I'm Muriel Wilkins and this is Coaching Real Leaders, part of the HBRR podcast network.

I'm a longtime executive coach who works with highly successful leaders who've hit a bump in the road.

My job is to help them get over that bump by clarifying their

goals and figuring out a way to reach them so that hopefully they can lead with a little more

ease. I typically work with clients over the course of several months, but on this show, we have

a one-time coaching meeting focusing on a specific leadership challenge they're facing.

Today's guest is someone will call Mo to protect his confidentiality.

He's based in the Middle East and manages a client-facing team dispersed across multiple locations.

His team has doubled in size in the last few years, and it hasn't always been easy. Before being promoted to director, when I was a project manager, I wasn't really having direct reports.

Maybe this was the main challenge when it came being a director, and something related to to the challenges maybe that when I got promoted,

it was during the COVID. The turnover was absolutely high. So while I was just getting

promoted and I'm starting to work, how I'm going to manage the team. I was just getting a lot of

people who are resigning and I need to maintain

them. So actually, I lost half of my team in actually a couple of months and it was a big

struggle for me at that time.

Moe advanced steadily at his company and has performed well.

He made the shift to his current director-level role during a tumultuous time,

but he's also running into other challenges that he didn't expect.

Usually if you're having a diversified team from junior to senior employees,

your expectation is always that you need to give a hand for the junior team

and you trust the senior ones that they know the job, they know how to do it, you trust

their decisions, but when it came to reality, it's totally the opposite. I've seen a lot of incidents happen, and unfortunately, I'm struggling with managing the senior employees in my team.

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