Why does executive coaching work?

 

Executive coaching works because of the tools and processes that executive coaches use with their clients. Perhaps another way to ask the above question is “How does executive coaching work?”

 

Executive coaching methodologies draw on a variety of disciplines from business management, leadership theory, behavioural psychology, adult learning models, systems theory, neuroscience and neuropsychology. Neuropsychology, for example, is an interdisciplinary branch of psychology and neuroscience that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relate to specific psychological processes and overt behaviours. Greater understanding about the way the brain works can help us learn how to change our behaviour to improve our effectiveness.

 

The human brain has evolved over millions of years to deal with some pretty basic survival needs. Part of the brain called the orbital cortex is built to detect changes in our environment and alert us to anything unusual. The orbital cortex is also very closely connected to the amygdala which is where the brain processes fear; this is very helpful when you are face to face with a sabre-toothed tiger. But the orbital cortex and amygdala compete for processing energy with the prefrontal region of the brain which is where a lot of higher intellectual functions operate. So when we are under stress or faced with a challenging environment we tend to act more emotionally and impulsively as our animal instincts start to take over our logical and rational thought processes. This is can be less than helpful in a business situation.

 

By learning from other disciplines, executive coaching can help clients improve their self-awareness and help them explore how to improve their effectiveness. Executive coaches help their clients analyse their goals more objectively and make decisions about what actions they wish to take to achieve those goals. The executive coach provides a framework for this and to support their client make permanent changes in their behaviour to help them achieve their desired objectives.

 

This example of the relationship between the orbital cortex and the amygdala is just one of many ways in which other disciplines contribute to the executive coaching profession. A good executive coach is alert to new insight from other fields and draws his tools from other branches of learning. Here are some examples of such tools:

• Using lateral thinking techniques to help re-frame issues and give alternative perspectives to problems
• Exploring a client’s core values and how these values influence their personal decision making process
• Identifying the core motivation behind an objective
• Helping a client to identify the full range of their skills and strengths as well as undeveloped opportunities
• Helping a client to brainstorm alternative courses of action to generate greater choices or a wider range of potential solutions
• Provide a non-judgemental, non-threatening, trusting environment to encourage creative thought
• Encouraging a client to express their goals as SMART objectives
• Driving behavioural change through a disciplined and action-oriented development plan

Part of the success of executive coaching stems from the fact that it isn’t just a one off exercise but a sustained period of learning. Executive coaching is not like a morning spent in a seminar being told something that is forgotten within a couple of weeks. Executive coaching is about a close focus on a particular aspect of your personal improvement until it becomes second nature – lodged in your subconscious so you can work towards your goals armed with a new way of thinking and equipped with new skills, behaviours and habits that stick with you for years.

 

Are you paying attention? Are you really listening?

 

Are you a good listener? Most people like to think they are. But next time you are in a conversation with someone try paying attention to how you are listening. Notice how your mind is cluttered with all sorts of things other than what the speaker is telling you. It’s very easy to be preoccupied with something else: perhaps you find yourself preparing to rebut what the speaker has just said, or maybe you are half-focused on a solution to the speaker’s problem. Or are you are distracted because you’re running late for your next meeting? 

 

Even if you can suspend your judgement and prevent your mind from wandering, listening is still difficult because listening is about being able to understand someone and often people don’t (or can’t) say what is really on their mind. I’m reminded of this quote from master obstructionist wordsmith Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the board of the US Federal Reserve:

 

“I know you believe you understand what you think I said. But I am not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.”

 

In executive coaching – indeed for all types of coaching – listening is critical and coaches train themselves to be better listeners. Good listeners – whether executive coaches, bosses or subordinates, husbands or wives, parents or children – all have the following characteristics:

• Good listeners suspend judgement and their personal prejudices. It’s not that they don’t have a view; it’s just that they don’t let it get in the way of listening to the speaker. 
• Good listeners are not defensive and do not feel compelled to justify themselves. This means they put their ego away and don’t allow negative, critical or blaming comments interfere with listening to the meaning behind what the speaker is saying.
• Good listeners can identify with the speaker and be empathetic but they don’t divert the speaker’s attention towards their own issues or get dragged into a “me too” mutual appreciation discussion.
• Good listeners hold back on giving advice. A good listener waits until he has really understood the speaker before offering advice – if at all. It’s easy to fall into the trap of providing advice when none is wanted.

Remember, as management consultant, Peter Drucker once said:

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”

A good executive coach will focus on the speaker not himself, attend to the speaker’s feelings not his own, and confirm that he has understood what the speaker has intended.

And if you don’t think you really understand what a speaker is trying to say then ask. And listen some more.

