Case Studies
Problems I help leaders work through
Short composite case studies organized around the problems owners and leaders most often bring to me. Each one shows the problem, how we worked through it, and the representative results.
Owner Dependence
Reducing Owner Dependence and Building Leadership Capacity
Owners are often told to delegate more, but that advice is not especially useful when the business still depends on the owner's judgment, memory, relationships, or ability to resolve uncertainty.
Roles and Structure
Clarifying Roles and Building Organizational Structure
Growing businesses often need more than additional people. They need a better understanding of the work already being done, where responsibility belongs, and which roles the organization actually requires.
People Decisions
Making Difficult People Decisions and Protecting the Organization
People decisions become harder when an employee's contribution, history, relationships, and behavior point in different directions. Someone may produce valuable work while struggling with authority, or have contributed for years while no longer fitting the role the business needs.
Clients and Opportunities
Choosing Clients and Work That Make Business Sense
An attractive opportunity can still require more from a business than it gives back. A prestigious client, impressive finished project, or promise of future work can make it harder to count the money, staff time, and attention the engagement actually consumes.
Decisions Under Pressure
Making Sound Decisions Under Pressure
Pressure can change how a leader interprets a situation. An accusation can begin to feel like something that must be answered, a difficult project can look like a failure, or a major career change can become attractive because it offers immediate relief.
Why I Use Composite Case Studies
The confidentiality of my clients is very important to me. Much of my work involves sensitive decisions, internal problems, leadership challenges, financial concerns, personnel issues, and circumstances that clients have trusted me to keep private. I am not willing to compromise that trust in order to create a more compelling case study.
For that reason, I use composite case studies. Each one draws from recurring problems, situations, work, and results across multiple real engagements. Identifying, contextual, and operational details may be changed or combined so that the case is not presented as the story of any one client or engagement.
The purpose is to show the kinds of problems I regularly help owners and leaders work through, how I partner with them through those situations, and the kinds of changes and results that have occurred across my work. The cases are grounded in real engagements, but the individual examples are intentionally constructed to protect the people and organizations behind them.
Composite case studies are a documented approach for presenting material drawn from multiple real cases while protecting confidentiality and preserving meaningful context (Willis, 2019). The approach has also been used in published executive-coaching scholarship, where composite case studies were presented with all identifying details removed to protect the individuals involved (Tawadros et al., 2024). This literature emphasizes that composite cases should remain grounded in their source material, be transparent about how material has been combined, and avoid introducing details or interpretations that misrepresent the underlying cases (Arjomand, 2024; Willis, 2019). These principles guided the development of the composite case studies presented here.
For my purposes, they allow prospective clients to see meaningful examples of the problems I work on and how I approach them without requiring past clients to give up the confidentiality that made candid work possible in the first place.
References
- Arjomand, N. A. (2024). Empirical fiction: Composite character narratives in analytical sociology. The American Sociologist, 55(4), 436–472. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-022-09546-z
- Tawadros, T., de Haan, E., & Birch, D. (2024). Social difference and relational coaching: Finding new freedoms in working with identity. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1379659. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1379659
- Willis, R. (2019). The use of composite narratives to present interview findings. Qualitative Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794118787711
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