Ed Batista: Art + Practice of Executive Coaching

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I like reading the work of Ed Batista because he makes me think. Deeply. His writings explore the psyche of the senior executive working extremely hard to keep himself and the organization performing at a high level. The titles themselves are clever, and the content is more so. Here are some recent examples.

Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)

Power Struggles Among Nice People

The Warrior and the Sage

Hard Problems in Soft Cultures

The Tyranny of Feelings

Leadership and Authenticity

These writings often emerge from Batista's work as an executive coach. He explores in writing what executives are feeling and experiencing.

Coaching in small bites

Batista knows these people because he was once one of them. Before becoming an executive coach in 2006, Ed was a manager and entrepreneur. As a result, he knows first-hand the exhilaration of accomplishing the near-impossible and the fear of crumbling it all. It is for this reason, among many, that clients find his coaching helpful as well as necessary.

As Batista told me in a recent interview, “I play a useful role. But I also play a small role… I work with clients who are very long periods of time relative to the field, but I also work with people relatively infrequently. And I have many clients who I talk to once a month…  I talk to them, you know, fewer, less than 1% of their working hours.” 

Batista is direct when speaking about his coaching process. "I aspire to help people learn how to coach themselves.” [It was this approach that led Batista to develop a course at Stanford called “The Art of Self Coaching.”]

Knowing oneself

Self-awareness is essential to the coaching process. It leads to an exploration of authenticity. A leader must learn to regulate self. “Being authentic is not just saying whatever comes into your mind at any moment, you know, in the way that, that, that you see fit. That may feel good in the moment, but it's unlikely to help you accomplish your goals, especially as a leader, because your words are going to have an outsized impact.” 

Batista cites the work of a mentor at Stanford, Scott Bristol, who drew a distinction between “the created self and the discovered self.” By this reasoning, says Batista, “The authentic self can be something we discover and create.”

Authenticity plays a crucial role in how leaders relate to those they manage. Sometimes it is a performance. "We need to appreciate that performance doesn't mean phony. A performance means I'm going to adopt the persona that allows me to accomplish my goals in a given moment. This also incorporates the symbolic aspect of leadership. Leadership isn't just making decisions and allocating resources. Leadership is also embodying a persona that the organization requires."

"If instead, as a leader, you're able to create an environment that taps into people's inner motivations in which they feel kind of intrinsically inspired by the work that they're being invited to participate in.” Such an approach is more fulfilling.

“Midlife malaise”

As a coach, Batista “I work increasingly with people who've they've experienced the success that they were aiming at. And that has radically changed my work as a coach. I'm not trying to help them climb the mountain. They're already at the mountaintop. I'm helping them figure out what's beyond the mountaintop.”

Some high achievers experience “midlife malaise.” It is not a crisis where people act impetuously or irrationally, but instead, they question what's next. A solution, as Batista writes in an essay, is to embrace our mortality. 

“I do believe that embracing mortality allows us to experience these emotions (anxiety, grief) with greater equanimity and thus accurately diagnose and come to terms with midlife malaise. But I also view the feelings evoked by mortality as valuable reminders of the finite nature of this existence--and thus an important source of gratitude.”

As noted, Batista addresses challenging issues and provides insights into a possible path forward with his writing and coaching.

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Catch my LinkedIn Live show, GRACE under pressure, Tuesdays and Thursdays 2 p.m. ET. Streaming on YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn, plus iTunes and Audible. Here's my interview with Ed Batista.