The Art of Making Great Leaders Even Better

Terry Patterson wanted the senior manager to stay.

The manager was one of Deloitte’s high performers, someone the firm saw a strong future for, and Patterson, then a Managing Director, was his coach. “I wanted him very badly to stay with Deloitte,” he says, “because he helped the firm, he helped our clients.” But the manager was becoming overwhelmed, and the conversations kept circling questions that surface for talented people in demanding firms: do I really fit in this space? Can I really keep up?

Patterson’s first answer was a fact: “you wouldn’t be there in the first place if you couldn’t.” His second was harder to give. After a series of direct, honest conversations, he told the manager that if this wasn’t the right fit, “then you should look elsewhere and I’ll support you in doing that.”

“I just felt that he deserved that kind of honesty,” he says.

The manager did leave, for another consulting firm. Three or four years later, he came back to Deloitte. Patterson takes no credit for the return. “I give him credit for realizing that he had his own agency.”

It is a short story about a rare quality in a coach: the judgment to put a person’s long-term interests ahead of the outcome you would prefer, and the confidence to say so out loud.

Ambition, not repair

Patterson built his career around talent: years as an HR executive at Ford, time inside IBM, and roughly fifteen years as a Managing Director in Human Capital Consulting at Deloitte, advising organizations at Fortune 50 scale. Today he coaches executives directly, many of them leading small and mid-sized businesses, and finds that the fundamentals hold at every size.

His starting point is ambition rather than repair.

If you’re a great performer already, let’s try and make you an even better performer.

Terry Patterson

For leaders who have already reached senior roles, the aim is to keep the pathway going and “find ways to even extend that career growth.” No title puts anyone beyond that work: “I don’t care who you are, you can always get better.”

The assignment is the method

What distinguishes his coaching is how closely it is tied to the client’s actual week. He works from familiar leadership capabilities, such as resilience, communication and business acumen, together with the client’s personal and professional values, then narrows the focus to a very small number. Every conversation ends with an assignment tied to something real: a major meeting, an important presentation, a difficult situation with a spouse, a child or a friend.

“The growth that people realize in their leadership skills becomes not an academic exercise, but something that is real world focused,” he says. He calls that real-world connection “a differentiator.” It also makes progress visible. The marker he looks for is a client able to say, “18 months ago, I wouldn’t have approached this situation in this particular way.”

A practiced listener

Beneath the method is a discipline Patterson has cultivated deliberately. Partners at a firm like Deloitte spend their days in rooms full of very smart people. Mid-career, a coach of his own challenged him to listen more closely in those rooms rather than wait for his turn to speak, and he made it a practice he still works on.

He now considers it the foundation of good coaching. “You can’t get to those kinds of questions, nor to the insights that they produce for the client, unless you really are adept at listening.” In practice that means “not making judgments, not even necessarily providing advice.” The same restraint shaped the Deloitte conversation, where the easier move was to argue for the outcome he wanted.

What clients find

Patterson is also exploring how AI can supplement traditional coaching, and says plainly that no one has all the answers yet. What he brings clients does not depend on them: a career spent watching leaders grow inside demanding organizations, a method anchored in their real work, and the honesty to say what they need to hear.

The manager who left Deloitte came back. The more telling detail is that Patterson was ready to help him go.