Transitions in the Workplace: Why Leadership Coaching and Executive Coaching Focus on What Happens In Between

🛞 Transition.

My Big Ones. 📌 Countries – 5 moves (6 different countries lived in overall) 📌 Houses I lived in – 16 (not including other short stays) 📌 Jobs – 13 (not including jobs before the age of 25, such as summer camp guide, babysitting, pizza place, 4–5 restaurants, 2 catering jobs, movie theatre, newspaper, and others) 📌 Education programs/institutions – 6 (I think, maybe more) 📌 Personal life changes – one marriage, two kids

And then, the daily ones. 📆 From one meeting to another. 📆 Commuting: to work, to the supermarket, to drop off the kids, pick them up, and drive them to hockey, volleyball, math, and friends. 📆 From sleep to waking. 📆 From work mode to home mode. 📆 From week to weekend. 📆 From routines to vacations. And the list goes on.

We (try to) plan the big changes. We rarely notice the small ones. What if transitions deserve more attention than destinations? Why transitions matter more than we think?

In the workplace, we often talk about change: new roles, new strategies, promotions, reorganizations. But research shows that it’s not change itself that drains people. It’s transition.

William Bridges, a well-known researcher in organizational change, made a clear distinction: Change is situational. Transition is psychological.

A new role is a change. Learning how to let go of the old role, redefining identity, adjusting expectations, these are all transitions.

Most leaders are not struggling because they can’t handle change. They’re struggling because they are moving through constant, unacknowledged transitions, often without pause or support. Why leadership coaching focuses on transitions?

Leadership coaching and executive coaching often begin where people least expect: not with goals, but with where attention is being lost.

In coaching conversations, leaders start to notice:

• How many roles they shift between in a single day

• How rarely they complete one transition before entering the next

• How little space exists between “modes” (leader, parent, partner, individual)

Coaching creates intentional pauses. Not to slow everything down, but to make transitions visible.

Once transitions are named, leaders can:

• Decide which ones require more presence

• Build small rituals to close one chapter before opening the next

• Reduce the mental load that comes from constant switching