No Time to Think Strategically? For VPs, That's a Leadership Identity Problem

When a VP in professional services says she has no time to think strategically, she is usually right about the symptom and wrong about the cause. Laurie Fenske, Executive Leadership Coach and MCC-credentialed practitioner with 25 years of professional services leadership, hears this complaint in nearly every new client conversation. Her consistent finding: the time problem is real, but solving it requires an identity shift, not a calendar audit.

The Complaint Is Common. The Diagnosis Is Wrong.

A Harvard Business Review analysis found that senior executives in a typical company spend only about three hours per month discussing strategy. Mankins, M. C. (2004). Stop Wasting Valuable Time. Harvard Business Review, 82(9), 58–65, 136.

The finding surprises people, and it shouldn't. Operational demands fill the space that strategy requires. Decisions that could be made by the team land on the VP's desk instead. The inbox never empties. The calendar fills before the week begins.

The standard prescription is time management: block your calendar, delegate more, protect thinking time. VPs try this. Many try it repeatedly. The calendar blocks get overridden. The delegation conversations feel harder in practice than in theory. Six months later, the problem looks identical.

Laurie's observation, shaped across hundreds of coaching conversations with VPs in financial services, consulting, and professional services more broadly, is that the time management prescription misidentifies the problem. The calendar is a symptom. The identity is the cause.

What the Identity Problem Actually Looks Like

The VPs Laurie Fenske works with did not arrive at the leadership transition gap through carelessness or laziness. They arrived there through excellence. They built careers on being the most capable person in the room: the expert, the reliable finisher, the one who never let things slip. That reputation was rewarded, consistently, for years. Promotion followed performance. It always did.

What no one explained is that the VP role requires a different definition of value entirely. The skills that produced early success, namely being the best individual contributor, the one who could always step in and handle it, are precisely the skills that become a liability at scale. When a high performer leads from that identity, she unconsciously signals to her team that stepping in is acceptable, that waiting for her to catch things is safe, and that the team's own judgment is secondary to hers.

The result is a team that has learned to wait. Not because they are incapable, but because the leader has trained them to.

A VP Laurie worked with at a mid-size consulting firm named this pattern more precisely than any framework could. After working through the identity shift, he reflected: "As leaders, we know the party starts when we leave the room." He meant it literally. When he stepped back, his team became more collaborative, more decisive, and more independent than they had ever been while he was in the middle of everything. His presence, as helpful as it felt from the inside, had been the constraint.

Why "Be More Strategic" Lands Flat

VPs in professional services hear the feedback to "be more strategic" with some regularity, particularly in performance reviews and 360 assessments. The feedback is accurate. It is also, almost universally, unhelpful.

Being more strategic is not a behavior that can be added to an existing identity. It requires a different operating premise: that the VP's value lies not in what she personally executes, but in the quality of the environment and the people she develops. That shift cannot be achieved through a time management system, because time management assumes the existing identity stays intact and simply needs better scheduling.

The identity question underneath the feedback is this: who are you as a leader if your value is no longer in what you personally deliver?

That question is uncomfortable. It is supposed to be. Laurie Fenske's work with VPs in the Leadership Focus Blueprint sprint typically surfaces this discomfort in the first two sessions. The discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It is the first accurate read of what the transition actually requires.

The Mechanics of the Identity Gap

The identity gap between high performer and strategic leader tends to manifest through a recognizable set of behaviors. Understanding the pattern is the first step toward addressing it deliberately rather than reactively.

The shift from left column to right is not primarily a behavioral change. Behaviors follow identity. When a VP begins to see herself as someone whose value is in what her team can do, the behaviors realign accordingly. The delegation conversations become easier not because the VP learned a new technique, but because she is no longer delegating from a sense of giving something away. She is delegating from an understanding that keeping it is the more costly choice.

What the Shift Requires in Practice

Laurie's approach, grounded in behavioral assessments including McQuaig and EQ-i and anchored in the Leadership Alignment Blueprint, does not start with tactics. It starts with the identity question.

The practical work follows three movements.

The first is naming the current identity honestly. Not the identity the VP aspires to, but the one she is actually operating from. This requires looking at what the VP does under pressure, when the team brings a problem, when a deadline is at risk. The instincts that activate under pressure are the clearest signal of which identity is actually in the driver's seat.

The second is building the first piece of evidence that a different identity is possible. This is not theoretical. Laurie Fenske typically works with VPs to identify one specific situation in which they will step back, let the team carry it, and observe what happens. The team handles it. The result holds. The VP collects something that no framework can manufacture: direct, personal evidence that their value is not contingent on stepping in.

The third is making the shift deliberate rather than accidental. Without intentional reinforcement, the high-performer identity reasserts. The VP who has just stepped back effectively will face another high-stakes situation the following week and may step back in. The coaching relationship exists precisely to hold the new identity in place long enough for it to become the default.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this actually a leadership problem, or do some VPs simply have roles that require them to be in the operational detail?

Some roles genuinely require a VP to hold more operational involvement than others, particularly in smaller firms or in transition periods when the team is new or under-resourced. The identity problem is distinguishable from a role-design problem by asking one question: would the VP step back if the team were capable? When the honest answer is no, or not fully, the identity is the variable, not the role.

How long does the identity shift take?

The shift does not happen on a fixed timeline. What Laurie observes consistently is that VPs who complete the initial sprint work, typically five focused sessions, leave with two concrete behavioral changes implemented and enough evidence to know the shift is real. The deeper consolidation, where the new identity becomes the default under pressure, develops through the ongoing coaching engagement over the following months.

What if the team genuinely is not capable of taking on more?

In Laurie Fenske's experience, this is rarely the full picture. What looks like team incapability is frequently a combination of unclear authority, insufficient trust from the VP, and a team that has been trained over time to wait for direction. Behavioral assessments, including team-level McQuaig profiles, consistently surface latent capability that the current dynamic is suppressing.

Can a VP make this shift without coaching?

Some do. Reading, peer conversations, and strong internal mentorship all contribute. The challenge is that the identity the VP is trying to shift is the same identity doing the shifting, which creates a well-documented blind spot. An external coaching relationship provides the objectivity that makes the blind spot visible and the accountability that makes the shift sustainable.

How does this connect to work/life harmony?

Directly. When a VP is operating from the high-performer identity at the leadership level, the role is all-consuming by design: she absorbs what the team doesn't carry, she catches what slips, she is available because the system has been built around her availability. The identity shift does not just change how she leads at work. It changes what she takes home.

The Clearest Sign the Shift Is Working

The VP from the consulting firm put it plainly after five sessions: the party starts when he leaves the room. His team had not changed. His identity had. The people around him could finally show what they were capable of, because he had stopped being the reason they didn't have to.

For VPs in professional services who are ready to make that shift, the Leadership Focus Blueprint is a five-session sprint designed to surface the specific identity gap and produce the first two concrete moves. To explore whether it's the right starting point, visit Laurie Fenske's profile on Dream Coach Match.