Reintegrating Integrity: Life & Career

Situation
A high-potential, VP contacted us for life and career coaching. He had transferred from the world’s largest delivery company to the world’s largest food conglomerate. Quiet, outstanding integrity, and high performance had always been his core identity and approach to life. Now that which had served him so well in his last company was swiftly becoming an impediment in his new company where corporate politics and ego parades took center stage.

Approach
Not one to fail, our client decided to make any changes that would not compromise his integrity. Taking into account his new culture, we asked his boss for clarification about how the company measured achievement. We also asked him how he measured achievement, and satisfaction and life well lived: epitaph and performance review.

Over the course of a year, we worked with him as a life and career coach, to help define the differences between behavior and self, and style and integrity. He reconsidered and refined how he gave himself permission to expand the repertoire of his identities and behavior. We opened up possibilities for him to reflect on how work and life can interweave and increased his agency to determine his values and path.

Result
He made personal changes to strengthen his family life, decided where he stood on several personal and professional issues, shed old paradoxes, and decided what to say no to. In other words, he created and executed his life and career strategy together as a partnership, rather than as competing opposites.

He became the top-rated executive in his organization and the keystone strategist for remaking the company’s operations and delivery strategy. Later, he designed a sound exit strategy for his future transition into those areas of life he had delayed in the name of financial success.