The call comes in at 11:47 on a Tuesday night.
Not an emergency. Just the usual one. A department head needs a decision only the CEO can make, because no one else has ever been allowed to make it.
She picks up. She always picks up. That’s the job, or so she’s been told since the day she got the title.
Then one week, she doesn’t pick up. She’s out of range, no signal, no way to reach her. And the team, without meaning to, without being told how, handles it. The numbers hold. The client stays happy. Nothing breaks.
She comes back to find the company ran fine without her voice on the line. For a moment, that feels like loss. Then it feels like something else entirely. A question she has never let herself ask out loud: what if being needed every hour was never the same thing as being valuable?
Meet Jennifer Hoege
Jennifer Hoege is the founder of Hoege Consulting & Coaching in Waunakee, Wisconsin, and after thirty years as a COO, a CHRO, and now an executive coach, she has built her entire practice around a belief most people in her field would never say out loud: her job is to make herself unnecessary, and if she’s done it right, her clients won’t need her again.
The Layoff That Rebuilt Her
Jennifer’s path started in operations and HR, the kind of work where you learn a company from the inside by fixing what’s broken in it. She spent twenty-five years climbing into rooms where people looked to her when things fell apart. She earned her Executive MBA at the University of Wisconsin, launched her first business in 2014, and four years later was recruited back into the C-suite as a COO.
Then two of the four companies she worked for were sold. She was laid off.
“I was surprised by how much it affected me. I knew it was a business decision, but that was the role I thought I would retire from,” she says. After twenty-five years of being the person others leaned on in a crisis, she was suddenly the one facing the uncertainty, with no title to stand behind.
What she found on the other side reshaped everything. “The identity you build around a role is not the same as the value you carry. You don’t lose your ability to create value. You own that, and it comes with you,” she says. She pursued professional coaching certification, opened a physical office on Main Street, and relaunched Hoege Consulting & Coaching, this time built around a rule she’d never seen anyone else fully commit to.
The Leader and the Organization, at the Same Time
Most consultants build the system and leave before the leader knows how to run it. Most coaches grow the leader and ignore the structure crumbling underneath them. Jennifer refuses to pick a side.
“Most engagements fail because the consultant builds the system and leaves before the leader knows how to use it, or the coach grows the leader while the structure stays broken. I work on both, because that’s how the work sticks,” she says.
That belief shows up everywhere in how she talks about leadership today, especially in her running argument against how most companies measure their people. She calls it AIC: a$$ in chair time. Hours logged, presence noticed, busyness rewarded, while the actual value someone creates goes uncounted.
“Hours worked and value created are not the same thing,” she says. She points to a CHRO whose department heads never define what great actually produces in a role, so everyone defaults to counting what’s easiest to count. “When the definition is missing, we default to the only thing we can see. Time. Or the appearance of busy.”
Her diagnosis for most stuck organizations isn’t a strategy problem. “The strategy is usually fine. I uncover the real problem underneath. Blind spots can’t be seen from the inside. That’s not a criticism. It’s physics,” she says. It’s a line she repeats often, and it’s the reason clients hire her instead of another consultant with a slide deck.
The results back it up. She designed a payroll and benefits model adopted globally by a major agriculture organization, saving $500,000 annually. She led an M&A integration that grew a company from 700 employees to more than 2,000. She coached a first-time CEO from ten employees to twenty, and is now coaching the third member of that same executive team.
The Hoege Playbook: 5 Lessons
Find the real problem before you fix anything. Most leadership struggles aren’t strategy failures. They’re diagnosis failures hiding underneath one.
Define what great actually produces. If you can’t describe the value of a role without mentioning hours, you haven’t defined the job yet.
Work on the leader and the system together. A strong structure fails under a leader who isn’t ready. A growing leader stalls inside a broken structure. Fix both or fix neither.
Your identity isn’t your title. The value you create is yours. It survives every layoff, every ending, every uncertain in-between.
Protect your promises to the people who matter, not just the ones on the calendar. Accountability isn’t only what you deliver at work. It’s the commitments you keep everywhere else.
Made Herself Unnecessary
Somewhere, a leader is standing in a hallway, watching their team handle a problem without waiting for permission. It doesn’t feel like loss anymore. It feels like the plan working.
That’s the outcome Jennifer builds toward with every client, whether she’s spending a year coaching a founder or stepping in as a fractional COO during a search for a permanent one. “My goal is to make myself unnecessary within the organizations I work with,” she says. Not because the work stopped mattering. Because it finally became someone else’s to carry.
She still remembers being the one everyone called at midnight. Now she measures her success by how rarely the phone rings at all.
Jennifer Hoege, MBA, SHRM-SCP, CPCC, PCC, is the founder of Hoege Consulting & Coaching, based in Waunakee, Wisconsin. She works as an executive coach and fractional COO/CHRO, serving CEOs and senior leaders navigating growth, transition, and organizational change. To connect with Jennifer or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile.
