What We’ve Been Noticing and What It Means for Two Piers
Over the past several months, I’ve been taking a dose of my own medicine.
In our Listening for the Signals series, I wrote about the value of pausing, observing, and staying curious. I also wrote about how critical it is to give our brains enough room to wander, make connections, and look up from the immediate task to see the horizon ahead.
And so, I’ve been doing just that as we clarify the direction of Two Piers.
Through conversations with trusted colleagues, advisors, and stakeholders, along with some much-needed time out on the river, I’ve been able to articulate more clearly where Two Piers has been headed over the past year or so. Experiencing the push and pull of the tides, often in the company of bald eagles and osprey, has given me some of the perspective and spaciousness needed to consider what this direction means for our continued trajectory.
The Path We Are On
Two Piers has always been an evolving entity.
It started by offering workshops and interactive experiences for individuals and teams navigating high-stakes environments and looking to develop skills for managing conflict and confrontation. It expanded to include consulting and individualized coaching. These days, it feels increasingly clear that the work we are doing is fundamentally in service of leadership development and organizational effectiveness.
That means supporting leaders, teams, and organizations through executive and leadership coaching, team coaching, coaching cohorts, workshops, and organizational consulting. Whether working at the individual, team, or organizational level, the common throughline is helping people navigate growth, change, complexity, and pressure with greater clarity, alignment, and impact.
What Hundreds of Coaching Conversations Are Showing Us
For the past six months, I have had a daily practice of closing out my workday by noting the broad, de-identified themes that arose in that day’s coaching work. I do not capture names, session notes, or identifying details, only high-level topics and broad context.
While this is not a representative workforce study, it has been a valuable exercise in more objectively assessing where clients are focusing their efforts and what challenges they are facing, especially when looking across hundreds of sessions.
The most consistent theme is stakeholder management: managing upward, building influence, navigating competing priorities, and helping the right people understand and support the work. It appears across industries, experience levels, and genders.
Effective communication also cuts across nearly every group. This includes giving and receiving feedback, managing conflict, navigating difficult conversations, and communicating effectively when the stakes are high. Among people leaders, topics such as developing others, delegating effectively, and using coaching skills are increasingly prominent.
Career planning is similarly common, although the questions shift by stage. Earlier-career clients are often establishing direction, confidence, and credibility. Mid-career clients are more likely to be considering their options, momentum, and broader influence, while senior individual contributors and later-career clients often explore purpose, identity, productivity, and what they want from the next phase of their working lives.
Confidence, both the internal experience of it and how it is perceived by others, is also a common theme, particularly among women at the director level. This work is rarely abstract. It is often connected to upward management, professional brand, visibility, promotion decisions, and navigating organizational change.
Despite the details and context varying widely, there is a consistent signal that leadership development does not happen in a vacuum.
When Individual Themes Point to Organizational Patterns
Each coaching topic ultimately belongs to the client, and I do not assign organizational meaning to any one conversation. At an aggregate level, however, recurring themes can raise useful questions about the systems surrounding those leaders.
Persistent stakeholder challenges may point toward unclear decision rights, competing priorities, limited sponsorship, or inconsistent expectations about influence. Repeated confidence and professional-brand work may prompt questions about how talent is recognized, developed, and positioned for advancement. The growing emphasis on delegation and developing others suggests a broader need for manager development and stronger coaching capabilities among leaders.
The answer is not always more coaching for the individual.
Sometimes individual coaching is exactly the right form of support. Sometimes a team needs to examine how it communicates, makes decisions, manages tension, or holds shared accountability. Sometimes an organization needs clearer operating norms, stronger leadership systems, or more intentional development pathways.
This is where Two Piers can be particularly useful: bridging the human experience of leadership with the structures, policies, procedures, and operating norms that shape how work actually gets done.
Building Capacity and Multiplying Impact
In alignment with these observations, we’re taking an intentional approach to the services and offerings we provide through Two Piers, with several developments underway.
We are currently designing group coaching cohorts for people with shared professional experiences or development needs. These cohorts will create another path to coaching and peer learning for those whose organizations do not currently offer individual coaching or for whom individual coaching may feel out of reach.
We are also continuing to broaden our bench of experienced coaches, allowing us to expand our capacity and better match clients with coaches whose backgrounds and expertise align with their needs. As we grow, the goal is not simply to add more coaches, but to build a trusted team that reflects the quality, rigor, and care we want clients to experience through Two Piers.
My pursuit of the ICF Advanced Certification in Team Coaching similarly aligns with this impact-driven direction. Teams have their own patterns, relationships, and ways of responding under pressure. Supporting them requires attention to the system they create together, rather than simply coaching several individuals who happen to work on the same team.
My continuing work as a mentor coach and coach educator has reinforced another part of the strategy: coaching becomes even more powerful when its impact multiplies. I increasingly coach the coaches while also helping organizational leaders develop coaching skills, whether or not they intend to pursue formal coach accreditation.
Leaders do not need to become professional coaches to listen more effectively, ask better questions, create space for reflection, and help their people think more clearly. Building those capabilities within organizations can extend the impact of coaching far beyond a single engagement.
Along with deepening and expanding our offerings, we are piloting a platform that will allow clients to manage onboarding, scheduling, billing cycles, packages, and session balances in one place. The goal is to reduce administrative friction and provide greater transparency around the practical aspects of the coaching engagement.
(Note: The platform will be used solely for administrative coordination, and not for storing any information about session content.)
Where Two Piers Is Going
All of these signals are helping us more clearly characterize the continued evolution of Two Piers: We are a leadership development firm supporting leaders, teams, and organizations through executive and leadership coaching, team coaching, coaching cohorts, workshops, and organizational consulting. Our work connects individual growth, team effectiveness, and organizational systems rather than treating them as separate problems.
This direction has been emerging through the work itself, through conversations with trusted colleagues, advisors, and stakeholders, and through creating enough spaciousness to step back from day-to-day delivery and consider where we can be most useful.
We are still listening for the signals, and we are getting even more deliberate about how we respond to what we hear.