Executive coaching is incredibly valuable for leaders, but it can be difficult to access at a time when they need it most. Take the case of a client of mine, “Simon,” a capable, recently promoted executive at a consultancy, who turned to his leaders for support when a market downturn hit the company.
He had been promised coaching, but the company withdrew funding for it just as his challenges multiplied: He needed an updated sales strategy, he had inherited an unmotivated team that faced the risk of being laid off, and he was left to navigate the turmoil alone — precisely at the moment when the stakes became highest.
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This scenario is not uncommon. Leaders today face more complexity, faster change, and higher expectations than ever before. But support systems have not evolved at the same pace.
Budget cuts, approval bottlenecks, and cultural barriers often mean that by the time help is available, the moment has passed or the problem has gotten worse. In small organizations that need to keep costs down, coaching may not even be offered.
Even those leaders in better-resourced organizations often delay asking for help, worried that it will make them appear incapable. The speed and sensitivity of today’s issues, from team politics to strategic change, require something faster, more discreet, and more available than formal coaching can always provide.
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This is where self-coaching can come in. Not as a direct replacement for executive coaching, but as a critical skill that empowers leaders to lean on each other, especially in high-stakes, high-pressure moments.
Yet while we talk about resilience and agility, we rarely teach leaders how to self-coach. In this article, we will talk about how to close this gap.
Self-coaching for real leadership problems
The SOLVE framework is a practical, research-based method that I developed over two decades of working and studying with leaders.
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I’ve observed that leaders need a simple but effective way to make progress on complex problems—something that encourages them to step back, understand what’s happening, and then move forward confidently but cautiously in a way that fits their specific situation.
Because it is a field-designed model for real leadership challenges, it works even on those who are confused, emotionally charged, or politically sensitive.
See how it works:
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1. Define the problem
As a leader, you will often be carrying a tangled knot of concerns from multiple stakeholders. By stating the problem to yourself, you are seeking to untangle this knot by articulating the central issue clearly in just one or two sentences.
This helps you shift from overwhelmed to focused. Just like in coaching, naming the problem accurately sparks insights into what the solution might be.
Keep these guidelines in mind when crafting your problem statement:
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Make sure your statement is no longer than two sentences. If it’s too long and you can’t narrow it down, you’re dealing with more than one problem. Separate them and solve them one at a time.
Incorporate the consequences of the problem. “The problem is X, and it is having impact Y” is the rough formulation you need.
Avoid solutions at this stage. It may be tempting to fit a “and we should do this about it” at the end, but remember that you haven’t researched the underlying causes of the problem at this point, so the best solutions aren’t yet clear.
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Finally, make your statement specific and detailed enough to expose the primary areas of challenge. For example, instead of “I’m failing to lead well,” the problem might be better stated as “I’m avoiding giving feedback to a high-performing but disruptive team member and it’s affecting the entire team.”
I recently coached the CEO of a sizable college, who spent 20 minutes laying out in detail a problem he was having getting his team’s buy-in on a building redesign.
When I asked him to summarize the problem in one sentence, he initially found it very difficult, believing that there was too much going on and that I was not sympathetic to the complexity of the situation. He managed to reduce it to a two-minute description.
But when I pressed him for just one sentence (and pressed some more), he was finally able to say: “My senior leadership team is resisting the building redesign, and this is reducing my energy and creating conflict.” And now we had something we could work with.
The clarity you gain at this stage will guide you through the rest of the process and make you dramatically more effective.
2. Open the box
This is the diagnostic phase, where you will undertake research to discover the nature of the problem in more detail. Think about what data or information you need to understand what is happening.
Observe patterns of behavior, review recent performance data, collect informal feedback from colleagues, and reflect on your own reactions and assumptions.
For example, one leader I worked with used this phase to discover that her team’s poor performance was not the result of laziness, as she feared, but rather stemmed from conflicting priorities from different senior stakeholders, which led to decision paralysis about which orders to follow.
You’ll know it’s time to move forward when you feel like you can see what’s going on and that you’ve gotten to the underlying causes, as opposed to generating more questions.
3. Define the solution
At this stage, formulate your plan on how to solve the problem you discovered. It’s about designing a solution that fits the specific context.
This can be a single action or a phased approach, but the goal is to align the intervention with the context of the organization, team or individual in question, as well as the industry, company culture, relationships and stakes involved.
For example, the HR leader at a healthcare organization was experiencing a lack of cross-team collaboration.
Initially, she considered implementing a formal communication model with strict rules about how often people should interact. But after “opening the box,” she realized that it wouldn’t fit the culture, which was to this (in this case, more flexible) and anti-buoyancy, tending to react negatively to rigid systems.
Rather than imposing a strict structure, she co-designed simple principles for collaboration with representatives from each team. The result was increased adhesion, improved clarity, and much less resistance than a top-down approach would have caused.
To support this process, leaders can ask themselves:
“Does my proposed solution align with the way things are really done around here?”
“Is there something I’m assuming that I need to test or validate?”
“Am I solving the root cause or just a surface-level symptom?”
These questions keep the solution context-sensitive and help avoid a “copy-paste” mentality from other organizations or functions.
4. Advance
This is when implementation begins. In this phase, you will be taking action while monitoring the impacts your actions are having, as well as focusing on how you will deal with any problems or obstacles that arise, whether they are political, emotional, resource-based, or something else.
Here are some key areas to keep an eye on:
- Biases that arise during times of change, especially the overconfidence bias: the belief that things will be simpler than they really are.
- Cultural resistance, because even a well-designed solution can fail if it conflicts with “how we do things around here”.
- Unintended unwanted consequences, such as better performance on your team but conflict with another team that feels they are being pushed too hard.
I worked with a senior leadership team at a boutique consultancy. Because they were using inconsistent processes, their customers felt like they were working with a different company depending on which leader they interacted with.
The team’s solution was to create a single, new process. But the initial plan significantly underestimated the amount of time it would take and how much resistance they would get from their teams.
When they realized they had been overconfident and were facing cultural resistance, they slowed down and put someone in charge of consulting with the different teams to create processes that everyone could agree on.
When the company was later acquired by a larger consultancy for a significant sum, these better processes were part of what made them a worthy target, as they signaled that the small company knew what it was doing.
As you move forward, you need to keep a close eye on what’s worth keeping and what might need changing, and you can’t be afraid to change if things aren’t going according to plan.
5. Expand your learning
After action comes reflection. What worked? What didn’t work? What patterns can you identify and how can you take what you learn further? This final phase is designed to transform your SOLVE experience into appropriate leadership growth rather than a skill set that is used once and then forgotten.
You can extend your learning by asking yourself:
- What worked well and how can I share this with others?
- What did I like or excel at, and how can I build deeper experience in this area?
- Where else could I apply the same skill or approach to make an impact?
- What was harder than I expected and what do I need to work on next?
After leading a successful strategy reset, a functional leader I worked with reflected using these four lenses.
She shared her new approach to stakeholder engagement with her colleagues, helping them learn what would work for their specific organization.
Realizing she enjoyed mediations, she enrolled in a short mediation course and then applied her honed skills to a stagnant cross-functional process transformation project. She further developed her skills by seeking mentorship from a colleague with deep experience in transformation.
The SOLVE framework is designed to balance structure and flexibility — and is not dependent on perfect conditions or external mediation. It can be used both in the midst of a crisis and on an ongoing basis to build a foundation for stronger, more self-reliant leadership over time.
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