Am I bad at this, or is it just really hard right now?
Five patterns from 90+ coaching engagements. The last one surprised me most.
I’ve coached over 90 growth leaders. Directors, VPs, Heads of Growth, across a pretty wide range of companies and stages and go-to-market models.
And after doing this for a while, I’ve started to notice something…
Almost every person I work with is struggling with the same internal dialogue.
They won’t say it in a team meeting. They won’t post it on LinkedIn. And they definitely don’t want their boss to hear. But in a one-on-one coaching call, once the pleasantries are out of the way, it surfaces.
Am I actually any good at this? Or is it just really hard right now?
If you’ve felt that, you’re not alone. I’ve never coached a growth leader who didn’t ask some version of it. Not once. Not even the ones with incredible LinkedIn profiles and multiple promotions and teams that love them.
This week, I made a video about the five patterns I’ve seen separate good leaders, from great ones. I'll embed it below. But I wanted to give you more context here on the stuff that didn't fit on camera - the client stories behind the patterns, and what actually changed for them.
Here are the 5 patterns:
1. They translate their brilliance into a system (instead of being the system themselves)
Most growth leaders get promoted because they were incredible individual contributors. Fast, instinctive, able to figure anything out.
But when they step into a leadership role, those same instincts start working against them.
I’m working with someone right now, I’ll call him Marcus, who is genuinely excellent at product-led growth marketing. But he’s newer to leading/ managing a team of people who are also excellent at it.
He kept getting pulled into everything. His team couldn’t make decisions without him involved. He was course-correcting project work at 11pm. And most of his one-on-ones had turned into working sessions vs prioritization support and career coaching.
His performance review was the wake-up call.
His exec team told him he was still the star of his team, and that for him to scale, he needed to create stars around him.
Together we built him a growth operations manual.
A set of decision-making frameworks. Clear definitions of what “good” execution looks like. Standard operating processes. Communication structures. Everything that lived in Marcus’s head, translated into an artifact his team could actually use when he wasn’t in the room.
He told me afterward that it was the first time the game slowed down for him. Like suddenly he could see the whole board.
If you’re not sure where to start with this, pick one system that would give your team the most leverage right now. How they make decisions. How they run experiments. How they communicate cross-functionally. Write down why it matters, what good looks like, and the steps to get there. That’s the start.
2. They treat visibility as a core part of the job (not a distraction from it)
Regardless of how many times you think you've told everybody, nobody knows what you're working on and why.
I was working with a growth leader at a tech company in the nonprofit space. Sharp, experienced, doing objectively the right things. But their CEO pulled them aside and said the team looked like they were prioritizing activity over output. Lots of busyness, with no clear connection to outcomes.
They were blindsided. They felt like they were hitting their key results.
But when we dug in, it was clear the work wasn’t the problem. The work was actually really good. The problem was that nobody above them could see the logic behind it.
They hadn’t made the strategy visible.
It looked like a duck treading water - calm on the surface, chaotic underneath.
What changed wasn’t the work. It was 3 things they started doing consistently:
Marketing their strategy (here’s what we’re going after and why)
Marketing their progress (weekly updates on what’s shipping)
Marketing their results (a monthly recap that closes the loop).
They did the same work. But had a different perception.
The reframe that stuck: managing up is marketing.
3. They speak two languages (growth fluent and exec fluent)
There’s a whole vocabulary inside the growth world.
Growth loops, activation rates, retention cohorts, PQLs, experimentation frameworks. When you’re talking to your team, that language is fine.
But when you take it into a room full of executives who've never done your job, it lands like a foreign language.
I learned this the hard way in my first growth leadership role.
I put together a slide deck walking through all of our activation initiatives. And by slide 3, I was underwater in questions.
“What’s the ROI?”
”What resources do we need”
“How does this connect to revenue?”
“Why are we prioritizing this over X?”
I never made it to my summary slide, which was, of course, the slide that should have been first.
The best growth leaders treat executive communication like a marketer treats audience segmentation. You wouldn’t send the same message to every customer segment. Don’t communicate your strategy the same way to your team and your CEO.
And write the executive summary first. Always.
4. They do it scared (that’s what looking confident feels like)
“Work on your confidence” is the kind of advice that sounds right but isn’t helpful.
I’m working with someone right now who looks, from the outside, like they bat a thousand percent. They have an incredible track record. Both in companies they’ve worked at and individual performance at those companies.
But they’ve been working for a new founder who chips away at their ideas, micromanages their decisions, and disrupts projects at the 11th hour.
Over time, that environment did something to them.
When I first got on a call with this person, I thought: how could I possibly help them? I should be asking for their help.
But slowly, that low-level working scared had eroded something real.
Our goal wasn’t “stop being scared.” That’s not how it works. Our goal was: feel the scared, and do it anyway.
2 tools I’ve found that actually move the needle:
The first is what I call a trophy file:
Every day, write down 3 wins. A thank-you from a colleague. Something you shipped that you feel good about. A decision you made that was right. It sounds small because it is small.
But it interrupts the automatic pattern most of our brains default to (scanning for what’s wrong) and starts building the muscle for noticing what’s going well. Do it for 30 days. It won’t fix everything. It makes things 10-15% better, and that compounds.
The second is an alter ego:
Kobe had the Black Mamba. Beyoncé has Sasha Fierce. Your highest-performing self has a posture and a way of showing up that you can practice stepping into before high-stakes moments. Figure out what it looks like for you. Then use it.
The world’s best don’t wait for the confidence to arrive. They do it anyways.
5. They know when their moment has passed (and leave before it takes something from them)
This is the one I didn’t expect to keep seeing, but it shows up constantly.
The growth leaders who feel the best and perform the best aren’t always the ones who stayed the longest. They’re often the ones who left at the right time. And the leaders who struggle most, who come to me with the most battered sense of self-worth? A lot of them stayed in the wrong role for too long.
There’s a concept I’ve started calling moment fit.
It’s the alignment between your skill set, your passions, and the specific moment a company is in.
The best growth leaders know how to read that alignment, and they know when it’s shifted.
Once a year, ask yourself: what’s the environment where I do my best work? Be specific. Company size, stage, growth problems, decision-making culture. Am I in that environment right now? If the answer is no, that’s worth sitting with.
And one more thing on this: the leaders who navigate transitions best are usually the ones who’ve been building their personal brand the whole time. Not because they’re chasing followers or hedging.
They recognize that fit is for a small window of time. And when it shifts, they don’t want to be starting from zero.
So, are you bad at this, or is it just really hard right now?
Probably both, honestly.
But the leaders who outperform haven’t figured out how to make it easy. They’re prioritizing the hard work: building the systems, the visibility, the communication, the resilience, and the self-awareness to keep going anyway.
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ps - if you're a Director, VP, or Head of Growth and you want to work through these patterns with a small group of peers who are navigating the same stuff - I'm opening the Growth Council in Q2. Apply here.