Executive Coaching
An interesting article by Stefan Stern in today’s Financial Times highlights the reluctance of senior executives to be coached. In contrast to their role models on the golf course (why do all golfers look so darned corporate?) who maintain their elite status only with the help of experienced golf coaches, those guys (and gals) in the C-Suite often get to the top in business and then feel no need of further advice.
Stern notes, however, that executive coaching is slowly entering the mainstream.
Reporting on his brief experience with a coach, he notes that a key skill is listening and playing back answers to the client. Surely this is a common enough skill and one readily available without paying coaching fees. Not so.
“The ability to listen sensitively is depressingly rare,” notes Stern.
Quoting Myles Downey, director of the London-based school of coaching, Stern lists the concrete steps necessary to have coaching take effect:
“My job is to cause the other person to think,” says Mr Downey. He certainly achieved that with this coachee. The experience felt like a mental “spring clean”, in which vague and semiconscious concerns were brought into sharp relief. But, crucially, the coach is also there to get the subject to commit to specific actions. This is not therapy: coaching is about raising people’s performance.
There’s an obvious case to make that coaching is of most value to those who’ve risen so far into the upper echelons of an organization that no-one else in the company feels able to fulfill this service. Most of us who have halfway decent manager get feedback and goal setting from them. But who will set goals for a CEO? Who will give honest feedback to a top manager? If there are employees willing to do this they should be honored for their courage and commitment to the company and service to the person at the top who they support. Most employees are too chicken to step forward when an honest critique is needed. Or is your experience otherwise?
3 Comments so far
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True. It’s hard to give an honest feedback to top managers. This situation makes it awkward if someone will be willing to do it. It’ll most likely create a different meaning for the other employees.
By Barb on 07.23.07 7:38 pm
Most people would think that it requires a person with a higher position to evaluate top managers. But for people on the top, guts is needed for employees to give an honest feedback to those people.
By Dave on 07.24.07 6:43 pm
I find that the easiest way to get a top executive trained or coached is not to use the word training. Training implies deficiencies or inadequacies. Instead, I use the word rehearsal. Everyone knows that Broadway stars rehearse, rock stars rehearse—so there is no threat to the ego. When training becomes “rehearsal� and is positioned as a perk, then it is far more likely to happen.
By TJ Walker on 08.20.07 9:39 am
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