After nearly 30 years working for the same public utility, and after being promoted to a management position – the only woman at this executive level – Kim McKinley found herself struggling with the challenges of her career. How she learned to use mindfulness and found the balance needed to rediscover her passion, makes her journey a great leadership coaching case study.
Kim is a true power woman. She works in a very fast-paced environment and has always been passionate about her work. However, after the aforementioned promotion to her current management position, she began to feel a loss of energy, overwhelm, and lack of direction.
On top of that, she began to experience anxiety and, the more anxious she felt, the more time she spent at work. That, in turn, led to more overwhelm. She was unsure how to turn this pattern around, which is when she began to search for an executive coach to help her transition to her new role.
Kim’s current job description is high stress, to say the least:
“My role today is I manage a power trading desk. So, what we do is we buy and sell energy, and we serve our loads the cheapest way possible, and create value for our utilities. We manage our company’s generating resources so we have many different types of fuel, coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear… So it’s a very dynamic environment.
“It’s just like playing on the stock market, watching prices all the time, buy, sell, buy, sell, and we just try to make as much money as we can [and] to save as much as we can.”
Why Making the Transition to Management is a Challenge
Despite spending 13 years in the same department, making the transition to a management role was a challenge for Kim. As well as experiencing the “empty nest syndrome” when her kids grew up and left home, her new role at work caused real distress.
“…the new management role, it was totally different. It was like, because I prided in the work I did in the past, I didn’t get to do that work anymore. So now I was leading it, but I really missed [my old job]. I guess I identified myself with the work I did… I didn’t feel like I was enough anymore.”
Also, “It’s a male dominated environment, which is great but, as a female, I never found that challenging until I became leader, a manager; and now I felt that I had to prove that I could be like the manager, the group senior.”
In my experience as an executive coach, this type of reaction is not unusual for a newly promoted leader. New managers often feel a sense of loss when they give up their old role and, to prove the promotion was justified, they will often work themselves into exhaustion. And, despite having the talent and experience to do the job, they begin to feel overwhelmed by their new role.
This is exactly the position Kim found herself in when she came to me for coaching.
Benefits of Leadership Coaching
During our work together, Kim rediscovered her passion for the job and got her confidence back. She started to truly shine, learned the magic of finding balance, and made mindfulness her superpower. Not only she, but her team, noticed these positive changes and no longer labelled her a “workaholic”.
As Kim stepped into her power, the others took notice. These days she does not need to reach out constantly for approval or assurance that she’s qualified for the executive position she holds. Things, people, results, and new opportunities flow her way – no chasing is needed.
Further, she re-created her social life and found a new passion outside of work. Kim is a woman who is shining bright!
Learn more about Kim’s journey, and how taking part in my Transformational Leadership Program made a huge difference in her life, here: https://youtu.be/QGs_N5y9cHw
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