaders who build genuine coaching skill — the kind described in last month’s five-questions post — stand out increasingly in a market where most managers default to advice-giving. You don’t need to wait for your company’s manager-development program to catch up. The five questions are usable in your next one-on-one this week.
Resource Spotlight
12 Questions That Top Performers Ask Themselves Every Day. A daily reflection tool we use in our coaching practice to build the kind of self-awareness that drives real development. Especially useful if you’re in transition, because the questions force the honest look at your own behavior that the identity shift requires — not in an annual review, but on a Tuesday morning before your day starts.
Get the 12 Questions for Top Performers →
Curious what assessment-driven development would look like for you?
Discovery calls are free, 30 minutes, and there’s no pitch — just an honest conversation about where you are, what you’re working on, and whether structured coaching or assessment work would help you get there.