In Between the Notes

A few years ago, I noticed that someone close to me at work was on the edge of burnout.

I was not their coach. I was not their line manager. I was adjacent to them in the structure of the team, close enough to see what was happening, with no formal mandate to do anything about it.

I recognised what I was seeing. I found the courage to say it. I suggested they speak to a professional. They did. They came back from it well, and the rest of their career has unfolded from that point.

That moment has stayed with me longer than most of the work I did in consulting. Not because of what I said — what I said was unremarkable. Because of what was required to say it. You have to be paying attention to the person rather than the deliverable. You have to find the courage to verbalise an observation that nobody is asking you to make. And you have to be willing to be wrong about it, in public, with someone you care about.

There is not much room for that kind of attention inside a consulting partnership. The role is built around delivery and visible answers. The five-minute conversation in the corner is not what the role rewards.

I was good at that. I was good at it for a long time. But the moment with the person on the edge of burnout was the one I kept thinking about. Not the closed deal. Not the launched programme. The five-minute conversation in a quiet corner.

The course at IMD

In 2023, I went to IMD for High Performance Leadership.

Each table of six in that programme had its own coach. Ours was with us from Sunday afternoon to Friday afternoon, and what he did inside our group of six strangers was something I had not seen anyone do before. He created the conditions for us to know each other quickly and well. He asked the questions that moved us in directions none of us had expected when we sat down.

Afterwards, I asked him how he had ended up in this work. He told me he had taken the same programme some years before, and that what had happened in his group had been the trigger for him to leave a senior corporate role and become an executive coach.

I was not ready to make that decision in the week of the programme. I was not ready six months later. But the question had been planted, and it did not go away.

What I did by design

I have made one career decision by design. The rest were coincidences.

I became a consultant because a company’s name caught my eye in a job fair catalogue. I stayed in consulting because I was good at it and because the path kept widening. Most of what looked like strategy at the time was, looking back, momentum.

Becoming a coach is the first thing I have done by design. I sat with the question for long enough that the answer stopped being a reaction.

I went back to IMD for the Executive Coaching Certificate Programme. IECC Cohort 7. Eight months, the same room, the same five peers.

I built the practice around the kind of attention I want to be paying for the rest of my career, rather than around the role I had grown into without choosing it.

In between the notes

When I was asked recently what coaching is, I reached for the metaphor I trust most.

I am a cellist. I have played chamber music for most of my life. Chamber music is not conducted. There is no figure at the front. The piece happens because each player is listening for the others, for the in between notes, the breath before the entry, the place where the next phrase needs to land. The work is in the listening, not in the playing.

Coaching is chamber music. The work is between the notes.

Most of what I did as a consulting partner was the part of music that audiences see. Most of what I do as a coach is the part audiences do not see. I had to leave the front of the room to do it.

This piece comes from a conversation with EMCC Switzerland for their reflective series. The interview happened because Charles Bill suggested at the EMCC AGM in March that I should volunteer for it. The recording is here.