New role, new title, new doubt. Leadership transitions feel lonely precisely because they're the part of the job most people dismiss as a first-world problem. Research by Nicky Terblanche in Human Resource Development Quarterly identifies the five coaching techniques executives credit most during transitions: active experimentation, Socratic questioning, critical reflection, direct challenging of views, and (surprisingly) coaches sharing research-based frameworks outright.

Every decision is different. A supply chain problem, a staffing call, and a crisis response each require different thinking, different tools, and different tolerances for speed versus deliberation. The Cynefin framework, developed by David Snowden and Mary Boone in Harvard Business Review, gives leaders a way to sort any decision into one of five categories (simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, or disordered) and match the response to the reality. In a pandemic, that match

When the ground shifts under a business leader's feet, the temptation is to look for new tactics. The best leaders look for something else first: their values. Carl Anderson's 1997 values-based leadership framework gives executives a disciplined way to identify their non-negotiable principles, translate them into values, and examine the leadership philosophy they are actually operating from, before the next hard decision lands.