Kelli Hendrickson

My coaching style is grounding, thoughtful, and will challenge you when you need it.

The experienced managers I am working with are feeling stuck or burned out and are unsure what their promotion prospects are or if they even want to continue in their current roles. The pandemic forced many changes and challenged the way they were used to leading and communicating with their team. The “return to normal” and balancing downward pressure of getting employees to return to in-person with the upward pressure of employees favoring remote work has added additional stress. My work with experienced managers in these situations focuses on the internal questions of “what experience do you want to have” and the external questions of “how can I best lead my team and serve my organization.”

My work with highly-trained individual contributors centers around finding career satisfaction, creating work-life balance, and generating career progression. I am particularly familiar with women and minorities in this role and understand the unique challenges that they face in meeting their standards and expectations.

The biggest challenge I notice with new managers and leaders promoted from high-performing technician roles (or individual contributors) is seeing themselves as leaders and understanding that leadership is not about the process but people. While deadlines and strategies still require process and precision to be completed, getting your people to accomplish this depends on how you see and present yourself as their leader. When I work with new managers, we focus on their vision for themselves in their new role and identify what skills they need to develop to enact that vision. Then through experimentation and reflection, they grow into their new role.