What Co-Active Coaching Taught Me About Leading Others (and Myself)

I've spent more than twenty years leading engineering teams. I believed I understood how to lead people. Then I began training as a coach — and I realized how much I was missing.

When I enrolled in my Co-Active coaching certification through CTI, I expected to learn a methodology I could use with clients. What I didn't expect was how deeply the Four Cornerstones of Co-Active Coaching would begin to transform the way I lead, manage, and navigate my own life.

These principles didn't stay confined to my coaching practice. They spread into my engineering organization and my one-on-ones, shaping how I view my own ambition and the distance between who I am and whom I am becoming.

Here's what I've been noticing.

People Are Naturally Creative, Resourceful, and Whole

For most of my career, I equated strong leadership with quickly having the right answer. Expertise as authority. That model produces results — until you start questioning what it costs.

The first Co-Active Cornerstone — that people are Naturally Creative, Resourceful, and Whole (NCRW) — asked me to try something different. What if I genuinely believed that before I opened my mouth?

I've been testing it with my team of twenty engineers. Asking more questions. Directing less. Keeping the question open longer than feels comfortable. What comes back is consistently richer than what I would have come up with on my own.

The same principle applies to every coaching session I conduct. When I get the urge to jump in with a solution, that urge acts as data — it shows me I've momentarily stopped trusting the person in front of me. The practice is to recognize that and choose to trust instead.

"Creative. Resourceful. Whole." No longer feels like just a framework to me. It has become a core belief — one I might even name my coaching podcast after because it perfectly expresses why I do this work.

The Whole Person Is Always in the Room

Engineering leadership is inherently transactional. Tickets, sprints, velocity, delivery. There's nothing wrong with that — until it becomes your only perspective.

The Whole Person Cornerstone has been an essential counterbalance. When someone on my team was underperforming, my first question used to be, "What's wrong with the process?" Now it's more often what's going on with this person? That's a small change in wording. It's a completely different approach to leadership underneath.

This also personally challenged me. I'm building a coaching practice, leading a technology organization, pursuing ICF certification, and exploring board service — all at once. For years, I treated these as separate paths that should never intersect. The Whole Person Cornerstone revealed how costly that illusion was.

The ambition, health, relationships, financial situation, and creative life — they all belong to one person. I can't see my clients as complete people if I don't do the same for myself.

Presence Is a Leadership Skill Nobody Talks About

Of the four Cornerstones, Dance in This Moment still demands the most active effort from me. I'm a long-term thinker, always carrying the roadmap.

The Co-Active invitation to let go of the plan and trust what's alive in the conversation right now doesn’t come naturally to me — and I suspect it doesn't come naturally to most leaders who have reached their position by being exceptionally good at anticipating what’s next.

What I'm learning is that this isn't about abandoning strategy. It's about having enough presence to recognize when the strategy needs to yield to what is actually happening. In coaching sessions, the most meaningful exchanges often come from the pause I almost skipped past. In leadership, the most important information I've received has come from one-on-ones where I stopped driving the agenda long enough to really listen.

Presence, it turns out, is a key leadership skill. It just doesn't appear on most performance frameworks.

Transformation Is the Standard — Not the Stretch Goal

The fourth Cornerstone — Evoke Transformation —directly explains why I founded Alpha Bravo Professional Coaching.

I didn't start this practice to help technical leaders optimize their calendars. I work with people who sense something larger is available to them and haven't yet figured out how to fully embrace it. Transformation is the core purpose.

What Co-Active training has shown me is that evocation isn't a technique I use. It's a quality of presence I either bring to a conversation or I don't. When I'm genuinely holding someone as capable of more than they currently see in themselves, something in the room changes. When I'm going through the motions — technically competent but not fully present — that's noticeable too.

The same dynamic exists in engineering leadership. When I truly believe my team can do innovative work — not just execute but create — that belief raises the limits of what we collectively aim for. Belief is powerful. Doubt is too.

What I'm Taking Away

The most honest thing I can say about these Cornerstones is this: they are not four separate things I practice. They are a single integrated stance — and I'm either in it, or I'm not.

NCRW and the Whole Person shape how I view people. Dancing in This Moment decides whether I'm with them. Evoke Transformation is why any of it matters.

Some days I live this well. Some days I catch myself halfway back to old patterns — defaulting to the expert, driving the agenda, solving instead of listening. But the awareness is different now. And in coaching, as in leadership, awareness is always the starting point.

If you're a leader who has never engaged with coaching frameworks — not as a tool you use on others, but as a practice you apply to yourself — I encourage you to begin. In my experience, the return on that investment has been profound.

Antoine E. Burrell, Sr., is the founder of Alpha Bravo Professional Coaching, a Co-Active coaching practice that serves professionals in technology, finance, healthcare, and defense. Learn more at alphabravocoaching.com.