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Why CEOs and C-Level Executives Need a Coach

#1 Dilution of your Delusion

Every executive on the planet suffers from some level and form of delusion.  Some live constantly in the world of delusion, some just visit frequently. But, we all experience delusion.  One of the most common forms of delusion is one’s ability to fully understand how he or she is perceived by their leader, direct reports or peers.  This is the most common blind spot I see with all of my coachees.  Best told in this real world dialog…

My conversation with Tim who reports to Bob, the CEO:

“Tim, how are you working with Bob?” I asked.

“He is very difficult to work with and I can never seem to get him to listen.  And he has created very unrealistic goals for my team and I feel like we are constantly failing.” Tim said.

Same day follow on conversation with Bob:

“Bob, how do you think the team is doing?” I asked.

“Everyone seems highly engaged and motivated and I think they are valuing my leadership during these times.  I don’t sense any team members struggling right now.” Bob replied.

If I have heard this dialog once, I have heard it 1000 times.  This is a small sampling of the delusion that C-level execs face on a daily basis.  No one is immune from delusion that holds an individual or team back from growth and progress.

When you have a coach that has an open ear to delusion AND is also coaching your entire executive leadership team, this blind spot can be removed and remedied.   Without a doubt, there is some form of misalignment or misperceptions that can only be solved by an outside coach pushing his or her coachee to see through their delusions and make changes.

#2 Not So Lonely at the Top… if you have a Coach

We’ve all heard the expression, “it is lonely at the top.”  If you are the CEO, there is really no one you can turn to internally (including the board) to talk openly and honestly about all the challenges or issues you are facing…be it personal or business related.  It is a similar situation with the other C-level execs.  CEOs and C-level executives need an outside source that is 1) trustworthy  2) familiar with their situation  3) a confidential source 4) and honest with feedback.

If you don’t have this source that meets all 4 criteria above, you will always be lonely at the top and frustrations will fester and play out negatively in your leadership.

#3 Praise Agent

We ALL value and need praise.  But most executives don’t get enough or the praise is more recognition or “good job” based.  Great coaches praise their coachees regularly when they see progress and tangibly observe their growth and maturity.  No one sees the progress a coachee is making more than a coach…assuming the coachee is getting out of their comfort zone and being vulnerable with their coach.  Quality praise from a coach is the best fuel and motivation to go bigger and be confident in doing so.

#4 Playbook Broker

CEOs and C-level executives face difficult scenarios and tough “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” decisions frequently…and the expectation from stakeholders is they should have a ready playbook to execute. Reality is no single person has the end all, be all playbook. Great coaches are uniquely positioned to provide these playbooks as they have seen volumes of scenarios and challenges in their work and…they have the benefit of seeing what the outcomes of running that playbook were.   If you want to be efficient and effective and not run your business by trial and error, having a coach that has a large catalog of playbooks with outcomes will bring enormous benefits to you and your business.

 

#5 Unbiased Accountability Partner

Effective executives have accountability partners outside of the board or their CEO.  Board members are always biased towards their own agenda or area of expertise.  The benefit of an outside coach is while they might be invested in retaining a contract, their single goal is to ensure that their coachee is doing the best work of their career and that their work is pleasure with a purpose. So, they are in turn, the best accountability partner.  If an executive properly uses their coach, they will be accountable to themselves but with a trusted Sherpa by his or her side.

#6 “In the Know” Facilitator of Executive Alignment Offsites

In my 7,500+ hours of executive coaching, there is one constant…Executive teams that have quarterly or at least semi-annual executive offsite meetings are the most high performing teams.  An executive team cannot be fully alignment or in synch without offsite strategic meetings.  Staff meetings and frequent team meetings are not sufficient and will not create full alignment.  If a CEO choses to make offsite meetings a priority, meeting annual goals and achieve executive team alignment are achievable.

However, a CEO shouldn’t be the facilitator of these meetings.  If the CEO acts as facilitator, he wears too many hats during the offsite and the meeting loses it’s purpose, meaning and traction.  The CEO should be part of the team during offsites and utilize a coach as the facilitator.  Using the coach as a facilitator allows the CEO to be fully present in the meeting, lean into the alignment exercises, and observe more than direct.  And great coaches have a rich playbook of how to effectively and efficiently tailor offsites based on the current emotional state of the ELT and company.

There are many more reasons that CEOs and C-level executives perform better and are more engaged and aligned with a coach by their side.  But this list above clearly articulates the benefits that far outweigh the costs.

