How do you know when you are at your best as a leader? Most organizations have plenty of ways to measure performance. We track results, revenue, engagement, customer outcomes, goals, milestones, and countless other indicators. But those measures do not always tell us how a leader is actually doing.
Are you grounded? Do you know who you can trust? Do you understand how others perceive your leadership? Are you carrying something that is draining more energy than you realize? Can you still see why the work you are doing matters. Those questions were at the heart of my conversation with my dear friend and newest SVChange executive coach, Harry Hofer.
Harry spent 30 years inside a Fortune 30 organization, where his career included both senior leadership and internal executive coaching. He is also a fellow graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Applied Positive Psychology program. After recently transitioning out of his longtime organization, Harry is beginning what he calls his “Career 2.0,” which includes joining our coaching team at SVChange.
Harry and I have recorded a number of short What’s Possible: In the Moment conversations together around what he calls leadership “nudges”: questions, ideas, or practices that help someone look at a situation differently. For this longer conversation, he brought four questions that have surfaced repeatedly throughout his years coaching executives.
Who can I trust? Where do I stand? What’s keeping me from being okay? How does my work matter?
Harry’s premise is simple. When leaders have meaningful answers to these questions, they are more likely to have the energy, clarity, and confidence they need to be at their best.
Who Can I Trust?
Leadership can be surprisingly lonely. As people rise within an organization, the number of people affected by their decisions increases while the number of people they feel comfortable being completely candid with can shrink.
Harry has seen this repeatedly with leaders stepping into executive roles. A promotion can bring more authority and responsibility, but it can also make people more hesitant to reveal uncertainty. Leaders who have built their careers on expertise and strong performance may suddenly find themselves responsible for an area where they do not know every answer. They may begin wondering whether asking a question will expose something they “should” already know.
That can quickly feed imposter feelings and isolation. The irony is that the moments when leaders most need support may be the moments when they become least willing to ask for it.
Who can you call when you do not know what to do? Who can hear the unpolished version of what you are thinking? Who will give you honest feedback without using your uncertainty against you? Who can you ask for help?
That person could be a peer, mentor, sponsor, direct report, friend, or coach. Ideally, leaders have more than one trusted relationship and understand what kind of support different people can provide.
As Harry and I discussed, trust still requires judgment and boundaries. Not everyone at work needs access to every concern you have. But having no one you trust creates its own risk.
One of Harry’s suggestions for leaders who are not sure whom they can trust is to start by asking whether they themselves are showing up as trustworthy. Being consistent, honest, supportive, and discreet tends to create an environment where trusting relationships have a better chance to develop.
It also helps explain why executive coaching can become such an important resource. When I match leaders with SVChange coaches, I often tell them that the right coach should be someone whose name appears on the calendar and makes them think, “Thank goodness I get to talk to them this week.” Coaching provides a confidential place to exhale, sort through what is happening, and say the things that may not have another appropriate home.
Leaders need thought partners. They need people who allow them to be human while they carry the responsibilities of leadership.
Where Do I Stand?
I immediately translated this into two questions I hear often in coaching: What is my reputation? How am I perceived? These questions become particularly complicated at senior levels because feedback can get less clear as leaders rise.
Someone might tell you that you are “doing great,” but what does great actually mean? Are you meeting the expectations that matter most? Does your manager see your performance the same way you do? How are your peers experiencing you? Is the work your team is doing solving the problem it exists to solve?
High achievers often want more than reassurance. They want evidence that they are doing the job well. At SVChange, we see this frequently when coaching leaders through major transitions. One organization we work with has been preparing leaders to step into a very senior VP role. One of the things we wanted to understand clearly was what “great” looks like at that level within that specific organization.
We were able to turn the organization’s leadership competencies into a reflection tool that helps leaders and their coaches assess where they are now, where they are growing, and what expectations exist at the next level. Managers are also brought into the conversation so the leader is not trying to guess what everyone else thinks.
Of course, objective feedback does not automatically quiet the internal voice. A leader can receive glowing feedback and still feel like an imposter. That is often where coaching shifts from understanding the external data to working with the internal narrative.
For leaders who do not have formal competency models or robust feedback systems, Harry recommends bringing the question back to basics. Who is your primary customer? What problem does your role or team exist to solve? Are you getting useful feedback from the people most affected by your work?
The goal is not to spend your career constantly monitoring how everyone perceives you. It is to create enough clarity that you are not wasting energy trying to read minds.
What’s Keeping Me From Being Okay?
Sometimes the answer is straightforward. You are not sleeping enough. You are not taking care of your body. A relationship needs attention. Your workload has become unsustainable. Other times, what is draining us happened months or even years ago.
