Coaching Real Leaders · Harvard Business Review / Muriel Wilkins

How Do I Deal with a Competitive Peer?

May 19, 2025·54 min·2 clips

Muriel reveals why doing great work in silence is not enough — and why Elsie's habit of leading with action steps instead of outcomes is making her invisible.

Elsie did not set out chasing leadership. She says she only started seeing it as possible after someone pointed out that she might have the skills for it. Now she can picture VP, and that changes the stakes. A role she once never imagined has become the test of whether the executive team sees her as ready. The complication is a colleague who used to be a mentor and once held Elsie's director role. Now they are peers, and the relationship has tension in it. Elsie worries that tension could affect her chance at moving up. She wants her results and work ethic to make her the obvious choice when a next level role opens. She also knows where her line is. If the opening came and he got it, she says she would start looking elsewhere because she would feel disrespected. Muriel does not let the conversation turn into a story where the colleague is the whole problem. She asks Elsie to name the outcome she wants: to be seen as the best qualified person when the opportunity arrives. Then Muriel puts the harder part on the table. Elsie may have more to give, but that only matters if the company is ready to receive it. The coaching stays with what Elsie can do before the decision exists. She has thought about leaving, but she is not ready, because she still believes she has more to contribute where she is. Muriel keeps both pieces in view: how Elsie can respond differently now, and what the promotion outcome would tell her. Ambition, disappointment, and self respect all get treated as useful leadership data.

As heard by us

A grounded coaching session on promotion ambition, peer tension, and staying focused on the outcome that matters.

Muriel Wilkins coaches a director who wants to be the first person the executive team thinks of when a VP role opens, while tension with a former mentor, now a peer, is starting to affect how she sees her path forward.

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Why you'd press play

When your former mentor is now your peer and the VP promotion is still ahead.

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