He Got the Promotion. Then He Got a Coach. Here's Why the Order Matters.

What changes when coaching happens before the transition — rather than after?

Most leaders come to coaching the same way.

Something isn't working. A team dynamic has deteriorated. A stakeholder relationship has gone sideways. A promotion has stalled, and they can't fully explain why. A new role is proving harder than expected. The external signal is clear: something needs to change, and they've reached the point of accepting they might not be able to change it alone.

That's when coaching happens. In response to difficulty. As a corrective measure.

He did something different.

He engaged coaching six months before the promotion conversation he could see coming. When everything was going well, and there was, by any conventional measure, no problem to solve.

What happened over those six months — and what happened when he walked into the new role — changed how I think about when coaching works best.

What He Was Trying to Avoid

He wasn't naive about what executive transitions look like from the inside perspective.

He'd watched peers step into VP roles and spend their first year in a particular kind of struggle that's hard to describe to anyone who hasn't experienced it. Not a struggle with the work —they were usually fine with the work. But with something earlier and more foundational: the first impression. The signal they sent in the first weeks about who they were as a leader at this level, before they'd fully understood the environment they were operating in.

The early mistake in a critical stakeholder meeting that took months to recover from. The team dynamic established in the first few weeks — too deferential, too aggressive, too uncertain — and that proved remarkably resistant to change. The psychological safety that didn't get built quickly enough, so that by the time the leader needed honest information from the people around them, the conditions for receiving it honestly hadn't been created.

None of these failures were dramatic. None of them showed up cleanly in a performance review. But they were real and expensive, and in almost every case they could have been prepared for — if the preparation had happened before the transition rather than in response to its consequences.

He didn't want year one to look like recovery.

What Six Months of Proactive Coaching Actually Looked Like

I want to be specific about what we worked on, because "coaching before a transition" can sound vague without the particulars.

We didn't work on his technical qualifications for the role. Those were already established and not the issue.

We didn't develop a strategic plan for the first ninety days. Good frameworks exist for that, and he could develop one himself.

What we worked on was harder and more personal than either of those things.

Who he wanted to be on day one. Not what he wanted to accomplish — who he wanted to be. In the first team meeting, before anyone had decided what kind of leader he was. In the first conversation when someone brought him a problem. In the first moment of genuine organizational tension, before he had the full picture. We spent real time on this because the identity you show up with in the first days of a transition is almost impossible to revise quickly once it's established. It teaches people something, and that teaching travels.

How to create psychological safety quickly. This is something most leadership transitions get catastrophically wrong — not by being deliberately closed, but by failing to be explicitly open. People watch their new leader struggle in the first few weeks and draw conclusions that determine how much truth they'll bring going forward. He thought through, specifically, what it would look like to receive hard information well. What he'd say. How he'd respond. What he'd do immediately afterward to signal that bringing him the problem was the right call.

His narrative. Not his résumé — the story of his leadership. What his experience added up to. What he'd built that no one else in the room had. What made him, specifically, not just technically, the right person for this role at this particular moment. This work mattered because the people around him — his new peers, his direct reports, the stakeholders above him — were going to construct a story about who he was, whether he offered one or not. Having a clear, deliberate narrative meant he was shaping that story rather than leaving it to whatever people inferred from his first few meetings.

What he needed to let go of. Every transition requires leaving something behind — a way of operating that worked in the previous role but doesn't serve the new one, a source of identity that can't travel with you, or a kind of work you were excellent at that you no longer do directly. We spent time identifying what that was for him, specifically, because leaders who don't name it tend to hold on to it unconsciously — which means they're half in the old role and half in the new one, and neither role gets their full presence.

What the First Ninety Days Actually Looked Like

The promotion came. He walked in.

And something was visibly different about how he arrived compared with his peers who received the same title at the same time.

Not more polished. Not more strategic. More settled. More specific. More clearly himself in a genuinely new context.

He knew what he wanted the first team meeting to communicate — and it did. He handled the first difficult piece of information in a way that made the messenger glad they'd told him — and within weeks, he had more honest information flowing to him than most new executives see in their first six months. His narrative was clear enough that when people asked about him in conversations he wasn't in, the answer was specific rather than general.

His first ninety days didn't look like recovery. They looked like an arrival.

I've watched many executive transitions. The difference between those that start well and those that spend a year digging out from an early impression is almost never capability. It's almost always preparation — specifically, the kind that happens before the transition rather than in response to its consequences.

The Reframe Worth Sitting With

Most people think of coaching as something that addresses a problem. You coach when something isn't working. You seek support when you're stuck or struggling, when the situation has become hard enough that you need an outside perspective to navigate it.

That's one version of coaching, and it's both real and valuable.

But there's another version — the one this client used — that doesn't address a problem. It prepares you for a chapter. It helps you arrive at a transition with intention, rather than having that intention arrive slowly over your first difficult months. It gives you the internal clarity that produces a first impression you chose, rather than one that happened while you were figuring things out.

The difference in outcome is significant. The investment — in time, in honest reflection, and in doing the work before you're under pressure to do it — is considerably smaller than the cost of the alternative.

If you're approaching a transition — a new role, a promotion, or a significant shift in the scope or nature of your leadership — the question worth asking isn't whether you're ready for it.

You probably are.

The question is whether you've thought through who you want to be when you arrive. And if the answer is not yet — that's exactly where the preparation starts.

Antoine E. Burrell, Sr. is a Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudera and the founder of Alpha Bravo Professional Coaching, a Co-Active coaching practice for technical and executive leaders. He works with leaders before and during major transitions — so the first ninety days look like arrival, not recovery.