A decision felt unfair. A colleague disappointed us. The organization changed in a direction we did not want. Someone received an opportunity we believed should have been ours. A trusted leader left. A team was reorganized. A culture we loved became something different. We can spend an extraordinary amount of energy fighting realities that have already occurred.
Harry used language I immediately loved: How do you accept what was so you can focus on what is?
I am working with a leader right now who has spent decades inside the same organization. The organization has changed dramatically, and the culture they once knew no longer exists in the same form. There is very real grief involved in that. But at some point, we have to distinguish between what we can influence and what we cannot.
One of the simplest tools I use with clients is two circles. In one, write: I have control. In the other: I do not have control. Then start sorting.
You may not control the reorganization. You may control how you lead your team through it. You may not control a senior leader’s decision. You may control how you respond. You may not control what happened two years ago. You can decide how much attention you continue giving it today.
Acceptance does not mean approving of what happened. It means recognizing reality so you can stop spending precious energy trying to rewrite it.
The world of work is changing incredibly quickly. Many leaders are watching organizations, cultures, technologies, and expectations evolve around them. The ability to accept what was and engage thoughtfully with what is may be one of the most useful forms of resilience we can develop.
How Does My Work Matter?
I think this is the question leaders may be most likely to lose in the pace of everyday work. Executives can spend their entire day reacting. There is another meeting, another decision, another fire, another deadline, another change initiative. When work becomes an endless stream of problems to solve, it is easy to become disconnected from why you are doing it at all.
Meaning is energy. When we know that we are valued and that we are adding value, work feels different.
Harry has a deeply personal connection to this question. His late wife went through a 14-year cancer journey, and that experience helped him see the impact of the organization where he worked in an entirely different way. He could trace the work people did inside that organization to moments that changed the lives of real families.
That ability to connect daily work to human impact gave him a powerful answer to the question, “Why does this matter?” Not every connection is immediately obvious.
During our conversation, I remembered a video I saw years ago featuring a hospital custodian describing why his work mattered. It has stayed with me because his role could easily be overlooked when we think about who “saves lives” inside a hospital. Of course doctors and nurses save lives. So does the person keeping that hospital clean. Without that work, patients are at risk.
Meaning is not determined by title, hierarchy, or the number of people you lead. It comes from understanding how your effort contributes to something beyond yourself.
Senior leaders sometimes have an additional challenge: the farther they move from frontline work, the harder it can become to see their impact. But leadership itself has enormous ripple effects. Managers influence the well-being of employees. Those employees influence customers, colleagues, families, and communities.
If you lead the people who lead those people, your impact may be less visible, but it is not smaller.
Four Questions Worth Revisiting
Harry does not present these questions as a one-time assessment. Our answers can change as roles, organizations, relationships, and lives change. They are useful questions to revisit whenever you notice your energy shifting or leadership beginning to feel heavier than usual:
Who can I trust? Identify the people with whom you can be candid, ask for help, and think out loud without excessive fear of judgment. If that circle is empty, consider how you can intentionally begin building it.
Where do I stand? Seek clear feedback instead of relying on assumptions. Understand what great performance looks like in your role, whose perspective matters most, and what problem you are accountable for solving.
What’s keeping me from being okay? Notice where your mental and emotional energy is going. Separate what you can influence from what you cannot, and consider whether something from the past is limiting your ability to engage with the present.
How does my work matter? Trace your work beyond your immediate tasks. Who benefits from what you do? How does your leadership affect the people around you? Where are you contributing value that you may have stopped noticing?
You do not need perfect answers to all four questions. But uncertainty around one of them can tell you where attention may be needed.
Being at Your Best to Do Your Best
One of Harry’s underlying beliefs is something we have talked about in several of our In the Moment conversations: most people want to do their best. The question is whether we are in a state that allows us to do it.
A leader who does not trust anyone may hold back. A leader who has no idea where they stand may spend enormous energy second-guessing themselves. A leader who is still fighting something they cannot change may have less energy available for what they can influence. A leader who no longer sees meaning in the work may struggle to sustain motivation.
When I asked Harry what becomes possible when leaders can confidently answer these four questions, he talked about presence. When we feel grounded enough to be fully present, we have greater access to our intuition, our strengths, our judgment, and our energy.
Leadership is not about reaching some permanent state where you feel confident, clear, energized, and purposeful every day. Human beings do not work that way.
It is about noticing when something has shifted and knowing which questions might help you find your footing again. Your answers may tell you more about how you are leading than another dashboard ever could.
