Rex Fernandes

Who this is for

The first eighteen months are the hardest, and almost nobody prepares you for them.

You were the strongest individual contributor on the team. That is why you were promoted, and it is exactly the skill set that stops working on your first day in the job. Most new managers are handed a title, a team, and no instruction.

You are still doing the work yourself

Delegating feels slower than doing it, so you do it. Your team learns to wait for you, and your evenings disappear.

Yesterday's peers now report to you

The friendship and the authority pull in opposite directions, and nobody has told you which one to put down.

You avoid the difficult conversation

Underperformance goes unnamed for months. By the time you raise it, it has become a bigger problem than it needed to be.

You have no honest mirror

Your team will not tell you what they think of your leadership, and your manager is watching outcomes rather than behaviour.

The method

Stakeholder Centered Coaching

Developed by Marshall Goldsmith in 1987 and used with senior leaders in some of the world's largest organisations. It rests on one idea that sets it apart from most coaching: the people you work with decide whether you have changed, and they are involved in the change rather than observing it.

Choose the one or two behaviours that matter

Not a list of twelve. A focused 360 assessment gathers how the people around you actually experience your leadership, and from that you pick the smallest number of changes that would make the biggest difference to them.

Tell your stakeholders what you are working on

You go to your direct reports, peers and manager, name the behaviour out loud, and ask for their help. This is the step most leaders want to skip, and it is the step that makes the rest work. Announcing it converts private intention into public commitment.

Ask for feedforward, not feedback

Feedback relitigates the past, which people are reluctant to give honestly and leaders are reluctant to hear. Feedforward asks a different question: what are two things I could do differently next month? It is easier to give, easier to receive, and it is actionable.

Practise in the real job, between sessions

The work happens in your actual meetings with your actual team, not in the coaching room. Our sessions are for planning the next experiment and reviewing the last one.

Follow up with the same people, every month

A brief, structured monthly conversation with each stakeholder. This is the engine of the method and the single variable the research found separates leaders who improve from leaders who do not.

Measure the change with the people who see it

At the close, the same stakeholders rate whether your leadership effectiveness has changed. Their verdict is the result. Mine does not count, and neither does yours.

You pay only if your stakeholders say you changed.

Marshall Goldsmith built his practice on tying the coach's fee to measurable improvement as judged by the leader's colleagues rather than by the coach. I work the same way, and the two halves of that are connected. I can carry the risk of the fee only because I am selective about who I take on. A coach who accepts everyone cannot make this promise and mean it.

Measurable
growth
or no fee

The evidence

What the research actually found

Goldsmith and Howard Morgan studied leadership development across eight major corporations and published the results in Strategy+Business. The finding that matters for you is uncomfortable and useful: attending the programme changed very little. Following up with colleagues changed almost everything.

Leaders who discussed their own improvement priorities with coworkers, and then followed up regularly, showed striking improvement. Leaders who did not follow up improved no more than by chance.

Finding from Leadership Is a Contact Sport: The “Follow-up Factor” in Management Development, Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan, Strategy+Business. Summarised here; read the original for the full method.

The study

8major corporations studied

11,480leaders who took part

86,000+mini-survey responses collected from their colleagues

73–6,748managers per company, so the pattern held at every scale

The effect appeared whether leaders had an external coach, an internal coach, or no coach at all. What mattered was the follow-up.

The method's author

Marshall Goldsmith

Goldsmith has spent close to forty years coaching senior executives, and has been recognised by Thinkers50 as the world's most influential leadership thinker twice, and as the world's leading executive coach for over a decade.

His argument is that the behaviours which make someone successful early in a career are frequently the ones that limit them later, and that changing those behaviours is not an insight problem. Leaders usually know what to do. The difficulty is doing it consistently in front of the people who already have a fixed picture of them. That is the problem Stakeholder Centered Coaching was designed to solve, and it is why the method puts those people inside the process rather than outside it.

I am a certified practitioner of his method. I am not affiliated with Marshall Goldsmith personally, and nothing here should be read as a personal endorsement of my practice by him.

Two-time Thinkers50World's Most Influential Leadership Thinker
Over a decadeRecognised as the world's #1 executive coach
60+ booksTranslated into 36 languages
4 bestsellersNew York Times and Wall Street Journal, including What Got You Here Won't Get You There
Since 1987Stakeholder Centered Coaching, 250,000+ leaders

Your coach

Fourteen years in leadership development, psychometric assessment and executive coaching. I am a Client Partner at Jombay, an AI-enabled talent assessment and leadership development company, and was previously Practice Director for its national leadership programmes HR40under40 and HR30under30.

I have designed and run assessment and development programmes for managers and senior leaders at Tata Motors, Bajaj Auto, SBI, Aditya Birla Group, Nasdaq and Kotak Mahindra Bank, and have facilitated workshops for more than 5,000 participants in person and online.

