First 100 days

Most organisations who responded to the latest survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development reported that they use external executive coaches, and over a third reported that they will use more external coaches in the future. However, most companies also acknowledge that one of the biggest challenges in using coaches is to ensure that coaching is linked to the business objectives. Coaching does seem to have become a bit of a fashion item or symbol of “executive status�, but used properly a coach can be a major and very positive intervention in executive development.

Personally, I believe that external coaching does have a positive role to play in executive development – well, I would say that wouldn’t I – and in particular I believe that a good executive coach can be a key element in supporting the success of a senior executive as they seek to establish themselves in a new role.
I have recently been working with an executive just appointed to a big regional role. There are three elements to the work that we are doing.

These are:
• Job Content
• Transformational Leadership
• Sustainability

The first of these is self-explanatory, but is in my experience often overlooked. The reason it is overlooked is that the best coaching takes place when the coachee opens themselves up to a need to develop and improve. Doing this implies vulnerability, which is precisely what most new appointees are in fact desperate to avoid showing – viz many of the other blogs around this site. The value of an external coach in this situation is that the coach carries no threat to the longer-term security of the new appointee; maybe unlike a new boss or new colleagues on the board! It is not the coach’s job to come up with the answers to the new challenges, but it is the coach’s role to help and support the new appointee as they explore these challenges and formulate ways of overcoming them.
Most appointments bring with them a big step up in responsibility; and often the most significant of these is about raising one’s capability as a leader. Moving on to the board of a company with shared leadership responsibility for the whole enterprise as well as personal leadership responsibility for a complete business function is often a complete transformation from what has gone before. It requires transformational leadership. And once again it is sometimes difficult to admit to a sense of vulnerability about this transformation to close colleagues, to the CEO or even to the HR Director. On the other hand a properly established and professional coaching relationship can support much of the support that is needed.

Finally Sustainability. I had a boss in the Middle East who said to me about two months after I arrived – “For goodness sake, remember this is a marathon and not a 100m sprint�. In other words, I had started off at a pace that was only sustainable over the shorter term. For the sake of personal well-being and, in my view for the sake of the business too, we should all work at a much slower pace than is generally the case today. However it is simply not possible to run at marathon pace in a new role, and having started at a sprint the expectation builds that the sprint is what you will keep on doing. So personal sustainability becomes an issue. Part of this is quite simply about physical energy – good health and stamina are at a premium; but a large part of it is also about emotional energy, and this is the part that tends to get overlooked. Once again, a properly established coaching relationship can provide much needed emotional support, and can provide the space to rebuild emotional energy, confidence and self-belief.

So, when you have that new contract in your sticky hand and before you actually step into the new role, speak with the new boss and HR Director about getting coaching support. It will pay off – in the short term, the medium term, and the long term!