By Pieto Pazzi
My depth coaching is grounded in the 5DL (Five Dimensions of Leadership, Roger Evans) and 5C (Five Capability clusters).
The 5DL works from the inside out — it describes the human developmental capacities that characterise outstanding leadership, revealed through ten years of corporate research. The 5C framework serves as the coaching architecture — five clusters of competencies that give coaches and leaders a shared language for what needs to be developed and how.
Together they form a complete system: 5DL identifies where the leader is in their inner development; 5C maps what capacities to cultivate to move forward. In-depth coaching — which goes beyond performance and behaviour into identity, meaning, and being —is unusually powerful precisely because both frameworks take the full human being seriously.
The transition challenges we identified (identity incongruence, authenticity gaps, burnout, AI-driven obsolescence anxiety, isolation, and the demand to move from expert to facilitator) are not skills problems. They are developmental problems — and these frameworks are built for in-depth development.
How Each 5DL Dimension Maps to the Coaching Work
1DL — Self-Reflection and Self-Awareness
The inner leadership dimension
What it addresses in transition: The leader who has built their identity on expertise, execution, and being the one with answers is suddenly in unfamiliar territory. Their old operating system — shaped by decades of being right, being decisive, being the expert — is both their greatest asset and their biggest obstacle. The work of 1DL is foundational: without honest self-observation, nothing else can shift. The leader cannot change what they cannot see, and they cannot see clearly what their ego is invested in protecting.
What depth coaching does here: The coach works at the level of the leader’s inner narrative — the story they tell themselves about who they are and what leadership means. This is slow, patient work. It requires creating the conditions in which a senior leader, often accustomed to performing confidence, can step out of performance altogether. The coach uses the 5C Grounding cluster as the primary coaching domain here.
5C Grounding capacities in practice:
- Inner Compass — the coach helps the leader get beneath role-identity to values. “Who are you when the title is removed?” is not a rhetorical question; it’s the generative coaching question that unlocks the transition.
- Reflective Awareness — developing the ability to notice patterns while they are happening: “When you felt defensive in that meeting — what was actually being threatened?”
- Congruence — surfacing the gap between stated values and actual behaviour. For a leader who preaches psychological safety but closes down when challenged, this gap is not hypocrisy — it is usually fear, and naming it without judgment is transformative.
- Curiosity — replacing defensiveness with genuine inquiry. The symptom of dismissing AI, micromanaging, or avoiding feedback is often a collapse of curiosity. Coaching at 1DL restores it.
- Presence — learning to slow down internally even when everything external demands speed. Many senior leaders have never been taught to simply be still with uncertainty.
The transition moment this enables: The leader stops identifying as their past role and begins to notice they are something larger — a person who has played that role. This is the essential pivot. Identity becomes more fluid; the grip of the expert-self loosens.
2DL — Awareness of Impact on Others
The relational leadership dimension
What it addresses in transition: As leaders move into more senior roles, or as their organisations change around them, they often lose accurate feedback. The gap between how they see themselves and how others experience them widens — sometimes dramatically. A leader experiencing burnout or identity threat becomes more contracted, less attuned, and more likely to project their inner state onto others. They may become more controlling, more dismissive, or more distant — while genuinely believing they are holding things together.
What depth coaching does here: The coach introduces the principle of relational reality — that a leader’s impact is not what they intend but what others receive. This is humbling and difficult for high-achievers who have been rewarded for their individual capability. The coaching work involves building genuine empathy — not as a technique but as a faculty — and supporting the leader to repair where trust has been strained.
5C Human Connection capacities in practice:
- Acknowledgement — learning to truly see people, not just manage them. Leaders in burnout often stop recognising their teams, focused entirely on output. Coaching at 2DL rebuilds this.
- Humility — this is the 5C capacity that most directly unlocks 2DL. The leader who cannot be wrong cannot receive feedback. The coach works here carefully, exploring what vulnerability costs the leader and what it actually buys them.
- Empathy & Compassion — not softness, but attuned understanding. As the workforce becomes more multigenerational and as Gen Z redefines expectations around purpose and psychological safety, a leader’s ability to genuinely empathise is a strategic asset, not a soft one.
- Connectedness — the antidote to leadership isolation. The coach helps the leader identify where they have allowed relationships to grow thin and supports them in rebuilding authentic connection — not networking, but genuine human contact.