Bonus Time

 

If you were given a modest financial bonus that you were not expecting – a truly unexpected bonus rather than, say, a year end performance bonus that you were already anticipating – how would you use it? I’m not talking about winning the lottery here but something much smaller – say $5,000. It is important that you were not expecting it. Perhaps you were really, really expecting a performance bonus of $25,000 (or whatever) and you received $30,000 so the extra $5,000 is literally “beyond your expectations” but at the same time it is not a massive amount of money. Would you hoard it or add it to your savings? Pay off a credit card bill? Use it for a sensible purchase? Splurge on something?

 

How would you feel about a modest time bonus? Suppose, completely out of the blue, your boss said thanks for working so hard recently, why don’t you just take the day off tomorrow? Today in Hong Kong we are getting a bit of a battering by a passing typhoon so the city is pretty much closed down for the day. In theory, many of us can do some work from home but in practice most of us have suddenly found ourselves with a free holiday. How to spend the time? Stay in bed and catch up on sleep or slump in front of the TV with a DVD? Use the time wisely to sort out some personal administrative paperwork or to clear out the junk in the cupboard? Go for a walk on the storm battered beach? Or get together with your neighbours for an impromptu typhoon party?

 

Different people account for such bonuses in different ways. Behavioural economists such as Richard Thaler (who has written extensively on this phenomenon) call this “mental accounting”. Mental accounting is about the process whereby people evaluate economic outcomes by grouping their assets into separate (non-fungible) mental accounts. The classic example of this from Thaler is the snowstorm and the basketball game: A family has paid $40 for tickets to a basketball game at a town an hour’s drive away from their home. On the day of the game there is a snowstorm which will not stop them from going to the game but it will be a big hassle to drive there and reduce the overall pleasure they would get from the trip.

 

Most people believe that because the family has already paid for the tickets they will probably make the effort to struggle through the snow to watch the game. But if the tickets had been given to them as a gift, they would probably stay home. Surely the tickets are still worth $40 and, with the snowstorm, visiting the game requires a further investment in time and hassle? Yet if the tickets were a gift they might just chuck ‘em away and stay at home to watch the game on TV. There are some other great examples of mental accounting in this article from the Washington Post. 

 

So how did you spend your typhoon day in Hong Kong?

Trust

Trust is the foundation of all successful relationships and it is a theme I will be exploring over future posts. To whet your appetite, I thought I’d remind you of the brilliant book on the subject: “The Trusted Advisor” by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford. They open their work with a question:

 

“What benefits would you obtain if your clients trusted you more?”

 

They go on to explain that the more your clients trust you, the more they will:

 

• Reach for your advice
• Be inclined to accept and act on your recommendations
• Bring you in on more advanced, complex, strategic issues
• Treat you as you wish to be treated
• Respect you
• Share more information that helps you to help them, and improves the quality of the service you provide
• Pay your bills without question
• Refer you to their friends and business acquaintances
• Lower the level of stress in your interactions
• Give you the benefit of the doubt
• Forgive you when you make a mistake
• Protect you when you need it (even from their own organization)
• Warn you of dangers that you might avoid
• Be comfortable and allow you to be comfortable
• Involve you early on when their issues begin to form, rather than later in the process (or maybe even call you first!)
• Trust your instincts and judgments (including those about other people such as your colleagues and theirs) 

It’s fantastic if you have clients like this…but first you have to win their trust…

Benefits of Executive Coaching

Randy Goruk is a seasoned corporate executive and professionally certified career coach with over 30 years of business and leadership experience including 5 years of professional coaching. He has neatly summed up the benefits of executive coaching as follows:

 

• Improve Profitability
• Save time
• Increase personal and professional confidence
• Increase creativity and energy levels
• Faster decisions
• Greater efficiency, confidence and results
• Immediate results

 

He outlines these benefits in more detail at his blog which you can see here.

Executive Coaching is Number One for Talent Management

Bersin & Associates has recently published a “Top 22” list of the talent management processes that drive the greatest business impact. Executive coaching is top of the list.

Bersin is a research and advisory firm dedicated exclusively to research in enterprise learning and talent management strategies for business performance improvement. Their clients include a long list of top corporates and financial institutions; they spent two years on the research and analysed about one million pieces of data.

So now it’s official: executive coaching is the number one priority in your talent management strategy.

The full Top 20 can be found here.

Executive Coaching and Return on Investment

Executive coaching pays

Research has shown that the return on investment (ROI) in executive coaching is 500-800%. This means that $10,000 spent on executive coaching should generate $50,000-$80,000 in return. Not bad.

