Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart

A Systems Approach to Engaging Leaders with Their Challenges

Mary Beth A. O'Neill

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780787986391
• eBook ISBN: 9781118047248
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Praise for Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart

"In this book, O'Neill brings form and structure to the art of executive coaching. Novices are provided a path while seasoned practitioners will find affirmation."
—Daryl R. Conner, CEO and president, ODR-USA, Inc.

"Mary Beth O'Neill's executive coaching gave me the tools and clarity to become a far more effective leader and change agent. The bottom line was that we succeeded with a monumental organizational turnaround that had seemed impossible to accomplish."
— Eric Stevens, former CEO, Courage Center

"O'Neill writes in a way that allows you to see this experienced coach in action. What a wonderful way to learn!"
— Geoff Bellman, consultant and author, The Consultant's Calling

"Mary Beth brings a keen business focus to coaching by not just contributing insights but through helping me and my team gain the insights that we need to solve our own problems. She has the ability to see through the sometimes chaotic dialogue and personalities in order to help a team focus on the real issues and dynamics that can impede organizations from achieving their goals."
— John C. Nicol, general manager, MSN Media Network

"Effective leaders require courage, compassion, and initiative. O'Neill's systems-based coaching serves as a guide for both coaches and executives to better enable good decisions and good decision-makers."
— Paul D. Purcell, president, Beacon Development Group

"With Mary Beth O'Neill's coaching, I've become the kind of leader who balances both the needs to get results and to develop great working relationships. Since I started working with her, I've won accolades as the Top Innovator for my company, and as Professional of the Year for my industry. More important, I've been able to scope my job in a way that allows me to learn and contribute at the same time, all the while delivering great results to the bottom line."
— Lynann Bradbury, vice president, Waggener Edstrom

Part One

CORE CONCEPTS The Coach’s Stance

1

AN INTRODUCTION TO EXECUTIVE COACHING

Coach: What are the most pressing business challenges you face?

Leader: We’ve got to get our division out of the cellar. Consistently we perform behind the other four divisions, and the CEO’s patience with us is wearing thin. I don’t think he’s going to put up with it much longer.

Coach: How much time have you got?

Leader: At the outside, maybe twelve months.

Coach: What obstacles prevent you from getting the results that you want?

Leader: My executive team isn’t operating as a unit. They’re pursuing their own business goals, not coordinating overlapping interests with other departments. In our meetings, when I ask for their opinions, they address issues only in their functional area. We’re not doing any creative problem solving.

Coach: What impacts do these disappointing results have on you personally?

Leader: I have to work two jobs: my own and the vacancy on my team. In my first year as senior vice president, I had three positions in a row vacated, and it’s taken too long to fill each one. It’s like trying to drive a car with one wheel constantly missing: it prevents me from looking at the big picture.

Coach: This sounds like a great setup for self-perpetuating burnout, for both you and your team. You’ll never get the results you need to succeed if you don’t carve out the space to lead your team.

Leader: So tell me how to do it when I’m fighting fires!

Coach: You may, by default, be managing only what you know how to do rather than doing what is needed. You may need to go beyond your own leadership strengths to achieve significantly different, breakthrough results. What is challenging for you about this situation in the face of these disappointing results?

Leader: Leading this effort is a big challenge for me. It’s the first time I’ve ever managed multiple functions. I’ve never spent energy on managing as a discipline in itself. I achieve success through technical know-how. I could use some help figuring out where to start.

Coach: Let’s start by defining more specifically which actions on the part of your team would directly lead to the results you need. Then we can look at how you will achieve those results with your team.

Leaders hold a special position in the landscape of change. A leader’s clarity of purpose and her ability to connect the people in her organization to that purpose go a long way toward mobilizing the necessary forces for change. Sometimes executives need help to fulfill the responsibilities of their special position. Executive coaches, who understand the demands and requirements of the change process, can help these leaders.

Leaders hold a special position in the landscape of change.

What would you do if the leader from the preceding dialogue were referred to you for coaching? What would be your goal with him? What would you want to accomplish? How would you determine if you were being effective?

These are the questions that effective coaches ask themselves every time they enter a new coaching relationship. They are also the questions that keep coaches, even experienced ones, up at night when the client or the situation reaches a particularly dicey phase.

A well-managed coaching relationship, along with an adequate period of time and a motivated executive, can lead to impressive results. That was the case for this leader, whose division became the top performer in the company within eight months.

This book explores how to think and act in ways that empower the executives you coach. It will help you become a valued resource to the leaders who need you most.

What Is Executive Coaching?

The coaching partnership begins when the leader faces a dilemma and feels stymied. The essence of executive coaching is helping leaders work through challenges so they can transform their learning into results for the organization.

Coaches possess the trained yet natural curiosity of a journalist or an anthropologist to the client’s work situation. In addition, coaches typically:

• Share conceptual frameworks, images, and metaphors with executives.

• Encourage rigor in the ways that clients organize their thinking, visioning, planning, and expectations.

• Challenge executives to expand their learning edge and go beyond their current level of competence.

• Build clients’ capacities to manage their own anxiety in tough situations.

By “executive,” I mean leaders who are in the top and upper levels of their organizations: the CEOs, senior vice presidents, plant managers, and executive directors of organizations. I define the executive’s job in three broad areas:

1. Communicating the territory, that is, the purpose, the vision, and goals of the organization to key constituencies, as well as outlining opportunities and challenges.

2. Building commitment, building relationships, and facilitating interactions that result in outstanding team performance.

