By Leslie Rohonczy, IMC™, PCC
Executive Coach | Leadership Development Expert | Author | Speaker | ©2026 | www.leslierohonczy.com
Halfway through an executive coaching session with a senior leader, I saw it: that juicy a-ha moment when an insight sparks, and the body responds before the words arrive. My client’s posture shifted as I offered him a metaphor for what he was experiencing. He leaned forward and began nodding, then his hands joined the conversation. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s exactly me. Do you have a camera in my office?”
For the record, I don’t have cameras hidden in my clients’ offices. But what I did have was a metaphor that illustrated something true about how he had learned to operate. It was a unique lens that reflected back to him the strengths he relied on, the pressures he carried, the ways he protected himself, and the costs of those strategies.
And, maybe most importantly, he felt seen. He understood that I ‘got’ him and wasn’t judging him. We now had a safe, shared language for exploring something that had previously been difficult for him to name. That’s one reason I return to metaphor so often in my executive coaching work.
I should clarify what I mean by metaphor. I’m not suggesting that leaders dust off those tired old sports clichés we’ve all heard a thousand times: keep your eye on the ball, step up to the plate, get back in the game. Those expressions may add a bit of colour to a conversation (if you like the colour beige), but they rarely reveal anything new. A developmental metaphor is personal, specific, and rich enough to help someone recognize a pattern in how they operate, then explore its strengths, limitations, and possibilities.
But metaphor isn’t just a powerful coaching tool; leaders can use metaphors when coaching and developing their employees, too. You don’t need to be a professional coach, invent elaborate imagery, or turn every one-on-one into a voyage of symbolic discovery. Sometimes one well-timed image can help an employee describe a challenge they’re having more clearly, so they can examine it with less defensiveness, and imagine a different way of responding.
The metaphor itself is not the point. What matters is what it helps someone recognize about what’s happening now, and the new possibilities that recognition opens.
MOVING FROM INSIDE THE PATTERN TO OUTSIDE IT LOOKING IN
When a behavioural pattern is deeply embedded, we don’t typically experience it as a pattern; we just experience it as our reality.
The leader who throws on his cape and flies in to rescue the team may believe, “This is what responsible leadership looks like.” The person who puts on a suit of armour before a difficult conversation may believe, “I need this protection to remain composed.” The executive who moves at jet-boat speed may see the wake she leaves behind her, without fully recognizing how hard it is to bring other people along with her.
Metaphor can help someone gain enough distance to examine what is happening. Instead of saying, “I’m impatient and terrible at bringing people along,” a leader can begin to notice, “I can feel my jet boat accelerating again.” Instead of thinking, “I shut people out,” someone might say, “This suit of armour is getting too heavy.” Instead of thinking, “It’s all up to me,” someone might notice, “I’ve picked up everyone else’s backpacks again.” Instead of thinking, “If I don’t get them engaged and developing, I’m not doing my job,” a leader can begin to notice, “I’m pulling up every seedling to make sure it’s growing.”
That small change in language matters. The behaviour is still theirs to understand and address, but it no longer defines the whole person. They can step back, observe it, and begin making more deliberate choices.
Research on metaphor supports its role in helping people make sense of complex or less tangible experiences by connecting them with something more concrete and familiar. A metaphor will not automatically produce insight or behavioural change. It does, however, create another way to explore an experience and experiment with different responses.
What felt personal and loaded yesterday can become something two people place between them and examine together today. It leads to powerful questions like, “What does the armour protect?” “When did the jet boat become necessary?” “What might you be taking away from your employees by flying in to rescue them?” “What are you trying to prevent by tending the garden so intensely?” These questions invite curiosity into a conversation where judgment, frustration, or defensiveness may have been getting in the way.
A LENS, NEVER A LABEL
There is a risk in all of this, of course. A metaphor can become so clever, appealing, or memorable that the person offering it falls in love with it. Once that happens, we may start trying to stuff the other person’s experience into our beautifully shaped metaphor, instead of allowing their experience to shape it.
A metaphor should offer a lens through which someone can examine their experience. It should never become a label that defines them.
When I offer a metaphor to a client, I tell them explicitly that I am not attached to it. Leaders can give an employee the same permission: “This image may not fit. We can play with it, change it, challenge it, or throw it out, and find something else that feels more like it fits your experience.”
I once offered a Labrador Retriever guide dog as a metaphor for a client’s ability to guide a new leadership team through a merger with another group. I thought it fit beautifully. He was terrified of dogs. Needless to say, we found a new metaphor. The person being coached gets the deciding vote. It’s as simple as that.
Even a metaphor that resonates with several people may mean something different to each of them. A gardener might represent patience and trust for one leader. For another, it might reveal a tendency to overwater every plant, pull up the seedlings to check whether they are growing, and take personal responsibility for the weather. Same garden. Entirely different coaching stance.
HOW METAPHOR SHAPES MY COACHING
Integral Coaching Canada’s methodology has deeply shaped my use of developmental metaphor.
In my executive coaching work, metaphor can help a client recognize how they currently approach an important challenge and envision a broader, more intentional way of leading. That developmental work is far more extensive than the simple application I am sharing here.