 

Two recent surveys provide some more insight as to why businesses use executive coaching. One is by the American Management Association (AMA) who commissioned the Institute for Corporate Productivity to conduct a global survey of coaching practices. Over 1,000 executives and managers were questioned about their use of coaching to determine, amongst other things, its association with higher performance and the correlation between executive performance via coaching and corporate performance. The report is available here but you need to register with the AMA to read it. The other survey was sponsored by HR consultancy Chiumento in conjunction with Personnel Today and explores the use of coaching in UK organisations from a survey of almost 500 companies.  Their report can be found here.

 

What do the surveys say?

• Executive coaching is widespread. The AMA report found that 52% of North American companies used coaching as did 55% of organisations outside of North America. According to the Chiumento survey, 65% of British companies have used coaching for the past five years.
• Executive coaching is popular. 93% of the British companies surveyed by Chiumento believe that coaching is a leading development tool and of the AMA respondents who don’t yet have coaching programs 37% in North America and 56% outside North America say they plan such programs in the future.
• Executive coaching is associated with higher performance. By “associated” I mean that the surveys couldn’t prove that coaching causes better performance but the AMA survey found that organisations that increased their use of coaching were more likely to report that they experience more success in coaching and that their organisations are performing well based on criteria such as revenue growth, market share, profitability and customer satisfaction.
• Executive coaching is primarily aimed at boosting individual performance. According to the British survey, 77% of firms use coaching primarily as a tool to improve performance. The figure for North America in the AMA survey is 79% and 87% for outside North America.

Gimme the bottom line

A study conducted by MetrixGlobal for Nortel Networks found that coaching produced a 529% return on investment as well as significant intangible benefits. MetrixGlobal have also reported that executive coaching at Booz Allen Hamilton returned $7.90 for every $1 the firm spent on coaching - almost 800% ROI. A report from the Manchester Review calculated an average return on investment of 545% from investing in executive coaching. The authors of the report postulated that:

• Coaching translates into doing
• Doing translates into impacting the business
• This impact can be quantified and maximized

But – and this is a big “but” – the Chiumento survey found that 44% of businesses believe it is impossible to measure the ROI of coaching. Their report argues that this is why 67% of organisations don’t even bother to try to measure ROI. To make matters worse, their survey found that over two-thirds of businesses believe there are too many cowboys in coaching, raising concerns about how buyers of coaching can be sure of what they are getting for their investment.

 

ROI is a theme I will come back to in future postings as is the subject of how to maximize the effectiveness of an executive coaching programme.

 

 

What is Coaching?

We often hear coaching, mentoring, therapy, consulting and all sorts of other terms bandied about. What are they and what’s the difference between them? The International Coach Federation (ICF) defines coaching as:

 

“Partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

 

Charlie Lang, current president of the Hong Kong International Coaching Community and Managing Partner of Progress-U, gave me his definition of coaching recently. He describes coaching as a two-phase process: help people to be better thinkers so they can create more choices for themselves; then keep them accountable so they can achieve their chosen objective. The ICF adds the following:

 

“Coaching is an ongoing relationship which focuses on clients taking action toward the realization of their visions, goals or desires. Coaching uses a process of inquiry and personal discovery to build the client’s level of awareness and responsibility and provides the client with structure, support and feedback. The coaching process helps clients both define and achieve professional and personal goals faster and with more ease than would be possible otherwise.”

 

So what’s the difference between coaching, mentoring, therapy, consulting and all the other stuff?

Stephen Fairley – professional speaker, best selling author and President of Today’s Leadership Coaching – has created the following chart that neatly encapsulates some of the differences between these specialist professional fields:

 

This chart is reproduced from Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching by Stephen G. Fairley and Chris E. Stout (Wiley, 2004) where the authors also explain the following:

 

Coaching is a “one-to-one interactive relationship” to help people “identify and accomplish their personal and professional goals faster than they could on their own.”

 

Consulting is about being seen as the expert. Consultants are people “who give you direct answers to specific problems.”

 

Mentoring is less structured than coaching and, unlike coaching, it doesn’t usually deploy specific goals and measurable results.

 

Managing is different from coaching in that the management relationship automatically confers “authority, permission and trust”. In coaching, the coach must always ask permission of the executive being coached to make behavioural changes. The coach-coachee relationship must be grounded in mutual trust and partnership.

 

Training or teaching is typically about a one-off event to deliver a one-way transfer of knowledge whereas coaching is an ongoing partnership of equals to help the coachee identify and achieve personal and professional goals.

 

Facilitation is usually where one person helps the members of a group communicate with each other by staying objective – often on the sidelines. A coach is an objective person but does not stay objective: they actively participate with the executive being coached to drive them to achieve their goals faster than they would otherwise by themselves.

