From Technical Expert to Leader: Coaching for Leadership Transitions in Telecommunications

The transition from technical expert to leadership presents complex challenges, particularly in fast-paced industries like telecommunications, where digital transformation, cross-functional collaboration, and regulatory pressure dominate. Emerging leaders (ELs) in this sector often struggle to balance operational expertise with strategic thinking and people management responsibilities. This study investigates how leadership coaching can support ELs through such transitions by enhancing leadership identity, decision-making, and stakeholder engagement capabilities. A qualitative research design, underpinned by an interpretivist paradigm, was applied to explore the lived experiences of six ELs and six line managers (LMs) within a South African telecommunications organization. Semi-structured interviews provided rich, contextual data, which was thematically analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) approach. This analysis revealed key development gaps, coaching expectations, and organizational enablers and constraints. Based on emergent superordinate and subordinate themes, the study developed a coaching framework that aligns EL needs with structured interventions. The framework comprises five components: leadership identity formation, strategic decision-making development, people management mastery, continuous feedback and learning, and active line manager involvement. The findings reinforce that coaching must be iterative, embedded in the organizational context, and responsive to individual leadership readiness. Organizations are encouraged to integrate the framework into existing leadership development programs to create resilient, adaptable leadership pipelines. This study contributes to leadership coaching literature by highlighting emerging leaders’ sector-specific developmental needs and offering a practical, evidence-based model to support coaching implementation in telecommunications.