Leaders are often given objectives such as “delegate more,” “become more strategic,” “communicate differently,” or “strengthen executive presence.” These may be worthwhile goals, but they rarely help someone recognize what to do differently when the pressure is on.
A strong metaphor gives the objective shape and texture.
Consider the leader whose approach resembles a jet racing boat. They are fast, responsive, decisive, and highly capable of reaching a destination quickly. Those strengths may have been richly rewarded throughout their career. At the same time, there is very little room in the boat for anyone else, and the leader’s speed may leave a wake of dependency, confusion, or disengagement behind them.
Simply advising this leader to slow down probably won’t create much change. The metaphor opens a richer developmental conversation:
When does speed genuinely matter?
Who needs to be in the boat with you?
When would creating shared ownership matter more than arriving first?
How will you retain your decisiveness while making more room for others?
The metaphor makes an abstract objective easier to recognize and work with in real situations.
What follows is a simple way for leaders to experiment with metaphor in developmental conversations. It is not a substitute for professional coach training or a complete coaching methodology. Four clever questions do not make anyone a Master Coach before lunch, but they can help you have more effective developmental conversations with your direct reports.
WHERE USEFUL METAPHORS COME FROM
Often, people hand us their metaphors without realizing it.
An employee may describe themselves as running on a treadmill, carrying everyone else’s load, juggling ten balls, playing every instrument, or wearing armour into important conversations. That language is worth noticing because it may reveal how they already understand their experience.
Imagine an employee saying, “I feel as though I’m juggling ten balls and everyone keeps throwing me another one.”
A leader could move immediately into workload solutions. Or they could become curious about the image:
Which balls cannot be dropped?
Which ones belong to you?
Which were handed to you by someone else?
Are any still in the air because you haven’t decided where they belong?
The metaphor does not replace a practical conversation about workload. It helps both people understand the workload more precisely before deciding what to do about it.
Sometimes, the person creates the image. Sometimes, you build it together. Occasionally, you may offer one based on what you’ve observed. However it emerges, the employee needs room to define its meaning, revise it, or reject it.
A rejected metaphor is useful information. It tells you that you have not yet found language that belongs to the person.
METAPHOR CAN HELP A TEAM SEE ITSELF
Metaphor can also help a group name how it wants to work together.
In my work with teams, I have seen the value of creating a collective metaphor that captures the team’s strengths, aspirations, relationships, and shared responsibilities. A team might identify itself as a pod of dolphins, for example, and develop its own understanding of what that image represents about how members navigate, communicate, protect one another, and move together.
The power comes from the meaning the team creates, rather than from the leader arriving with a polished image and announcing, “Good news, everyone. We’re dolphins now.”
A shared metaphor can give a team shorthand for conversations that would otherwise be difficult to begin. When the pod of dolphins is functioning well, what’s happening to make it so? When food sources are scarce and the pressure is on to find food, how does the pod adapt? What causes some dolphins to be separated from the pod, and how do the others help them navigate their way back?
Because the metaphor belongs to everyone, it can become a useful reference point for reflecting on collective behaviour without immediately blaming an individual. The team can then discuss whether it’s living into its chosen image and what may need attention when it’s not.
Used thoughtfully, a collective metaphor can help a team name the culture it wants to create and recognize the everyday behaviours required to make that culture real.
USING METAPHOR WITHOUT GETTING IN ITS WAY
If you want to experiment with metaphor in a developmental conversation, a few practices matter:
Listen for images already embedded in the person’s language. Their metaphor will often resonate more deeply than one imported from outside.
Offer your own images lightly. “I wonder whether this is a little like…” creates more room than “Here is what you are.”
Watch what happens before you elaborate. Changes in posture, energy, expression, words, or engagement may tell you whether the image is opening the conversation or closing it down.
Let the person define the details. Ask what the metaphor means to them instead of explaining what you believe it ought to mean.
Explore both its value and its cost. A jet boat, suit of armour, conductor, gardener, or superhero contains strengths as well as limitations. Development begins with understanding the whole pattern.
Remember your authority. An employee may agree with a metaphor because their leader offered it. Make disagreement easy and explicit.
Allow the metaphor to evolve. As the person develops, the image may acquire new features, change form, or become unnecessary.
Most importantly, don’t confuse recognition with transformation. A metaphor can create a powerful moment of awareness and insight, but insight is the beginning. Sustainable change still requires practice, reflection, experimentation, and new choices under real pressure.
YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE
Think about someone you are coaching or developing who has you feeling stuck. In your next conversation, listen carefully for the images embedded in how they describe their experience.
If none emerges naturally, you might ask:
“If this challenge were a vehicle (or a landscape, object, animal, machine, or character), what might it be?”
Then remain curious: What does the image reveal about how they currently see themselves or the situation? What strengths exist within it? What does the image protect, restrict, overlook, or leave behind? If it evolved to represent how they would like to approach the situation, what would change?
Resist the temptation to interpret the image for them or steer them toward the answer you think they need. The metaphor may help you see where their development could go next. More importantly, it may help them see it for themselves.
If you would like to explore the metaphors shaping how you lead, or create a collective metaphor that helps your team strengthen how it works together, I would love to help. Reach out to arrange a free exploratory executive coaching conversation at leslierohonczy.com.