- Forgiveness — one of the most underestimated coaching competencies. Leaders carrying unresolved grievances — toward the organisation, a board, a predecessor — carry a weight that distorts their perception and their decisions. Coaching at 2DL creates space to put down that weight.
5C Sense-Making is also active here:
- Perspective Skills — the coach works with the leader to take genuine second and third positions: “What is your team actually experiencing right now? What do you imagine your board sees when you walk into the room?” This is not role-play; it is perspective development, and it is irreplaceable.
The transition moment this enables: The leader discovers that their effectiveness now comes through others, not despite them. The shift from “I deliver” to “I enable” becomes emotionally real, not just intellectually understood.
3DL — Seeing the Whole System
The contextual leadership dimension
What it addresses in transition: Senior leaders undergoing identity transition often lose contextual clarity. When internal anxiety is high, perception narrows. The leader who should be holding the long view gets pulled into the tactical. They start managing rather than leading. They see threats rather than patterns. The AI disruption challenge sits squarely here: leaders who can only see AI as a threat to their expertise cannot see the full system of which it is one part.
What depth coaching does here: The coach helps the leader elevate their vantage point — to step back from the immediate pressure and see the larger forces at play: the organisational culture dynamics, the generational shifts in the workforce, the long arc of their industry, and their own place in a bigger story than this quarter’s performance. This is 3DL work: developing the habit and the capacity of systemic sight.
5C Sense-Making capacities in practice:
- Systems Thinking — the coach uses tools like mapping stakeholder incentives, identifying feedback loops, and naming the unspoken rules of the organisational culture. This is not MBA strategy; it is the leader learning to read the room at a much larger scale.
- Long-term Orientation & Visioning — one of the most important coaching interventions for a senior leader in transition is to return them to their legacy question. Not “what do I need to deliver this year?” but “what do I want to have made possible in ten years?” This reactivates strategic orientation.
- Critical Thinking — discernment about what truly matters versus what is urgent. Leaders in survival mode treat everything as urgent. The coach creates space to slow the frame and separate signal from noise.
- Creativity — the move from either/or thinking to generative thinking. Many leaders in transition get trapped in false binaries (“I can be the old version of myself or fail”). Coaching at 3DL opens possibility space.
- Perspective Skills — seeing through multiple stakeholder lenses simultaneously: what does this look like for the team? For the board? For the organisation in five years?
5C Alignment also active here:
- Cultural Agility — understanding how different parts of the organisation, different generations, different national cultures, interpret the same signals differently. The leader who can see this whole picture leads with far greater sophistication.
The transition moment this enables: The leader stops seeing their transition as a personal crisis and starts seeing it as participation in a much larger systemic shift — one that is happening to organisations and leadership everywhere. This normalises and expands their experience simultaneously.
4DL — Will, Choice, and Delivery
The decisive leadership dimension
What it addresses in transition: This is perhaps the most misunderstood dimension. In the context of transition, 4DL is not about driving harder or being more decisive in the conventional sense. It is about inner freedom — the capacity to choose from a centred place rather than react from fear or habit. The leader who micromanages is not demonstrating 4DL; they are demonstrating its absence. The leader who avoids difficult conversations, who defers decisions to protect themselves, who over-commits and under-delivers — these are all failures of inner will, not capability.
What depth coaching does here: The coach works with the leader’s relationship to choice — including the choices they do not realise they are making. Every avoidance is a choice. Every moment of collapsing under pressure is a choice. The coaching creates the conditions in which the leader can access what Evans calls “inner freedom”: the ability to stand firm without rigidity, to be moved by events without being overwhelmed by them.
5C Delivery capacities in practice:
- Courage — this is the central 4DL coaching domain. Not reckless courage, but the quiet courage to hold a line, to name what is true, to make a difficult decision in the full knowledge that it may be wrong. The coach works with the leader to locate where their courage has gone — often it has been eroded by isolation, burnout, or accumulated self-doubt.
- Resilience — not bounce-back from failure but durability while in difficulty. The coaching question is not “how do you recover?” but “how do you stay functional, grounded, and clear while you are inside uncertainty?”
- Proactivity — shifting from reactive management to anticipatory leadership. The coach works on the leader’s internal orientation toward the future: are they moving toward something, or running from something?
