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Technology Leader Coach · The Seat
Six months alongside a leader whose board had stopped listening
An established Technology Director in a regulated professional services firm, good at the job, and increasingly certain it was not enough.
The situation
A Technology Director at a professional services firm, several years in post, with a team that respected them and a board that had stopped hearing them. The function was seen as a cost centre. The roadmap never reached the money. Board papers were technically right and went unread, and the director had started to wonder whether the problem was them.
The firm sat under professional regulation and handled client data at scale, so the technology agenda was never only about efficiency. Cyber Essentials Plus, client due-diligence questionnaires, data protection obligations and a looming migration of a core system all needed board decisions, and the board kept deferring them.
What was in the way
The coaching areas that mattered here were influence and translation, judgement and, more than the director expected, career and resilience. Influence, because the papers were written for a technical reader and the board was not one. Judgement, because the director had started agreeing to every request rather than choosing, and the roadmap had become a list. Resilience, because years of not being heard had become a story the director told themselves, and the story was starting to shape the behaviour.
The regulatory pressure cut both ways. It was the reason the board could not keep deferring, and it was the lever the director had never pulled, because framing risk to the board felt like threatening it.
What we did
Monthly sessions for six months, with a line open in between. The first session named the reality without flinching: the board was not listening, and some of that was the board, and some of it was the papers.
The next inch was one board paper, rewritten. The technology came out of the first paragraph. In went the client due-diligence questionnaires the firm had lost points on, the regulatory consequence of the core system falling out of support, and a number. The paper asked for one decision, not four. It was approved.
Then the behaviour: every paper in the board's language, every ask singular, every risk stated as what it means for clients and the firm's licence rather than as a technical fact. We rehearsed the conversations that mattered before they happened, including the one where a partner pushed back in the meeting, which went better for having been practised.
The judgement work was a roadmap with things removed from it. Twelve initiatives became five, and the director learned to say no to a partner's pet project with a reason the partner could repeat. The resilience work was quieter: the story of not being heard was retired once there was evidence against it, and the director started to protect their own time with the same seriousness they protected the team's.
What changed
Three board decisions won in six months, including the first multi-year technology investment the firm had ever approved and the core system migration the board had deferred twice. Cyber Essentials Plus renewed on time with board sponsorship rather than in spite of it. One restructure of the team completed without losing anyone the director wanted to keep.
What they kept
A board that now asks the director for a view rather than a report. A roadmap with five things on it. And a leader who stopped asking whether the problem was them, because they had found out what the problem actually was and fixed it.
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