Do you need an executive coach?

·         Around 50% of the chief executives interviewed [in a survey of over 150 current and former chief executives from around the world] said they found the job “intensely lonely” and did not know who to turn to for advice. A common response was, “I can’t talk to the chairman because in the end he’s the one who is going to fire me. I can’t talk to my finance director because ultimately I’m going to fire him, and I can’t tell my wife because I never see her and when I do, that’s the last thing she’ll want to talk about.”

 

·         “It is extraordinary to think you can be excellent at something without a coach. The notion that Roger Federer would not have several coaches is ridiculous. One of the best things that happened to me was to get a coach,” says Richard Baker, a former boss of Alliance Boots, a pharmacy.

 

As someone who has held a number of C-level posts, the above comments (which were reported in The Economist newspaper) resonated with me very strongly.

 

I’ve discovered coaching; have you?

 

Questions questions

“Neuro-psychologists have demonstrated that the parts of the brain that are used by a coachee when a question is asked are different from those used when someone receives an instruction,” says psychologist Jonathan Passmore, programme director of the Masters in Coaching Psychology course and director of the Coaching Psychology Unit at the University of East London, quoted in Personneltoday.com.

 

This comes from a useful article written by Stephanie Sparrow which first appeared in “Training and Coaching Today” and points to evidence of the science behind coaching: if an executive coach can ask their client the right questions they can stimulate their client’s brain in a new way and generate new insight. However, as the piece goes on to point out, too many questions can get in the way of listening and according to Erik de Haan of the Ashridge Centre of Coaching, “asking only a few questions is the mark of a successful coach”. Sparrow also lays out five useful coaching questions suggested by de Haan together with the intention behind them:

 

Question: Why is this issue important for you now?

Intention: To discover more about the relationship between the coachee and the issue.

 

Question: What do you expect from coaching?

Intention: To establish objectives for the coaching.

 

Question: Where have you come across a similar issue?

Intention: To find out more about the coachee’s reaction to past challenges.

 

Question: What would you advise yourself?

Intention: To help the coachee take responsibility.

 

Question: If this is a symptom of something else, what is that?

Intention: To bring out another dimension of the problem.

 

I look forward to readers sharing their own favourite executive coaching questions…

 

Harvard Business Review – Executive Coaching Survey

According to the first ever survey of executive coaching by the Harvard Business Review, the top five reasons that businesses hire executive coaches are:

1.      To develop the capabilities of a high-potential manager       28.1%

2.      To facilitate a transition (in or up)                                   19.4%

3.      To act as sounding board on organizational dynamics          13.0%

4.      To act as sounding board on strategic matters                  12.8%

5.      To address a “derailing” behavior                                     12.4%

 

The survey also reported that the focus of coaching sessions typically shifts during the course of an engagement for reasons including the following:

“Over time the focus often becomes more strategic and discretionary rather than so immediate and results driven.”

 

“The more senior the executive, the more likely [it is] that the issues will shift as the engagements tend to last longer—partly because ‘it’s lonely at the top’ and there are many key issues where someone with absolutely no axe to grind can be of great help.”

 

“As trust and new skills take root, coaching often moves to address underlying beliefs and attitudes for deeper, more lasting change.”

 

“As the coachee becomes more self-aware and understands more clearly how his/her behaviors impact others, the focus of the work changes, and we work on more in-depth issues.”

 

“You are given a list of objectives that the sponsor of the program has discussed with the coachee and the coach. That becomes the roadmap. But coaching can have a lot of twists and turns.”

 

The whole report, The Realities of Executive Coaching, which was published in January 2009, can be downloaded at http://coachingreport.hbr.org

 

Dogged persistence – fossil hunting

Often coaching is about finding the right question to ask: the one that opens your client’s mind to some completely new insight. To do this you have to keep approaching your client’s issue from all sorts of directions. It is a little like being a fossil hunter: gently tapping away at a stone until it cracks open to reveal a perfect specimen hidden inside.

 

I had an interesting experience recently with a coachee (she happens to be an experienced executive coach) who presented me with a personal issue that had bothered her for many years. I did not feel entirely comfortable with my ability to address her concern and wondered whether it might be something that I should refer to someone with different specialist skills to my own. Nevertheless I thought it worth spending a little time exploring before jumping to any conclusions. After questioning her closely for about twenty minutes I seemed to be getting nowhere and I was feeling more and more uncomfortable with the subject matter. Pulling myself together I put all my focus into thinking laterally about my coachee’s situation and I persisted with the questioning even though some of the questions I was coming up with could have seemed rather odd.

 

Then suddenly I asked her the “right” question and her whole demeanour changed. It was like cracking open the stone and finding a fascinating fossil inside. She had discovered that a critical assumption about her concern was not what she thought it was and that gave her a whole new perspective: we had broken through a barrier in her thinking. In itself this did not “solve” anything but it did provide us with a step forward in addressing her overall issue.

 

The lesson here is that it is not always possible to crack open a stone in twenty minutes but do not give up: keep coming in from different angles and you’ll get there eventually.

 

[Thanks to Cris Janzen for planting the seed that inspired this blog entry.]