A framework for navigating high-stakes, high-pressure moments without formal executive coaching.
Executive coaching is incredibly valuable to leaders, but it can be hard to access at the moment they need it the most. Take a client of mine, “Simon,” a capable and newly promoted executive in a consulting firm, who reached out to his leaders for support when a market downturn hit the firm.
He’d been promised coaching, but the company withdrew funding for it just as his challenges multiplied: He needed an updated sales strategy and had inherited a demotivated team who faced the risk of redundancy and was left to navigate the tumult all on his own—at precisely the moment the stakes became highest. This scenario isn’t unusual. Leaders today are facing more complexity, faster change, and higher expectations than ever. But support systems haven’t 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 low, coaching may not even be offered in the first place. Even those in better-resourced organizations often delay asking for help, worried it makes them look incapable. The speed and sensitivity of today’s problems, from team politics to strategic pivots, require something faster, more discreet, and more available than formal coaching can always provide. This is where self-coaching can come in. Not as a like-for-like replacement for executive coaching, but as a critical skillset that enables leaders to support themselves, especially in high-stakes, high-pressure moments. Yet while we talk about resilience and agility, we rarely teach leaders how to coach themselves. In this article, we’ll talk about how to close that gap. A Self-Coaching Framework for Real Leadership Problems The SOLVE framework is a practical, research-backed method I developed over two decades of working with and researching leaders. I’ve observed that leaders need a simple but effective way to move through complex problems—one that encourages them to take a step back, work out what’s going on, and then move forward confidently but cautiously in a way that fits their specific situation. Because it’s a model designed in the field for real leadership challenges, it works even on those that are messy, emotionally charged, or politically sensitive. Here’s how it works: S: State the Problem As a leader, you’ll often be carrying a tangled knot of multiple stakeholders’ concerns. When you state the problem for yourself, you’re looking to untangle that knot by articulating the core problem clearly in only one to two sentences. This helps you shift from overwhelmed to focused. Just like in coaching, naming the problem with precision sparks insights into what the solution might be. Keep these guidelines in mind as you put together your problem statement: Make sure your statement doesn’t exceed two sentences. If it’s too long and you can’t get it shorter, you’re dealing with more than one problem. Separate them out and solve one at a time. Incorporate the consequences of the problem. “The problem is X, and it’s having Y impact” is the rough formulation you need. Avoid solutions at this stage. It can be tempting to squeeze in “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 clear yet. Finally, make your statement specific and detailed enough to lay out the primary areas of the 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 whole team.” I recently coached the CEO of a sizeable 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 really hard, believing that there was too much going on and that I wasn’t sympathetic to the complexity of the situation. He got it down to a two-minute description. But when I pushed him for just one sentence , he was eventually able to say, “My senior leadership team are resisting the building redesign, and it’s 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 it dramatically more effective. O: Open the Box This is the diagnosis phase where you’ll undertake research to uncover the nature of the problem in more detail. Think about what data or information you need to make sense of what’s happening. Observe patterns of behavior, review recent performance data, gather informal feedback from peers, and reflect on your own reactions and assumptions. For example, one leader I worked with used this phase to uncover that her team’s underperformance wasn’t the result of laziness as she’d feared but stemmed from conflicting priorities from different senior stakeholders, which led to decision paralysis about whose orders to follow. You’ll know it’s time to move on when you feel that you can see what’s going on and that you’ve arrived at the underlying causes, as opposed to generating more questions. L: Lay Out the Solution At this stage, formulate your plan for how to solve the problem you’ve uncovered. It’s about designing a solution that fits the specific context. This may be a single action or a phased approach, but the goal is to match the intervention to the context of the organization, team, or individual in question, as well as the industry, company culture, relationships, and stakes involved. For instance, the HR leader in a healthcare membership organization was facing poor cross-team collaboration. She initially considered implementing a formal communication model with strict rules about how often people should be interacting. But after “opening the box,” she realized that this would not suit the culture at all, which was ad hoc and anti-bureaucracy, tending to react negatively to rigid systems. Instead of enforcing a strict framework, she co-designed simple principles for collaboration with representatives from each team. The result was increased buy-in, improved clarity, and far less resistance than a top-down approach would have triggered. To support this process, leaders can ask themselves: Does my proposed solution align with how things really get done around here? Is there anything 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” mindset from other organizations or roles. V: Venture Forth This is when implementation begins. At this stage, you’ll be taking action while monitoring the impacts your actions are having, as well as focusing on how you’ll handle any problems or obstacles that emerge, whether they’re political, emotional, resource-based, or something else. Here are a few key areas to watch out for: Biases that emerge during times of change, especially overconfidence bias: the belief that things will be more straightforward than they really are. Cultural resistance, because even a well-designed solution can fail if it clashes with “how we do things around here.” Unintended, undesirable consequences, such as improved performance in your team but conflict with another team who feel they’re being leaned on too heavily. I worked with a senior leadership team in a boutique consulting firm. Because they were using inconsistent processes, their clients 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 their initial plan significantly underestimated the amount of time it would take and how much resistance they’d 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 they could all get behind. When the firm was later acquired by a larger consulting firm for a significant amount of money, these better processes were part of what made them a valid target because they signaled that the little firm knew what it was doing. When venturing forth, you need to have a careful eye on what’s worth sticking with and what might need changing, and you can’t be afraid to change if things aren’t going according to plan. E: Elevate Your Learning After the action comes reflection. What worked? What didn’t? What patterns can you spot, and how can you take what you learned farther? This final stage is designed to transform your SOLVE experience into proper leadership growth, rather than a skillset that’s used once then forgotten about. You can elevate your learning by asking yourself: What worked well, and how can I share that with others? What did I enjoy or excel at, and how might I build deeper expertise in that area? Where else could I apply the same skill or approach for impact? What was harder than I expected, and what do I need to work on next? After having led a successful strategy reset, one functional leader I worked with reflected using these four lenses. She shared her new stakeholder engagement approach with her peers, helping them learn what would work for their specific organization. Realizing she enjoyed facilitating, she enrolled in a short facilitation course, then applied her improved skills to a stalled cross-functional process transformation project. She further developed her skills by seeking mentoring from a colleague with deep transformation experience. . . . The SOLVE framework was designed to balance structure and flexibility—and doesn’t rely on perfect conditions or external facilitation. It can be used both in the middle of a crisis and on an ongoing basis to build a foundation for stronger, more self-sufficient leadership over time.
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