3. Producing results and outcomes through the direct efforts of others as well as the executive’s own efforts.

Executive coaching is the process of increasing the client’s effectiveness in meeting these three responsibilities. For example, in the opening story, the executive was clear about the third responsibility: the results. He even had a sense about what was missing in the second area: the interactions he needed from his team. But he had yet to act on that knowledge: he was not defining the expectations he had for his team. Neither was he communicating to his team, with any conviction, the territory ahead and his vision for where they needed to go.

Some of you coach one-to-one with leaders exclusively. Others, myself included, use coaching as one tool in the toolbox used for larger organizational change projects with leaders (see Appendix D). Although my practice encompasses larger change efforts, this book focuses largely on the one-to-one executive coach work relationship because it is so critical.

It is easy to assume that this coaching relationship happens in isolation from the dynamics of the executive’s team. Of course, it does not, even when you coach only the leader. Whether coaching the executive happens with the team or independently, that relationship must take into account the team and the organization. One of the purposes of executive coaching is to turn the leader toward his team so he can lead them more effectively. This approach can enhance the contributions of both the leader and the team.

I do wish to acknowledge the special concerns of executives at the very top of their organizations. Top executives deal with issues of stockholders, owners or partners, succession, loyalty, strategic alliances, and positioning in the marketplace. Many believe that they should not ask for help, which exacerbates their “lonely at the top” experience.

The biggest difference I find in coaching top executives as opposed to middle executives is one of tone and pace. Top executives require more toughness from those who partner with them. By toughness, I mean knowing when to sacrifice tact for directness to reach the punch line sooner. Although the pace is quicker and the tone may be blunter with top executives, the coaching approach of this book works well for middle executives too.

How to Be the Most Hard-Nosed Businessperson in the Room

For as much as American and Western culture corporations have the reputation for being tough-minded and bottom-line oriented, too many organizational customers of executive coaching services invest in coaching with less rigor and outcome focus than they should. Organizations deserve to see a return on the investment they make in their executives through coaching. I make sure that I am seen as a business partner with my clients by sticking to these parameters regarding my work:

• Refuse to be satisfied with executive coaching as “finishing school.”

• Refuse to undertake an initiative that has no business measures associated with it.

• Refuse to be a substitute for your client’s boss.

By “finishing school,” I mean those vague requests for coaching that come because someone’s boss said she needed to “develop more executive presence,” or “prepare herself for the next level of management,” or “I’m not sure what my boss meant, he just said that coaching might benefit me.” There needs to be an established need for coaching expressed in ways that mobilize the client toward a specific goal.

Attaching business measures to a coaching effort makes clear the connection between investment in the executive and the return that the organization will receive. It goes well beyond finishing school and starts delivering two-for-one results for organizations: they get both a developed leader and greater bottom-line results with the same investment dollars.

Everyone is overworked in the business environment, clients’ bosses included. I do not blame bosses for wanting to offload some of their supervisory work onto their subordinates’ coaches. It is just that I do not let them succeed at their attempts to do it. Executive coaching is not a substitute for performance management. The executive coach is an adjunct resource, not a replacement for the boss-direct report relationship.

Executive coaching is not a substitute for performance management.

Four Essential Ingredients of Executive Coaching

Let’s revisit the coach-executive conversation at the beginning of this chapter. The coach’s sequencing of questions reveals four essential ingredients of executive coaching. The first ingredient is maintaining a results orientation to a leader’s problem (“What are the most pressing business challenges you face? ... How much time have you got?”) To lose sight of outcomes is to waste the leader’s time, money, and energy. The organization needs him to stay focused on what will produce the key goods, services, or information that define that organization’s success. A coach’s job is to support the leader’s drive for results.

The second ingredient is partnership. The coach becomes a partner in the executive’s journey toward greater competence and effectiveness. During the conversation (and in the question, “What obstacles prevent you from getting the results that you want?”), the coach begins to stand shoulder to shoulder with the executive in untangling and assessing the many factors, forces, and dilemmas facing the leader. Within this collegiality, the coach inquires, stimulates, and challenges the leader to perform at his optimal level.

The third ingredient is the ability to engage the specific leadership challenges that the executive faces (“What is challenging for you about this situation in the face of these disappointing results?”). This helps him explore what drives him off course and what he typically avoids—for example, seeing the waves he creates for others as he works through his agenda. Leaders naturally resist concentrating on their own actions while looking to others for results. Within the coaching partnership, the coach confronts the executive to look at the ways in which he may be his own worst enemy and thus prevent himself from achieving the results he wants.

In the fourth ingredient, the coach links team behaviors to the bottom-line goals and points out the need for executives to set specific expectations for their teams. (“Let’s start by defining more specifically which actions on the part of your team would directly lead to the results you need.”) This is an essential connection. Coaches help clients define specifically the people processes that are most relevant to the business goals. They keep leaders focused on their results orientation but also widen their view of what their teams need to do to get there. It is important in the conversation linking results to team behaviors that the leader’s responsibility remains central (note the coach’s last comment in the dialogue: “Then we can look at how you will achieve those results with your team”).

Core Principles That Guide Executive Coaching

When I coach executives, I adhere to three core values or principles. When diligen...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• The Author
• Part One - CORE CONCEPTS The Coach’s Stance
• Part Two - METHODOLOGY The Four Phases of Coaching
• Part Three - SPECIAL APPLICATIONS
• Afterword:
• Appendix A - THE CORE ACTIVITIES AND OUTCOMES OF THE COACHING PHASES
• Appendix B - EXECUTIVE COACHING SKILLS SELF-ASSESSMENT SURVEY
• Appendix C - QUESTIONS FOR CLIENTS
• Appendix D - COMBINING COACHING AND CONSULTING FOR POWERFUL RESULTS
• Notes
• References
• Index