The potential baby

Kathryn Crawford Saxer Career Management

“Are you using birth control?” I asked a beloved coaching client, a junior executive on the East Coast. There was a shocked silence on the other end of the phone line. After a pause, she allowed that she is on the pill. She had two offers on the table: a VP role leading a large organization and a senior manager role without direct reports. She’s also thinking about having her first baby. “So you have a couple of months to …

Managing your manager

Kathryn Crawford Saxer Career Management

A beloved coaching client didn’t get promoted. He missed it by one vote. Unfortunately, it was his skip’s (his “skip level” — his boss’s boss) vote. “How do your other clients manage upwards?” he asked me, describing a pattern of cool and unhelpful relationships with his executive management over the course of his career. So I told him about a client, a senior technical director at a large health care organization, who had asked me a similar question. Her direct …

Pebbles

Kathryn Crawford Saxer Career Transition

I had a new coaching client in my office the other day. “I hate my job,” she told me as she sat down, barely holding back tears. “I fell into it 10 years ago. I’ve been promoted and I’ve moved around to different companies,” she said, naming a couple of premier Seattle employers. “But I just hate the work and I feel stuck in it.” We talked in detail about what she’s interested in: product management, teaching middle school, UX …

Dreadful questions

Kathryn Crawford Saxer Career Transition

The room was full of software engineers and technologists. I was on stage to talk about confidence and impostor syndrome (both very coachable, by the way). Those engineers were looking at me skeptically. They were ready to eat me alive. “Bring it on,” I thought to myself. I flipped to the first slide of my presentation, projected in large, bold font on the screen behind me: Who am I and how do I have credibility to coach executives in industries …