David Turner

The setup: In the words of Jerre Stead (ex-CEO of IHS and many other great companies), one of my most influential mentors…”People are the only sustainable differentiator.”  And I always say, it’s ALL about the talent and team.  With great and engaged talent, success is achievable even with poor products or slow markets.  With subpar or disengaged talent, maximizing potential or achieving consistent success is not possible even with the best products and growing markets.

In my opinion and experience, what separates the good from the great is the executive or people manager that can be objective about talent assessments, make hard decisions to make talent changes and do this on a frequent basis throughout a business’ evolution.  And here is the bold statement for this section: In my opinion and based on my experience, I believe that only 5-10% of all managers or executives are good or great at talent optimization.  It’s one of the most needed areas of improvement for most people leaders.

When I think about the team members that need the most of my time and coaching, it is the ones that have a sub-par quality of talent on their team.  And the exact opposite is true.  The team members that I spend the least amount of time with generally perform better than the ones I spend more time with. And the sole reason for that is the quality of talent on their team.  These team members are great at hiring, great at coaching and great at upgrading talent when needed.

However, every people leader has blind spots and at some point, needs a wake up call in terms of assessing one or more of their team members.  This coaching template below is extremely helpful to improve a people leaders effectiveness at optimizing their talent.

Coaching Questions/Exercises:

I will put the “coaching questions” in more of an evaluation template versus a series of questions.

On a scale of 1-5, rank all of your individual team members in the following areas:

1. The team member’s skills as it relates to their job or role
2. Their will and engagement
3. The quality of their peer relationships
4. Their ability to recruit, lead and influence people not just manage team members (applicable if a manager of people)
5. Their consistent demonstration of living the company’s values
6. Their willingness to be coached
7. Perform a formal or informal 360 degree survey of the above with a few of their direct reports, peers and leader’s peers.  Compare your assessment to the 360 feedback.

Many times, managers go down the path of thinking that the company has not set up a person to be successful or meet their goals. And while that absolutely is the situation in some cases, it’s usually just an excuse.  Using the statements below and the process above can help a manager make an objective assessment and not use the company as the scapegoat.

The Manager is 100% responsible and accountable for the following:

– Organizational design to enable success for individual team members

– Consistent coaching over a minimum of a quarter

– Open, Honest, Candid, Caring feedback to their team members.  Truth Telling!

The Manager and Team Member split responsibility 50/50 for the following:

– Coaching (giving and receiving if manager; receiving if individual contributor)

– Ownership for skill development and asking for help

– Ensuring that the team member has S.M.A.R.T. goals in place and agreed upon

– Feedback from the team member’s peers (manager) and managing peer relationships (team member)

The individual Team Member being assessed is 100% responsible and accountable for:

– Living the company’s values

– Their will to succeed, learn, grow, contribute, engage, etc.

– Working every day to achieve their S.M.A.R.T. goals

– Leading and coaching their team members (if a manager of people)

– Being open to coaching

Experience Share:  I had one of my coaching clients talk to me for months about a certain person that he did not think was cutting it.  We seemed to be going in circles as my client always found a reason to justify the person staying on board (sound familiar?).

Here is a sample of how our conversations:

John: “Bob is really a drag on my team as I cannot seem to count on him to deliver his work product without extensive help from others or me. It really pains me and my other team members when we have to do a lot of his cleanup.  But, he does have a lot of industry experience and people do like him.”

Me: “So should you upgrade him?”

John: “Yes, but I do think he does an ok job for what we pay him”

Me: “Is an ‘ok job’ what you want your boss to think of your work product and team?”

John: “No, and I see what you are saying and maybe I should upgrade him”

We had different iterations of this conversations over a few months and I finally came up with the criteria above and presented it to him and we used it on his entire team.   We used Bob as our example and after walking through items 1-6 with him, he came up with rating of 2.8.  Before we even talked about doing step 7, he said “well, this seems pretty straightforward and clear.”

Before our next coaching session, John upgraded the person. And as you can expect, he was elated as he felt a weight lifting off his should.  And at our next session, he told me about the new hire and John said she was a “significant upgrade and was killing it.”  John also told me about how much more engaged and excited he was about managing his team.

The setup: To achieve a steady state of work life balance or fully optimized

time management cadence is not possible.  And it is never smart to pursue or desire the impossible.   There are some days/weeks/months in which you need to work more based on a deadline or some pressing need.  There are some days/weeks/months in which you need to be at home more or more physically and mentally present in your personal life. It just never works out to where you can be in balance at all times.  

