There is a particular kind of leader who gets pulled aside early in their career and told, gently but pointedly, that they care too much. It usually comes wrapped as feedback for improvement rather than a compliment.
Slow down.
Toughen up.
Save the empathy for outside the office.
Lisa Virtue heard some version of that message throughout her twenty years climbing into the executive suite, and instead of letting it shrink her, she built an entire coaching practice around proving it wrong.
Today, Virtue is an ICF-certified Executive Coach based in Portland, Oregon, working with executives, senior leaders, founders, and high-potential professionals who are ready to lead with more confidence and less self-erasure. She is also the founder of HEARTset Studio, host of the HEARTset Leadership Podcast, and the creator of a leadership framework built specifically for people who refuse to believe that strong results and strong humanity have to be traded off against each other.
Her Coaching
Virtue’s coaching practice sits at the intersection of executive coaching, organizational development, and change management. According to her Leadership Coach Directory profile, she partners with leaders who are navigating organizational change, stepping into bigger roles, or making significant career transitions, strengthening both the strategic and human sides of leadership along the way. She holds an ICF credential, is a Prosci Certified Change Practitioner, earned her Master Professional Career Coach designation through IACC, and is currently working toward a Master of Science in Organization Development from Pepperdine University, expected in 2027.
Through her practice, Virtue offers one-on-one executive coaching for team leaders, dedicated coaching for founders scaling their companies, group training and CPR (Coaching Performance Recovery) programs for HR and learning and development teams, and a HEART-Aligned Job Search track for leaders navigating a career transition. Clients can work with her virtually or in person in Portland and McMinnville, Oregon.
A Framework Built From Twenty Years of Watching Leaders Up Close
At the center of her methodology is the HEARTset Leadership Framework, a model she built after two decades of watching what actually separates leaders that people want to follow from leaders that people merely tolerate.
The HEARTset Framework breaks into five pillars, each one a letter in the acronym:
- H – (be) Human; Prioritize your humanity: Stay connected to your values and authenticity.
- E – Elevate others; Mentor and elevate others: Help your team members thrive.
- A -Act; Find the right pace for action: Balance urgency with thoughtful decision-making.
- R – Relate; Foster authentic relationships: Build trust through open communication.
- T – (be) Transparent; Practice transparency: Create a culture of safety and trust within your team.
Virtue introduced the concept in the premiere episode of her podcast, where she describes discovering these five pillars of how leaders show up for others. She has more than twenty years of observing leadership firsthand, paired with roughly a decade of studying it from a theoretical and scientific angle.
Describing the framework on her podcast, Virtue explains, “it’s the way you bring your heart into how you lead in real time,” drawing on intuition because leadership lives in exactly those moments where trust gets built or broken.
Each pillar addresses a distinct failure mode she has watched leaders fall into. On the Be Human pillar, self-awareness comes first: understanding a leader’s impact and what lies below the waterline, the parts others cannot see coming, and knowing when their own stress or assumptions are about to shape the room.
On Elevate, she pushes leaders past the instinct to be the smartest person in the room, since leadership is about making the room stronger through others, which means giving real feedback and not avoiding hard conversations, while still caring enough to help someone actually get better.
On Act, she names the trap that snags so many capable leaders: not knowing when to take action, overthinking and delaying, or swinging too fast and cleaning up the mess later.
On Relate, she asks leaders to strengthen trust and connection across their team and organization, building the kind of psychological safety where people feel safe enough to disagree, take risks, and speak up before small problems become big ones.
And on Transparency, she offers a line that tends to stick with people long after they hear it: when leaders aren’t clear, people fill in the gaps themselves, and usually they don’t fill them in generously.
The Story Behind the Framework
Virtue’s path into coaching was not a straight line, and she is candid about how much it grew out of the very tension her framework now addresses. According to her HEARTset Studio bio, after twenty years in progressive leadership roles rising toward the executive suite, she was often coined as a leader who cared too much for her team. Rather than sanding down that instinct to fit a harder-edged model of leadership, she built her second career around it.
Her own About page traces the throughline even further back, through athletic coaching, teaching adults, recruiting, and building professional development programs for mentees. She describes conducting hundreds of interviews and mentoring countless staff over her corporate career, work that became what she loved most about her job long before she called it coaching. As she explained it in a profile written by a former team member, the shift toward résumés, interview prep, and salary negotiations began intentionally back in 2009, and it never once felt like a chore. She then realized it was simply something she loved doing, and it seemed to be her passion.
The leap to full-time coaching came at a genuinely difficult moment. She left her executive job in the middle of the pandemic, building a business while caring for her young daughter and her mother at the same time. Her daughter, in fact, became one of her biggest sources of motivation, tied to a phrase that has stayed with her throughout the journey: women empowering women begins at home.
What clients notice first, according to people who have worked alongside her, is how fully she shows up in the work itself. “I love having a personal impact. I just love seeing people grow,” she has said, describing what draws her to the work day after day. That combination of warmth and challenge is echoed in how her own team describes her: caring, a great listener, business and tech savvy, and someone who gives critical feedback in a kind way.
How She Works With Clients
Virtue’s coaching style leans conversational and Socratic. Her Leadership Coach Directory profile lists her communication approach as calm and steady. Sometimes, she has observed, people have a hard time seeing things themselves. All the pieces can be sitting right in front of them, but they cannot connect the dots and see that everything is part of the same puzzle, the way it is often easier to clean someone else’s house than your own.
That framing captures her broader philosophy well. Her goal is not to reshape people into some generic template of what a leader should look like. It is to bring clarity to what is already there and help people focus on the strengths they already have, all delivered with the kindness she names as one of her core values, alongside inclusion and women’s empowerment.
On the podcast, she is equally clear-eyed about the stakes of getting this wrong at scale. She points to a Gallup finding that global employee engagement dropped to an alarmingly low twenty-one percent in 2024, with manager engagement falling even further to twenty-seven percent, a gap she connects directly to the estimated $438 billion in lost productivity that follows disengaged leadership. It is the kind of statistic she uses to make the case that showing up with heart is not a soft skill. It is a business requirement.
Bringing HEARTset to All
Virtue extends her HEARTset philosophy through the HEARTset Leadership Podcast, now well into its first season, where she interviews coaches, researchers, and leaders on topics ranging from psychological safety to bringing humor into high-pressure teams. She also writes The HEARTwire, a newsletter she describes as heartfelt letters delivered straight to a leader’s inbox, offering coaching perspective and research-informed insight, essentially a coach in your pocket between sessions.
Her work has been recognized by outlets including the Rip City Review and Find My Profession, both of which named her among Portland’s best career coaches, and she has appeared on numerous podcasts discussing career transitions and leadership during periods of organizational upheaval.
Getting in Touch With Lisa Virtue
Prospective clients can learn more about Lisa Virtue and read reviews from her peers through her Leadership Coach Directory profile. From there, she can be reached directly through the following channels:
- Coaching website: lisavirtuecoaching.com
- HEARTset Studio: heartsetstudio.com
- Email: lisa@lisavirtuecoaching.com
- Book a discovery call: Calendly
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lisavirtue
- Instagram: @lisavirtuecoaching
- YouTube: Lisa Virtue Coaching
- HEARTset Leadership Podcast: Apple Podcasts and Spotify
