Leadership Coaching for
High-Responsibility Leaders
Adaptive development coaching for women leaders, healthcare leaders, physicians, surgeons, executive leaders, and teams navigating complexity, pressure, and change.
Mary Printz helps leaders uncover the hidden patterns beneath over-functioning, rumination, and over-responsibility, so they can lead with greater clarity, steadiness, confidence, and alignment with their values.
Trusted by leaders in:
HEALTHCARE • EDUCATION • ENGINEERING • BUSINESS • PUBLIC SYSTEMS
When Life and Leadership Become Heavy
You notice:
-
You replay conversations long after they are over.
-
You feel responsible for someone’s reactions, emotions, or outcomes.
-
You are outwardly capable but internally exhausted.
-
You avoid certain conversations, and carry the weight of what remains unsaid.
-
You struggle to set boundaries without guilt.
-
You keep trying to solve adaptive challenges with more effort, more thinking, and/or more control.
-
You are leading through complexity, however it's a challenge because your old patterns of doing things are running you into the ground and creating challenges.
This is a developmental moment.
You work hard, carry responsibility, solve problems, support people, and keep going when the pressure is high.
The same strengths that helped you succeed can begin to cost you.
The Work Is Not to Push Harder.
It's to Grow Differently.
Most leadership development focuses on skills, strategies, communication tools, or behaviour, all of which matter.
What I've noticed is that when smart, capable leaders keep repeating
patterns they genuinely want to change, a deeper assumption
is usually operating beneath the surface, stalling their progress. This
requires developmental and adaptive work.
In our work together, we uncover the hidden assumptions, protective
patterns, and internal commitments that shape
how you lead, decide, respond, and relate under pressure.
This is adaptive development coaching.
It's about seeing and unblocking the thinking that's been running behind the scenes, so you can lead with more freedom, clarity, and choice.
This Work Is For Leaders Who Are Ready To:
-
Stop over-functioning without abandoning yourself
-
Set clear boundaries without losing connection
-
Reduce rumination and recover your cognitive energy
-
Speak more clearly and calmly in difficult conversations
-
Lead with steadiness when the stakes are high and there's uncertainty
-
Move from reactivity to calmer presence
-
Build internal authority instead of relying on external approval
-
Understand your hidden patterns that keep repeating
-
Grow the capacity required for the complexity at work and life
Who Mary Works With
Women Leaders
For women who are strong, capable, relational, and carrying more than others see.
Lead with clarity, confidence, self-trust, and emotional steadiness, without self-erasure, boundaries, over-responsibility, or absorbing the emotional weight of others. There is a way to achieve better work-life balance.
Explore Coaching for Women Leaders →
Capacity that holds in complexity
You’re operating in a system where responsibility is high, time is scarce, and the emotional load is heavy, yet invisible, often across shifting systems and competing demands.
Leaders, Executives & Teams
Healthcare Leaders, Physicians, & Surgeons
For healthcare leaders, physicians, and surgeons, navigating high responsibility, complex systems and thinking, emotional load, conflict, moral pressure, burnout, constant change and uncertainty.
Build adaptive and developmental capacity to think with greater clarity in complex situations and systems, cut the ties with rumination, strengthen internal authority, and lead with steadiness and values in demanding environments.
Executive Leaders and Teams
For executives, founders, directors, entrepreneurs, managers, and leadership teams navigating complexity, growth, transition, relational strain, conflict or recurring patterns hindering progress.
See your own adaptations and developmental growth edge with clarity, and compassion while increasing your capacity to lead through complex situations.
Explore Executive Leadership and Team Coaching →
Speaking and Conferences
Identify your developmental growth edge and embark on the process of adaptive development for improved leadership capacity to listen, relate, care for and think in greater complexity with choice for increased performance, retention and healthy work culture. The beauty is that it translates to all areas of life.
Thoughtful, practical, and engaging. Designed to stretch your growth edge and create awarenesses that will transform your workplace and performance.
While the contexts differ, the inner patterns that bring leaders here are often similar.
Choose the doorway that best reflects your current role and responsibilities. Each path is tailored to the realities you are navigating.
Why This Work Is Different
This is adaptive-development coaching.
It's not about time management, productivity hacks, or learning another leadership framework.
