From Instruction to Influence: the Hidden Challenges of Your First Executive Role

Stepping into senior leadership or a board position brings profound shifts in responsibility, visibility, and self-expectation. For those feeling the weight of unfamiliar pressures, coaching offers a powerful space to transform overwhelm into clarity, and uncertainty into purposeful influence.

Your first CEO, C-suite, or board role is a powerful milestone, one often accompanied by quiet, persistent pressure.

There’s pride, naturally. This is what you’ve worked toward for years. But alongside that comes a profound shift in how you’re seen, what’s expected of you, and how you experience your work.

You’re no longer just the expert delivering results. You are the result or at least, that’s how it can feel.

You’re expected to shape vision, steward culture, influence without instructing, and make decisions that ripple across entire teams, sometimes globally. It’s high stakes. And deeply personal.

This is often where coaching begins.

The Hidden Struggles of First-Time Executives

One of the first things I hear in sessions with new leaders is some version of this:

“I thought this would feel different.”

You’re expected to operate at strategic altitude, yet many new executives find themselves bogged down in the weeds, firefighting or overcompensating to prove they belong at the top table.

In our rapidly changing, hybrid working world, effective leaders are those who ask insightful questions and listen deeply. 

Especially if promoted internally, there’s the pressure to still be seen as one of the team, even as you’re expected to step into a new kind of leadership.

This tension has real consequences.

According to Harvard Business Review, nearly half of new CEOs underperform in their first 18 months. Not due to lack of capability, but often due to misaligned expectations, unprocessed internal doubts, and the absence of safe, high-trust spaces for reflection and recalibration.

Coaching Under the Spotlight: Leading AMID Visibility and Scrutiny

Stepping into a senior executive or board role is more than taking on greater responsibility it’s entering a space of intense visibility where every decision, word, and gesture is magnified.

For first-time CEOs and new board members, this heightened scrutiny can feel like exposure rather than empowerment. You’re not just leading strategy, you’re shaping culture, managing competing stakeholder expectations, and navigating pressures that ripple far beyond your immediate team.

The spotlight brings opportunities and challenges that few roles prepare you for: public scrutiny, boardroom dynamics, investor pressure, and the subtle but relentless gaze of the organisation and its ecosystem.

Through coaching, I support leaders in developing the clarity and resilience to navigate these pressures in five key ways:

1. Build Emotional Resilience by Facing Your True Reflection

Coaching holds up a mirror without judgment, helping leaders confront the emotional weight of constant visibility. It creates a safe space to speak freely, process pressure, regulate reactions, and stay grounded amid scrutiny and high-stakes feedback. Harvard Business Review highlights that emotionally agile leaders navigate complexity and change with far greater success and coaching cultivates exactly that resilience.

2. Transform Visibility into Influence: Leading Beyond Scrutiny

We work together to harness your platform as a powerful tool to inspire trust, align your team with your vision, and actively shape the culture you want to see. Rather than fearing scrutiny, coaching helps you reframe your mindset: it’s not about being judged, it’s about being heard with clarity and purpose.

3. Integrate Your Identity to Lead with Confidence

We explore the gap between the “real you” and the “leader you feel pressured to be.” Together, we uncover limiting beliefs and unhelpful narratives that hold you back. This deep work fosters authentic leadership grounded in your core values and strengths.

4. Strategically Expand Your Leadership Impact

We focus on amplifying your strengths while encouraging you to stretch where it truly counts. It’s about knowing when to make a decisive impact that demonstrates your value, all while staying rooted in what you already do best. Through this process, you cultivate a leadership presence that inspires trust and confidently navigates complex organisational dynamics.

5. Strengthen Decision-Making by Listening Inward Under Pressure
With so many eyes watching, reactive decision-making could become the norm. Coaching supports you in slowing down, listening inward, and making thoughtful, values-aligned choices even when the pressure is high.

What Coaching Can Offer That Mentoring Often MisseS

Unlike mentoring (which is often directional, with the mentor driving idea generation) coaching creates space for something deeper: leveraging your own experience and potential.

Here’s how that works in practice.

In coaching, we explore questions that help you see things differently and challenge your current way of leading, such as:

• What stories or ideas about yourself are shaping how you lead and how might they be holding you back?

• When do you try to control situations instead of trusting others, and what might happen if you let go a little?

• Which beliefs about leadership no longer serve you, and how can you shift your thinking to lead more effectively?
  

Clients often describe coaching as a turning point because, rather than offering ready-made answers, it helps you identify what’s holding you back and find your own path forward. This kind of change, rooted in honesty and self-awareness, is what makes coaching distinct from mentoring.

This isn’t just a friendly chat. It’s focused, sometimes confronting and uncomfortable, purposeful work that builds strong, lasting leadership.

The Data Is Clear: Inner Clarity Drives Outer Impact

Recent research supports this inside-out approach. According to a 2024 PwC global CEO survey, 45% of CEOs feel they won’t survive more than 10 years unless they reinvent their leadership style. The same report stresses the importance of human-led transformation - the ability to listen deeply, adapt quickly, and lead with emotional intelligence.

Meanwhile, Gallup research shows that only 21% of employees feel their leaders are aligned with company values. That misalignment starts at the top. And it’s rarely about strategy - it’s about presence, trust, and communication.

Randstad’s findings on future-ready leadership suggest that executives who actively build emotional agility and self-awareness see higher levels of team engagement, talent retention, and long-term resilience.

From Isolated to Grounded: The Energy Shift That Matters

As a coach, I don’t offer quick fixes. What I offer is space.

A space where leaders can be human before they’re expected to be heroic.
Where they can explore doubts without judgment.
Where they can unlearn what no longer serves them, and lead with intention, not autopilot.

I’ve seen it happen time and again: an energy shift that changes everything.

More grounded.
More trusting.
More influential - not by instructing more, but by inspiring more.

If You’re a First-Time CEO or C-Suite Executive…

…know this: it’s completely normal to feel a little off-centre right now.

You’re learning to hold space for others without losing yourself.

You’re adapting to a new level of visibility, scrutiny, and dependence.

You’re expected to lead transformation, while still transforming yourself.

You don’t have to do it alone.

Coaching won’t give you a script. It will give you something far more valuable: a mirror, a map, and a moment to catch your breath before your next move.

Want to find your footing and lead with more confidence and clarity?
I offer 1:1 coaching for new CEOs and first-time executives (including options supported by your organisation).