Mindset Powers Behavior

He’s come to that view over a career that passed through nearly ten industries before arriving at coaching. After starting out in financial services, Adegbiji spent more than six years in pharmaceuticals, joining Glaxo and staying through two mergers until it became GSK. He later became a commercial manager at Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company. At Accenture, he led capability development across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and a global client base of 5,000 until his role was eliminated in 2009 in cuts that followed the financial crisis. If all that moving around taught him how change works, it was also a lesson in turning adversity into advantage.

“After Accenture, I had time to explore my options, and that’s when I became intentional,” he says. He wanted to do work rooted in what gave him energy, which turned out to be optimizing human potential and personality. He started with employability and career coaching before moving into leadership development. Today, the two disciplines form the cornerstones of his practice. He is Senior Associate Director for Global Career and Leadership Development on the Chicago Booth Executive MBA program, working with leaders across campuses in Chicago, London, and Hong Kong, and he holds a professional accreditation with the European Mentoring and Coaching Council. The leaders he coaches often find themselves where he once stood, in transit from an identity built on one kind of expertise to a role calling for another.

“Some people are promoted to the level of their incompetence because they have been seen as excellent executors,” Adegbiji says, echoing the Peter Principle. A common example comes when strong technical performers move into senior leadership. Up through middle management, people get rewarded for execution and operational excellence, but priorities change as they rise. Senior leaders are charged with making decisions rather than executing them. They have to think across the enterprise and scan the horizon while forgoing the firefighting they cut their teeth on.

Adegbiji describes a PhD-trained scientist recruited into a venture capital firm. She had been hired for what she knew but now she found herself in a new world built on a different set of rules. She sat on the board without speaking and came to feel like a figurehead. Impostor syndrome coupled with self-sabotaging behaviors buried her ability to contribute with authority.

The coaching work started with how she was showing up. It uncovered tendencies that were undermining her and habits she’d never thought to question. After nearly ten months working on establishing credibility and presence, she was promoted from scientific director to partner in the firm. Her opinion also started carrying weight outside the organization.

“Coaching does bring results,” Adegbiji says. “But coachees have to be ready to put in the work.”

The case shows how far Adegbiji’s coaching can reach after starting on the behavioral or situational level. “It can go even to the identity level,” Adegbiji says, “where core issues are addressed to help people form new identities and make the necessary transition.” For the scientist, that meant moving from seeing herself predominantly as an expert scientific observer to more of a strategic leader and valuable board member who could contribute to corporate-level decisions.

Adegbiji helped develop the curriculum for the Executive Coaching for Leaders program and teaches its coaching practice module. “Coaching is a practical discipline,” he says. “The more you coach, the better you get at coaching. That’s why the program’s focus is on translating theoretical foundations into skills leaders can actually use.”

The practice sessions are built around a problem surfaced in recent management training research. It shows that people revert to their old approaches once a program ends unless they’re deliberate about continuing their improvement. In the program, participants bring live issues into the sessions rather than hypothetical scenarios. Current problems involving workload, resilience, delegation, decision-making, or performance management are then worked through in real time in a setting where confidentiality and psychological safety have already been established.

They practice listening beyond the words being spoken and asking questions that can shift another person’s perspective. “The idea is to allow people to bring their authentic self and unique personality and flavor to how they coach,” Adegbiji says.

For Adegbiji, a key aspect to effective coaching is that it makes itself progressively less necessary. “The purpose is to build ownership in the coachee, so the coach is essentially walking themselves out of the job,” he says. Frameworks such as the GROW model help leaders clarify a goal, examine current reality, identify options, and commit to a way forward. But the framework only becomes useful if it can also become action. That takes a willingness to try something without feeling expert in it.

“The first steps take courage,” he says. “But the value comes after that, from the feedback and iteration. And the higher you go, the less feedback comes to you unasked, so you need to make the most of it at the level you are right now.”

The same logic applies to decisions for Adegbiji. “Indecision is never neutral,” he says. “Waiting for complete information rather than moving ahead with a decision can be worse than making the wrong decision. Leaders either decide, or they drift.”

Development, as Adegbiji describes it, requires two things in the end. The first is awareness of what is happening within. The second is the willingness to act before certainty arrives. “You do not need to wait to be an expert,” Adegbiji says. “Whatever knowledge, experience, frameworks, ideas you have, test it out, try it out, and iterate. That is how we learn, after all.”