This work integrates adult development theory, adaptive leadership, emotional intelligence, Immunity to Change methodology, neuroscience-informed insights, and leadership experience to create lasting change required for the next phase of personal or team growth.
The focus is on creating greater capacity for self, others and the team.
The capacity to pause before reacting.
The capacity to hold complexity without becoming consumed by it.
The capacity to speak and think with clarity amidst complexity.
The capacity to lead without carrying what is not yours to carry.
The capacity to make decisions from internal authority rather than urgency, guilt, fear, or over-responsibility.
What Clients Often Experience
Through this work, leaders will:
-
Expand their developmental growth edge personally and professionally
-
Release the assumptions driving pressure, avoidance, or over-functioning
-
Respond with more confidence, assuredness in conflict
-
Think with greater complexity and internal authority
-
Hold space for others without reacting
-
Make decisions with greater clarity and less rumination
-
Set boundaries without losing connection
-
Communicate under stress and in the midst of chaos
-
Recover their emotional and cognitive energy
-
Lead with presence, perspective, and confidence
Sustainable change and performance becomes possible when the hidden patterns are surfaced with an action plan to overturn them.
Client Reflections
Through our work, I began to understand the assumptions driving urgency and pressure, and developed the capacity to lead with greater steadiness, clarity, and confidence.
My role remains demanding, but not destabilizing. I communicate more effectively, make decisions with greater intention, and approach complex challenges with more perspective.
I would highly recommend Mary to physicians and healthcare leaders facing complex challenges, leadership transitions, or organizational change.
Jamie V., MD, Department Head
Working with Mary gave me clarity on my values and the confidence to lead from a place of stability rather than stress. My communication has grown, my anxiety around high-pressure moments has eased, and I'm advocating more effectively for my team and our patients. I'd recommend this program to any physician in or considering, a leadership role.
Sarah M., Obstetrician
About Mary Printz
Mary Printz, M.Ed., is an executive adaptive
development coach, consultant, speaker,
former school principal, business CEO, and
certified Harvard Immunity to Change coach.
She brings more than three decades of leadership,
education, coaching, and organizational experience
to her work with high-responsibility leaders and teams.
Mary’s work is grounded in adult development, emotional intelligence, adaptive leadership, and the lived reality of leading in complex systems.
She helps leaders uncover what is happening beneath the surface so they can shift how they think, respond, communicate, and lead.
Mary is based in Alberta, Canada, and works with clients across Canada and North America.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who do you coach?
Mary coaches high-responsibility leaders, including business, healthcare, physicians, surgeons, executives, entrepreneurs, education, and leadership teams.
Do you only work with physicians and surgeons?
No. Mary works with leaders across sectors. Healthcare, physicians, and surgeons are an important area of her work, with the broader focus being adaptive development for high-responsibility leaders navigating pressure, complexity, and change.
Are you based in Alberta?
Yes. Mary Printz is based in Alberta, Canada, and works virtually with clients across Alberta, Canada, and North America.
Is this therapy?
No. This is coaching and developmental work. It focuses on leadership capacity, internal authority, emotional steadiness, decision-making, communication, boundaries, and change.
What is adaptive development coaching?
Adaptive development coaching helps leaders grow the internal capacity required for the complexity they are facing. It looks beneath behaviour to the assumptions, protective patterns, and meaning-making systems that shape how a person leads and responds.
What kinds of challenges do clients bring?
Clients often come when they are facing burnout, rumination, conflict, over-functioning, leadership transition, difficult conversations, team misalignment, emotional fatigue, constant change or the sense that their old ways of succeeding are no longer working.
Do you speak at conferences or events?
Yes. Mary speaks for conferences, associations, organizations, retreats, healthcare events, women’s leadership groups, and executive teams on adaptive leadership, emotional capacity, burnout, over-functioning, self-trust, and leading through complexity.
Begin With a Conversation
If you are carrying more than others see, leading through complexity, or sensing that your next level of leadership requires a different kind of growth, this may be the right place to begin.
A discovery conversation is a place to name what you are navigating, ask questions, and explore whether this work is a fit.
Mary Printz, M.Ed.
Executive Adaptive Development Coach
403-866-3806
mary@maryprintz.com
MaryPrintz.com