Too often people swing to the extremes.  They work too much or they are completely lazy in their work.   Or people waste time trying to save time and/or are not proactive or self-aware to better manage their priorities.  And therefore, most people struggle with balancing their personal lives and careers.  Implementing balancing habits and corrective templates to more effectively managing your priorities and time will results in being more balanced.  

Bottom line on this one… Balancing requires discipline, awareness, reflection, planning and thought.  It also takes the desire to want a more balanced life. Many people will say they want to work less or “work smarter.”  Or they want more time at home or more time just not working…but be careful of those that say it but do not really want what they say.  If a person has their identity wrapped up in their career or is miserably unhappy in their personal life, they don’t have the will to work on balancing.  So, before you go down the path of the coaching questions below, ensure there is a clear and honest will to work on balancing and make tangible changes.

Coaching Questions/Exercises:

Profile your time on an average week or random week in the past and future.  Use your calendar to ensure you get as accurate as possible based on facts versus guessimation (which is almost always wrong in this case).  Categorize the time into a few macro buckets.  What do these buckets tell you about your priorities?

Profile direct reports – grade them, discuss time required for each, their output, etc (see previous coaching template on Talent Optimization) 

Let’s review your current to-do list.  For every task, apply these questions:

1) what happens if you don’t do it?

2) what happens if you push out 30 days?

3) who can you delegate that task to? 

4) which one of your S.M.A.R.T. goals does this task directly align to?

Now how does your to-do list look?  More manageable?

What can you stop doing in both your work and personal life?   If you stopped doing that, how many hours a week would that free up?

Do you have trouble saying no?   If so, why?

Are you trying to prove yourself?  Who are you trying to prove yourself to?

Discuss where you want more time?  Work, personal hobbies, at home, with friends or family?

Discuss how the following could be applied to give you more time or make you more efficient: 

• Conducting 20 and 40 minute meetings vs 30 and 60 minute meetings
• Turn off all email and news alerts to keep you focused on the current task at hand and reduce distraction.  
• Calendaring – make entries into calendar for rest of year for tasks or meetings like your 1:1s and coaching sessions 

If your coachee is a people leader, it almost always comes down to one of four things causing the imbalance: 

1. Self Induced: They don’t actually want balance and they thrive off of chaos or 

being overwhelmed and busy.  If this is the case, it’s a whole separate coaching discussion.

• Talent: 
  • They need to reorganize their talent/team (reorg)
  • They need to coach their team on a more consistent basis  
  • They need to upgrade people on their team 
• They need to have a formal process to regularly assess priorities, optimize their time and analyze how they are spending time  
• They are understaffed or taking on more than they can handle based on the available hours in a day

Never aim for a balance, life will never be balanced, it is always a “balancing” journey.

Assess your balance on a consistent basis, expand your ability to handle stress and effectively shift the balance when out of whack.

Experience Share: Dave was a classic workaholic.  He could not admit he was but when I tracked his schedule over a few month period, it was clear that he was addicted to working excessive hours (classic workaholic for sure).   But as always, there was more to the story.  As I walked Dave through the coaching questions above, we jointly discovered that Dave was in an infinite loop of trying to prove himself to his wife.  Dave was actually incredibly efficient, which gave him time back to spend outside of work.  But, as I dug deeper into why he was trying to prove himself to his wife, he gave me a backstory and some history that clearly spelled out why he was working so many hours.  It all boiled down to the fact that he did not want his wife thinking that he was not willing to go above and beyond to provide for his family.  This infinite loop was never really defined or understood by Dave, much less discussed with his wife.  His “addiction” was: 

a) hurting the relationship with his wife 

b) hurting the relationship with his kids  

c) setting a horrible example for his team, who were feeling the pressure of working similar hours and he had some unwanted attrition on his team in the last year based on this

d) not helping the company as the extra hours were not adding value

e) and the list of negatives goes on.   

Dave and I talked out how he could discuss the subject with his wife and start to make some concrete changes.  A few days later, Dave talked to his wife about why he was working so much and his wife was extremely apologetic for her actions and words that were perpetuating the infinite loop of proving himself to her.  The pressure was relieved and Dave immediately started to reduce the late nights at the office and as expected… 

a) the relationship with his wife dramatically improved and his work was not a toxic wedge in their relationship

b) for the first time in a while, he was able to be present with his kids at night  

c) he talked to his team about the changes he was making and the engagement of his team significantly improved, and he had no unwanted attrition over the next year

d) and the list of positives goes on.

Our careers should enhance our personal lives, not negatively impact our relationships and quality of life.  Work life balancing is always possible and achievable as long as a coachee desires more of a balance.

What a great example of how coaching makes a positive impact in a coachee’s professional and personal lives.