- Hope & Optimism — not naive positivity, but what the research calls “constructive optimism” — the belief that meaningful action is still possible. This is critical for leaders whose identity shift has left them feeling powerless or irrelevant.
5C Grounding also active here:
- Presence — 4DL decisions require a calm internal platform. The coach supports the leader to develop the capacity to remain centred even when the board is anxious, the team is restless, and the environment is volatile.
The transition moment this enables: The leader stops deriving their authority from positional power, expertise, or past track record — and starts leading from who they are choosing to be. This is the most profound identity shift in the whole transition: from authority-by-role to authority-by-character.
5DL — Asking for Help and Mobilising Support
The collective leadership dimension
What it addresses in transition: This dimension is last in the developmental sequence because it is, paradoxically, the hardest for senior leaders to embody. The entire career pathway for most executives has rewarded self-sufficiency, having answers, being the capable one. Asking for help feels like failure. Delegating deeply feels like losing relevance. The isolation symptom — so pervasive in senior leadership — is, in large part, a 5DL problem: leaders who cannot ask for help, cannot be coached, and cannot let others carry the weight.
What depth coaching does here: The coach works on the leader’s shame relationship to support — the unconscious belief that needing help is weakness. This is identity work at depth. It connects directly to the transition from expert to facilitator: the facilitator role requires the leader to be genuinely comfortable not being the smartest person in the room, not having the answer first, not being central. Until 5DL is developed, the leader cannot fully inhabit this new identity.
5C Alignment capacities in practice:
- Mobilisation Skills — coaching the leader to activate others’ energy rather than supply all the energy themselves. This is a profound behavioural shift with deep psychological roots.
- Co-creation Skills — moving from “I decide, you implement” to genuine collaborative design. The coach uses real situations from the leader’s work to practise this in sessions.
- Relationship-Building Skills — rebuilding the leader’s network of peers and support — often depleted through years of upward climb and professional isolation. The coach helps the leader identify who they can be honest with.
- Communication Skills — part of 5DL in practice is learning to ask clearly and without apology. Many leaders have lost the habit of making requests; they issue instructions or suffer in silence.
5C Human Connection is also active:
- Humility — 5DL cannot be developed without it. The coach creates the conditions for the leader to say, perhaps for the first time in years: “I don’t know. I need help with this.”
The transition moment this enables: The leader discovers that their influence actually expands when they ask for help — because it signals psychological safety, models vulnerability, and unlocks the collective intelligence of the people around them. The leader who could only lead through their own capability becomes one who can lead through the capability of many.
The Integrated Coaching Arc: Sequencing the Work
In practice, depth coaching using both frameworks moves through a natural arc — not as rigid phases but as a deepening spiral:
| Coaching Phase | Primary 5DL Work | Primary 5C Domain | Identity Question Being Addressed |
| Orientation | 1DL | Grounding | Who am I beneath my role? |
| Relational Reset | 2DL | Human Connection | How am I actually landing with others? |
| Contextual Expansion | 3DL | Sense-Making | What larger story am I part of? |
| Decisive Recommitment | 4DL | Delivery | What am I choosing to stand for now? |
| Collective Reinvention | 5DL | Alignment | How do I lead through, not despite, others? |
Each phase integrates all five 5C clusters to varying degrees — Grounding is active throughout; Delivery and Alignment become more primary as the coaching matures.
What Makes This “Depth” Coaching
Depth coaching, as distinct from performance coaching or skills coaching, works below the level of behaviour and strategy. It enters the territory of identity, meaning, values, and being. What makes the 5DL + 5C combination particularly suited to depth work is this:
5DL insists on the whole person. It does not separate the leader from the human. The five dimensions are not competencies to acquire — they are human capacities to develop. They take time, setback, reflection, and support to grow. This is exactly the texture of identity transition.
5C provides the map for the coach. The 25 competencies across five clusters give the coach both breadth and precision — the ability to name what is underdeveloped, to see what is compensating for what, and to track genuine development over time.
Together they hold the paradox at the heart of every senior leader transition: that the very things that made you successful — your expertise, your self-reliance, your decisiveness, your drive — are the things that must be transformed, not abandoned, as you move into a new leadership identity. These frameworks do not ask leaders to become someone else. They invite leaders to become more fully themselves — at a depth they have not yet reached.
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Also read:
Personal Challenges Senior Leaders Face: Effectiveness & Identity Transition
