Leadership Coaching in Sarasota for VPs, Directors, and Rising Leaders
You already know what you need to work on. Somebody told you. It's in a document.
I'm Christina Carey, and I do leadership coaching in Sarasota, Florida for the layer of the org chart where the job quietly changes underneath you: VPs, directors, and the high-potential people being groomed for the seat above them.
Most leaders at this level don't arrive confused about their development areas. They arrive with a 360 report, or a performance review, or a boss's offhand comment from eight months ago that they've replayed a hundred times since. They can recite the feedback verbatim. What they can't tell you is what's different because of it.
That's not a self-awareness problem. That's what happens when insight arrives without a structure attached to it.
Three patterns I see constantly at this level
You got promoted for being excellent at the job you no longer have. You were the best individual contributor on the team, so they gave you the team. Now the thing you're best at is the thing you're supposed to stop doing.
So you don't. You take the hard project back, you rewrite the deck yourself at 11pm, you tell yourself it's faster this way. It is faster this way. It's also the reason your people aren't developing and you're working weekends.
You're a good leader on good weeks. When the quarter is calm, you're the manager people describe as the best they've had. When it isn't, you go quiet, get short, cancel one-on-ones, and start solving instead of leading.
Your team has learned to read which version showed up today. Nothing about that is a character flaw, but consistency, not peak performance, is what people actually experience as leadership.
The 360 said the same thing twice. Two review cycles, same theme. You didn't ignore it. You read it carefully, you felt terrible about it for a week, you resolved to change, and then a Tuesday happened and then another one. The gap between agreeing with feedback and being changed by it is enormous, and almost nobody crosses it alone.
How leadership coaching works with me
The mechanics are the same across everyone I coach: mindset work to find what's actually driving the behavior, and an accountability structure so the change survives contact with a normal week. What's different at your level is that the commitments involve other people, which makes them both harder and easier to verify.
We start with what's already known. You likely arrive holding more information about yourself than you've used: 360 results, review language, a pattern your last boss named. We don't re-diagnose. We pick the one or two things that would matter most if they actually changed, and we get specific about what “changed” would look like on a Thursday afternoon.
Then we find what's underneath. Delegation problems are rarely about delegation. Usually it's the belief that your value is your output. Reasonable, since that's precisely what got you promoted, and it stops being true the moment you have a team.
The leader who goes quiet under pressure is often protecting people from uncertainty they'd rather have. Naming the real driver is what makes the behavior change stick instead of requiring willpower forever.
Then we make it checkable, and I check. Commitments get defined tightly enough to evaluate. Not “delegate more” but “Priya runs the Q3 review, you don't touch the deck, and we talk about what that was like for you.” Sessions run every other week over six months, with a short check-in by text or email in between. When something slips, we have a direct conversation about it. Not punitive. Precise.
And your team notices before you do. That's the part that surprises people. The leader is usually the last to feel the change, because they're still fighting the internal version. Meanwhile the one-on-ones got better six weeks ago.
If you're the one at the top of the org chart with nobody above you, CEO coaching is the closer fit. If the issue is purely follow-through, look at accountability coaching.
Common questions about leadership coaching
- What's the difference between leadership coaching and executive coaching?
- Mostly the seat, not the method. Executive coaching usually describes work with C-suite and owners; leadership coaching typically means VPs, directors, and emerging leaders who have a boss and a team. The work I do is the same in both cases (find the belief driving the behavior, then hold you to the change) but the specifics differ. A director's hardest problem is usually influence without authority. A CEO's is usually that nobody tells them the truth.
- Who sees what we talk about?
- Nobody. My clients pay for their own coaching, which keeps this simple: there's no sponsor, no progress report, no summary to anyone's HR department, no file with your name on it. What you say in a session stays in the session, permanently. If your employer wants to fund the engagement, that can work, and I'd put the terms in writing before we start. They'd see whether you attended and whether we're on track, never content. But I'll say plainly that I think self-funded coaching works better, and not only for confidentiality reasons. People show up differently to something they chose and paid for themselves.
- Do you use 360 assessments?
- I'll use one if it's genuinely useful, and often it isn't necessary. Most leaders who come to me already have recent 360 or review data sitting unused, and my instinct is to work that material rather than generate more of it. Collecting new feedback can become a very sophisticated way of delaying the part where something changes.
- I'm doing well. Is coaching still worth it?
- That's most of my clients, and it's the better time to do this. Coaching arranged after things go badly is remediation, and everyone involved knows it. Coaching at the point where you're performing and want the next seat is developmental, and it moves faster because you're not spending the first two months on defensiveness.
- How long is an engagement, and how often do we meet?
- Six months, sessions every other week, in person in Sarasota or over Zoom, with check-ins by text or email between sessions. I don't do single sessions or month-to-month, because a new leadership habit needs to survive a bad quarter before you can call it yours, and that takes about six months to see.
- What does it cost?
- Engagements are billed monthly, $2,000–$3,000 per month depending on scope. My clients fund their own coaching and generally treat it the way they'd treat any other investment in their career: deliberately, and expecting a return. Details on the coaching fees page.
- Do you only work with leaders in Sarasota?
- I'm based in Sarasota and meet leaders in person here and in Bradenton, Lakewood Ranch, and Venice. Everyone else works with me over Zoom, which means location has never determined who I can work with. Plenty of my clients are elsewhere entirely.
Start with the feedback you already have
Bring me the thing you've been told more than once and haven't changed. Thirty minutes, no cost, and you'll leave with a clear read on why it hasn't moved, which is usually not the reason you think.