When Gravitas Has No Address: A Coaching Engagement in Three Parts
Part Three: On what surfaced when the presenting frame gave way
This is the third and final part of this essay. Part One introduced the engagement and what was observable in the room before anything more substantive became available. Part Two attended to the biographical material that surfaced beneath the presenting goals and what it required of me as a practitioner. This part follows the engagement into the moment the presenting frame gave way, what was discovered beneath it, and what eventually shifted by reframing the developmental agenda.
Where the frame broke
Several sessions into the engagement, the leader described an experience she could not fully account for. In her leadership team meetings, she was struggling to provide clear direction and inspire the team. With a particular team member — one brought in by her predecessor — she found herself losing emotional regulation. She was reprimanding him in front of the group in ways she recognised as disproportionate and professionally costly. She was aware of what was happening and, yet, could not explain it.
I was struck by the specificity of this encounter; it was not a generalised leadership difficulty. It was a response within the relationship with a particular team member , producing a distinct pattern: the emotional dysregulation, the inability to hold authority or inspiration in the room with any settled quality. Conventional explanations — confidence, role clarity, transition anxiety — were partially valid but insufficient. The questions I held were: why this person, and what did this encounter carry?
Rather than moving toward interpretation, I held those questions and let the material unfold. What emerged over time was an implicit comparison. This team member appeared to embody, in the leader’s experience of him, the predecessor’s authority — decisive, technically assured, a bigger personality. She was measuring herself against an internalised standard, both real and constructed, and finding herself wanting. When we could talk about this unspoken comparison with her predecessor, I asked what made her available to such comparison rather than being in denial of it. This question was not immediately answered. Much later, it became a coaching question she often referred to. Remaining with her internal process of discovery, in timing, form and content, allowed each theme to illuminate something critical to her agency in making meaning of her behaviors.
The emergence of grief and fear
As these themes were engaged more directly, something emerged that did not belong in the initial framing: loss. The shift away from technical and functional authority was not only a strategic transition. It involved relinquishing the mode through which she had known herself as competent for two decades. This was not a skills gap that training could close. It was an experience of identity in suspension — no longer the professional she had been, not yet the one the role required.
Her difficulty providing direction, her emotional outbursts with this particular team member, and her continued focus on operational detail became intelligible in this light. These were not behavioural deficits. They were responses to disorientation and loss that had no organisational container. The early impression of passivity was also reinterpreted. It reflected exhaustion rather than disengagement. She was holding together a professional identity that was fragmenting, in a context that could neither recognise nor support that process. In such conditions, the coaching became the only space where the experience could be named.
Over time, a further layer emerged: her fear. When she reduced her functional involvement and stepped back from operational detail, she encountered an unfamiliar feeling of a lot of time in her hands. This did not feel like freedom. It felt like exposure. The detail had structured her time, protected her from engaging with strategic demands that felt uncertain, and given her a reliable sense of competence. Its absence revealed both anxiety and a potential lack of skills in areas the role was now asking of her.
What shifted, and how
Change was gradual and non-linear — consistent with a postmodern understanding of development as situated, emergent, and resistant to predetermined sequence. Periods of greater clarity were followed by returns to reliance on direction from me and renewed retreat into operational detail. There was no single turning point.
What altered over time was not confidence in a conventional sense. The earlier passivity gave way to a more active engagement with difficulty — an increasing capacity to remain in uncertain situations rather than micro-managing. The emotional outbursts became less frequent and less intense. Her relationship to the particular team member shifted: not resolved, but less charged, less organised around the implicit comparison that had been driving it. She also developed a more realistic view of herself and her internal struggles with the new role, including which aspects were genuinely about her skills and competencies, beyond an identity attached to functional expertise.
This engagement highlighted my role in not resolving the initial presenting issue but in sustaining interpretive openness long enough for the problem itself to reorganise across levels of understanding, primarily driven by the leader’s agency.
What these three parts demonstrate, and what they leave open
Across the three parts of this account, the individual lens has revealed something that no presenting problem and no competency framework would have surfaced unaided. Discovering the leader’s developmental areas required a sustained attentiveness that could not have been planned in advance. It was a word (“gravitas”) that had no location, a pattern of passivity that read as exhaustion, formative experiences that organised the present, a specific relational disruption with a team member that could not be explained by any single frame, an unacknowledged grief and fear — none of these were sufficient on their own. Together, in dynamic tension with each other, they began to constitute something closer to the truth of what was happening.
It also required of me, as a practitioner, to honour the humanity and the agency of the person in the room. To notice when the presenting frame was not adequate to her actual developmental needs. And to pivot — to find, with her, language that fit better than the language she arrived with. The sense of misfit I felt was data. It pointed to the organisation’s relationship to development. To the limits of the word gravitas as a coaching goal. And to the importance of linking her development back to the specific demands of her role. That twin focus — on the person and on the role — was crucial in moving her from self-awareness to meaningful, self-directed change.
A note on what this account does not capture
These essays have attended to what was most analytically visible: the leader’s interior experience, my attentiveness as a practitioner, and the meaning that accumulated between us over time. But the fuller complexity of the engagement is considerably larger. Two important dimensions are largely absent:
The craft of the sessions themselves. The account does not capture the clinical and relational texture of the work: the interpretive decisions, including the use of silence as a containing intervention; the questions that functioned as reframes; or the long stretches of apparently circular work that constituted the necessary conditions for later movement. What has been offered here is the meaning that emerged from the work. The “how” of the work — its craft, its judgement, and the moment-by-moment navigation of the engagement — remains largely below the surface.
The theoretical coherence beneath the practice. Also unspoken is how the theoretical traditions that informed this engagement — postmodern epistemology, scientific approaches to change, psychoanalytic thinking, and action research — were held together not as an eclectic mix but as a coherent and intentional epistemological stance. That coherence has shaped my craft. I will account for it — how I came to it and the iterative cycle of action and reflection that constitutes the methodological backbone of practice-based inquiry — in the essays that follow.
The essays in this series have thus far focused on the individual: the leader’s experience and how her biographical residues shaped her leadership behaviours. The next essay shifts to the organisational context. It examines the leader within her team and attends to what this reveals about the organisation’s culture, structures, and constraints. This broader lens surfaces dynamics that an individual account alone cannot access and offers, yet again, a reminder of the situated nature of leadership within a much broader system.