 

Counselling or psychotherapy is mainly focused on people who are “broken, bruised or in need of healing” and who may be suffering from depression, anxiety or severe relationship difficulties. On the other hand, coaching focuses on people who are “creative, resourceful and whole” and helps healthy people perform at a higher level.

 

Asking not telling

An underlying theme here is that a coach recognises that ultimately his client is the best expert at his personal situation: what his objectives need to be, how he is going to achieve them. However the coach recognises that the client may not have figured these out properly so the coach helps the client explore issues through asking questions. It is often helpful if a coach understands the context of the environment in which an executive works but a coach does not presume to be an expert in the coachee’s job. The coach does not (and should not) tell his client what to do by giving answers. Different approaches are valid depending on the client’s situation and in practice in executive coaching relationships the coach does provide teaching or mentoring too. But the process of coaching is primarily about asking not telling.

Midlife

Are you struggling with a midlife crisis? Trying to make sense of why so much of what you have achieved in your life doesn’t seem to have much relevance to what you want to be? Wondering what on earth you are going to do for the next twenty years?

 

As someone who (I think) has successfully navigated his midlife crisis, I was fascinated to come across some interesting thinking on this subject by Catherine Fitzgerald, Ph.D., an organisational psychologist and executive coach to senior executives as well as co-editor of Executive Coaching: Practices and Perspectives, edited by Catherine Fitzgerald and Jennifer Garvey Berger (Davies Black, 2002)

 

As Fitzgerald points out, Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of the school of analytical psychology, recognised midlife as a psychological watershed in life. The first half of life – up to the age of about 35 to 40 – is about “winning a place in society” by focusing on a specialist role, a profession or business. According to Fitzgerald:

 

“In the second half of life…the focus is on being a generalist, on revisiting and incorporating all of the parts of yourself that you had put aside in order to make your way in the world of the first half of life.”

 

The transition from the first half of life to the second can be particularly traumatic – the “midlife crisis” – because it often involves a major adjustment of an individual’s preferences for basic human cognitive functions.

 

Cognitive functions

Jung identified three dimensions of psychological types, each comprising opposing pairs:

 

                        Extraversion    –     Introversion

                                Sensing    –     Intuition

                               Thinking    –     Feeling

 

Jung’s theory, which was enhanced by Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers (of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator fame) asserts that people are either born with, or develop, certain preferred ways of thinking and acting.

 

For example, although the Thinking and Feeling functions are both used to make rational decisions, the analysis preceding those decisions is performed in contrasting ways. People who prefer Feeling tend to come to decisions by associating or empathizing with the situation, trying to figure out the greatest harmony, consensus and fit, bearing in mind the needs of the people involved. Those who prefer Thinking tend to decide things from a more detached standpoint, measuring the decision by what seems reasonable, logical, causal, consistent and matching a given set of rules.

 

Crisis time

The problem with midlife is that the transition from a specialist to a generalist also applies to these cognitive types and requires people to start to develop their weaker cognitive functions. The person who has spent the first half of their life preferring a Thinking perspective may find themselves face to face with an under-developed Feeling function. As Fitzgerald explains, such an individual in midlife may find themselves drawn to:

 

·    Focusing on what they care about and value, rather than what’s logical

·    Considering their personal reactions to, not their analysis of, a situation, and taking into account the personal reactions of others

·    Viewing a situation from a more attached and subjective perspective

 

And this can lead to all sorts of angst: “Why don’t I enjoy my job any more?” “What’s the point of all this?” “Am I no longer up to the job?”

 

Solutions

Fortunately there are very positive aspects to these changes. Consider the executive who has carved out a career in some specialist area – a banker, lawyer or engineer – who is moving into a senior management position. Revisiting the three points above for our “Thinker” grappling with their less-developed “Feeler” function might suggest the following:

 

Less preferred “Feeling” attributes	Examples of opportunities for personal advancement
Focusing on what they care about and value, rather than what’s logical	Greater ability to focus on building the corporate brand or to deal with ethical dilemmas
Considering their personal reactions to, not their analysis of, a situation, and taking into account the personal reactions of others	Becoming a more effective and productive manager across a broader range of people and disciplines
Viewing a situation from a more attached and subjective perspective	Better at handling the challenges of managing a whole business division rather than a single unit

 

Myers and Briggs outlined sixteen permutations of cognitive types but although the impact of midlife on each of these types varies a great deal, they all share the common struggle of recognising, adjusting to and taking advantage of these changes.

 

Senior executives need to recognise and understand how “who they are” and “who they are becoming” affects how they address the challenges they face every day. More on this another time…