How to help a senior client who's outgrown their role find the next challenge
This is for you when a senior client is good at the job and quietly restless. The easy read is a bigger title or an exit. You suspect something simpler: the seat got small, and neither of you can name what would be big enough.
A strong senior outgrows a role when the biggest problem the job offers gets smaller than what they are built to run. A bigger title will not fix that. A bigger problem will. Your job is to find the problem their operating model is built for, and name it with them.
Open their Systems in the profile. Systems show how they operate across a whole year, the engine and not the day. Each one is built for a certain size of problem.
- Name what the role stopped offering. What is the hardest problem the role still asks of them? Can they solve it without stretching? When it is done by lunch, they have outgrown it.
- Read each System as an engine, not a description. What is the biggest problem it is built to run at full size? Not what they point it at today.
- Put the bigger problems on the table. Hold nothing back. Inside the company: the job nobody owns, the mess two levels up. Outside it: a problem in the industry, a new business, a field they keep circling back to.
- Match them up, and pick one. Hold the bigger problems against their Systems. Look past what sounds impressive or just happens to be open. You want the one their engine is built to run, with the rare edge one of their Superpowers names.
When a problem bigger than the role lights the client up and fits them, the work has landed. Stop there.
- Name it, in their words. Have the client say the next challenge as one sentence, engine attached: "My next challenge is ___, and the System built to run it is ___." That sentence is the hold: a named problem, sized to them, not a title to chase.
The client owns the challenge. You own the read that showed their engine had outgrown the role.
Coaching questions
A bank to pull from, not a worksheet to run in order. Once the client names a problem bigger than the seat, follow it.
Sitting with having outgrown it
- If the title stayed the same but the problem got twice as big, what happens to the restlessness?
Widening it
- What is the biggest problem your engine has never been pointed at, in or out of this company?
Moving toward naming it
- Of everything on the table, which one does your operating model fit, not just want?
