Elisa Haggarty Coaching & ConsultingA COO of a consulting firm engaged me for executive coaching after reaching a breaking point: her team of 9 directors was avoiding hard conversations, missing deadlines without flagging risks, and consistently defaulting decisions back to her. This dynamic was burning her out and stalling key company innovation and collaboration. At the root of the issue, directors were afraid to hold firm boundaries with clients around billable hours on client-facing projects—hours were being broken every month, costing the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars each quarter. The teams were producing excellent work and strong business plans, but the organization was hemorrhaging money simply because its leaders couldn't have the hard conversations needed to hold the line and create a win for everyone involved.
To address this, I began with 1:1 coaching sessions with the COO focused on helping her set clearer boundaries and shift out of a pattern of over-functioning for her team. I then designed and facilitated a series of experiential workshops for her 9 directors grounded in conscious leadership principles—direct communication, boundary-setting with both clients and direct reports, and practicing new behaviors in real time during moments of change and stress rather than just discussing theory.
The results were tangible and cultural. The COO shifted her tendency to absorb too much responsibility, which reduced her burnout and exhaustion, and she began communicating differently—empowering her directors to have the hard conversations themselves instead of mitigating every issue on their behalf. This shift modeled the exact behavior the directors had been struggling to demonstrate with their own teams. The engagement produced a new standard of accountability across the leadership team and gave them a reimagined approach to solving the billable-hours problem that had been quietly draining hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue each quarter.