I have also built teams and departments from nothing and grown them into profitable units, so I have been on the other side of this. I trained as an engineer and began my career in machine learning research, which is probably why I am more interested in whether a leader actually changed than in whether the coaching felt good.

Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching certification awarded to Rex Fernandes, 29 September 2026 — Stakeholder Centered Coaching certification, 29 September 2026

Continuing Coach Education certificate: 27 approved hours on core competencies, 9 on resource development — CCE · 27 hours core competencies, 9 hours resource development

Selection

I choose the leaders I coach. That is part of the method, not a sales tactic.

Stakeholder Centered Coaching does not work on everybody, and Goldsmith has been blunt about this for decades. He has written plainly about the people he will not take on, because coaching them wastes their time as well as his. I apply the same filter, which is what the first conversation is for.

I will say no if

You do not think there is anything to change. If the problem is genuinely everyone else, there is nothing here for you. Goldsmith's line is that it is impossible to fix people who think someone else is the problem.
You are in the wrong job. If you would feel relieved rather than sorry if the organisation shut down tomorrow, coaching is the wrong intervention. That is a career conversation, and I will say so.
Your organisation is going the wrong way. If the strategy around you is broken, making you a more effective leader only helps you move faster in a direction that is not working.
You are being sent. Leaders who turn up because HR or their manager told them to, and who do not want it themselves, do not change. I would rather decline than take the engagement.

This works if

You already suspect what the problem is. Most new managers can name the thing they avoid. You do not need to have it diagnosed, you need to do something about it.
You are willing to tell your team. The method asks you to name your development goal out loud to the people you lead. If that is unthinkable, this is not your method.
You will do the monthly follow-ups. Fifteen minutes a month with each stakeholder, every month. This is the part the research says actually moves the needle, and it is not optional.
You want to be measured. At the end, your stakeholders rate whether you changed. If you would rather not know the answer, we should not start.

The four disqualifying patterns are Goldsmith's own, set out in You Can't Coach the Uncoachables.

The fit conversation

Forty-five minutes, free, and either of us can say no at the end.

This is a working session rather than a sales call, and it is how the selection actually happens. You find out how I coach by being coached. I find out whether you are someone this method will work for. Roughly speaking, I expect to say no to a fair number of the people I speak to, and I will tell you why.

What we do

One real situation

Bring something you are stuck on this week. A person, a decision, a conversation you have been putting off. We work on that, not on your career in general.

What you leave with

One behaviour and one experiment

A specific thing to try before your next team meeting, and a way to tell whether it worked. Yours to keep regardless of what either of us decides.

What happens after

A straight answer

I tell you whether I think coaching would help you, and whether I am the right person for it. Sometimes the honest answer is that you need a different intervention. You will get that answer rather than a proposal.

Before you ask

Questions people ask first

How long does an engagement run?

Stakeholder Centered Coaching is normally six to twelve months. That is not padding. The method depends on monthly follow-up with the same stakeholders over enough cycles for them to notice a sustained difference, and a shorter engagement cannot produce that evidence.

Do I have to tell my team I am being coached?

Yes, and this is the part most people hesitate over. Telling your stakeholders what you are working on is a step in the method rather than an optional extra. In practice it tends to land far better than leaders expect, because asking your team for help with your own leadership is itself a change they notice.

What stays confidential?

Everything you say to me. What your stakeholders see is the behaviour you have chosen to work on and your progress on it, because you tell them. The content of our conversations is not shared with your employer, and I do not report to your manager.

Does this work if my organisation is not paying?

Yes. The method needs your colleagues to participate, not your HR department to sponsor it. Many of the leaders I work with arrange this themselves.

Is it online or in person?

Sessions run online, which also means the monthly stakeholder follow-ups fit into a normal working week. I am based in Pune and in-person sessions are possible there.

What happens if you decide not to work with me?

I tell you in the conversation, with the reason. In most cases it is because coaching is not the right tool for the problem you brought, and I will say what I think would be. Nobody gets a polite maybe followed by silence.

Why are you turning work away?

Because my fee depends on your stakeholders reporting a change, and a leader who does not want to change will not produce one. Being selective is what makes it possible to carry that risk. It is a practical arrangement rather than a posture.

What does it cost?

Fees depend on the length of the engagement and the number of stakeholders involved, and we agree them before we start. The structure is the part worth knowing now: the fee is tied to measured improvement, so if your stakeholders do not see change at the end, you do not pay it.

Start here

Request a fit conversation.

Send a message with your role, how long you have been managing, and the one thing you would want to work on. That last part matters, because it is most of what I am assessing. I reply to everyone personally, usually within a day.

Or email directly

gmail@rexfernandes.com

Open mail

+91 97671 95781

Message

Stakeholder Centered Coaching® and the Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching® marks belong to Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching. Rex Fernandes is a certified practitioner of the method and is not an employee, agent or representative of that organisation, and this page is not endorsed by Marshall Goldsmith.

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