Executive Leadership Coaching

In my last Insight, I discussed steps to follow for those engaged in executive leadership coaching. 

Typically, I see employers make a number of mistakes regarding executive leadership coaching. 

• They don’t choose one or two behaviors on which to concentrate. Their agenda is far too broad and they don’t keep focusing on that agenda. I have done a lot of shadow consulting with executive coaches and they all too often try to make this person into something they’re not, and that doesn’t work very successfully.
  
  
• The hire coaches frequently who don’t focus on developing a clear contract around behavior change and don’t work with the person they’re coaching to develop a support system to produce and support the change.
  
  For example, if you have a hook as a golfer, you need someone with you out on the range who keeps saying, “No, you have to move your hands this way,” and gives you feedback immediately.
  
  For a coach to provide that feedback when they’re not there observing the behavior in a situation makes it very difficult to provide accurate feedback. So what the coach really ought to encourage this person to do is take that 360-degree feedback, go to some people who have provided it and say, “I really appreciate what you have offered in the way of feedback to me and I’d like to enlist your help in changing the behavior that concerns you.”
  
  But it has to be circumscribed. It has to be “I tend to be too long-winded” or “I tend to procrastinate” or “I tend to ignore deadlines.”
  
  Whatever the behavior is, the client has to own up to it and say, “Please help me with this. Please provide me with feedback when you see me doing it, and tell me when you see me not doing it, so I know I’m on the right track.”
  
  Doing that isn’t always fun; it’s very hard work and you’re going to run into resistance from the person you’re coaching, which is not part of what executive coaches expect. They expect to be welcomed with open arms. But that doesn’t always happen. 

Steps to Effectively Utilize Executive Leadership Coaching

The first step toward being an effective coach is having clarity about what coaching can accomplish and what it can’t accomplish. 

In my experience, too frequently senior executives want to provide the person they’re coaching with a personality transplant and I don’t think that is possible. They see coaching as a be-all, end-all. They think they can create this massive personality change. They think they can make a somewhat constricted engineer into a compassionate human being, sensitive to the people he/she oversees, who has good communication skills, who is empathetic and who sets realistic deadlines…blah, blah, blah—it’s not going to happen. 

Pick one or two behaviors that you really think this person would be willing to change. Pick behaviors that will increase this person’s chances of being successful for the time being. 

It’s not a pessimistic view, because I really do believe that you can produce real behavioral changes, but it’s very circumscribed. 

In my next Insight, I’ll give an example of a time I provided executive leadership coaching to a company. 

The first step toward hiring an effective coach is having clarity about what coaching can accomplish and what it can’t accomplish.