Why Executives May Need A Different Kind of Coach.

Introduction

Executives today want more than what traditional coaching offers: they want a confidant, who can both coach and advise them through a wide variety of challenges. An executive confident who knows when to use traditional coaching techniques and also when to adjust to address other issues, beyond personal transformation.?

Traditional coaching unnecessarily limits the support coaches can offer executive leaders. While many executive leaders engage coaches to further develop their leadership skills and experience personal growth, what most want is a “safe vessel” where they can freely talk about anything while controlling the agenda. This sometimes falls outside the bounds of generally accepted coaching principles.

With several years of coaching under my belt and more than a thousand hours of direct client experiences, I’ve concluded that traditional coaching is a necessary—but not always sufficient—tool for supporting senior executive leaders in a “coaching” context. Insufficient because the basic principles of coaching limit my flexibility to provide what the client needs at any given moment.

This is not to say I believe coaching techniques are to be eschewed. The change or goal expressed by my client and the process we use to facilitate the client’s success will always be at the core of my coaching. Restricting the breadth of the client relationship, however, precludes me from meeting other needs that may emerge such as brainstorming and advising when I have the expertise.??

In this piece, I share how I came to this conclusion and what I believe is a more effective approach for executive coaches looking to support their clients. I then provide examples of when conventional coaching falls short of the support executive leaders want and how an “Executive Confidant,” with more flexible and broader scope can provide a more compelling coaching relationship.

Understanding Senior Executives

Anybody who has ascended to the most senior position in an organization knows it can be lonely at the top. Senior executives can find themselves isolated and even protected by the people around them. Often, they don’t know who they can trust to share their feelings and thoughts or even brainstorm. Moreover, information and perspectives about the business can be deliberately filtered and even spun by the individuals delivering them. On the private side, support networks at home and in the community may not be able to be understanding of and empathetic to the experience of these business leaders.

Individual contributors who transition to managerial roles can find themselves feeling lonelier and more isolated. As individual contributors, their focus was on themselves and a specific task, and they may have benefited from the structure created by their manager. Now, in a team leadership role, they are expected to create the vision, the strategy, and the priorities that align with organizational goals, unify the team, and efficiently integrate the collective talents of the individuals. Having assumed a new type of role in an ever-changing environment, the quality of their decisions and leadership prowess is more important.

Sitting alone in an office, in a cubicle or even at home, leaders may benefit more from speaking with a confidant who can offer coaching, advice, or even just a willing ear at any moment—when the issue is fresh, and the outcome can be jointly molded.

Executive leaders today face an environment that is particularly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). Under tremendous pressure to grow the top and bottom lines, leaders crave a safe place where they can share their thoughts, express their frustrations, engage with a neutral sounding board, work through difficult decisions, and refine their leadership capabilities.

Conventional Executive Coaching

One-on-one coaching has emerged as the gold standard for supporting senior executives seeking to enhance their decision-making skills and leadership prowess. To guide this process, trained coaches, certified by respected organizations like the International Coach Federation (ICF) in North America and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) in Europe, use established techniques and tools.

The approaches of these two organizations help leaders develop greater self-awareness and improve their engagement with the outside world, often leading to behavioral changes that better align with desired outcomes. Unlike mentoring and consulting, this coaching process is expected to avoid direct advice-giving. Instead, the coach focuses on providing a mirror for the client. Through the coach's creation and facilitation of a process, the client's mobilization for change will be more successful because it can be more genuine and better aligns with the client’s values and goals.

There is strong scientific evidence that allowing clients to come to their own conclusions through the coach’s facilitation of a process—as opposed to advising them on what to do—makes change more genuine and sustainable. The executive leader, however, is not looking for “change” in every session.?

My coaching experience, conversations with fellow coaches, and my decades as senior executive surface the need for a slightly different, more agile coaching relationship. This broader and more flexible client relationship broadens the role of the coach, from the creator of a process to an "Executive Confidant." As an executive confident, this more flexible coach offers the safe vessel I believe most executive leaders really want.

The Executive Confidant

An Executive Confidant is a trained coach. As such, they are responsible for building a trusting relationship with the client and creating a process that can lead to a change in behavior based on a goal defined by the client. The coach helps build the client’s awareness of what’s getting in their way, and, if the client decides to mobilize for change, the coach and the client co-create an action plan and execute it through a process that includes practice, experimentation, and assimilation.?

While this approach is the gold standard for driving transformation, this is not always what the client values in a coaching relationship. At the most fundamental level, they want somebody to be there for them, no matter how they prefer to use the meeting. Sometimes, the executive wants to brainstorm, use the coach as a sounding board to improve the quality of decision-making, or receive advice about a specific area of the business in which the coach possesses legitimate expertise. In a pure coaching framework, these are not client needs a professional coach is trained to meet. In fact, based on conventional coaching wisdom, the coach is expected to refrain from providing any of this advice or pure listening.

An Executive Confidant, however, is able to flexibly respond to these needs at any given moment, even a request for business advice if they have sufficient expertise to offer. By creating a safe vessel for the executive that’s totally open and honest, the Executive Confidant offers the client the opportunity to talk about whatever they want with someone who will always listen and respond honestly and objectively.?

The truth is, sometimes what the executive needs most is a safe place to vent or run an idea by somebody who does not have a personal stake or bias in the situation. In order to be that intellectual and emotional haven, however, an Executive Confidant and the client need to develop a different kind of relationship based on trust, loyalty, and deep understanding. The confidant has the leader’s best interests at heart, often offering perspective that others within the organization cannot. This is also true for conventional coaches; however, the process and techniques generally exclude the flexibility to deliver exactly what the executive says they need at the start of a coaching session.

Illustrating Executive Confidant Support

Several of my clients today want and value support that transcends the traditional executive coaching playbook. Here are four categories of non-conventional needs expressed by my clients in the last year.?

Can I Pick Your Brain

In addition to conventional coaching, three of my clients, one C-suite, the other two at the Director level, really wanted me to play the role of “sounding board.” Each had to deliver a critical presentation at an offsite meeting in a few days.

At the start of the coaching session, I asked what their most important goal was for the session. It was clear from the start that the high-stakes presentation was top-of-mind for the client and therefore where they most wanted my support.

As we scrolled through the deck, I posed questions and, when I deemed necessary, offered suggestions. Here’s an example of a dialog with a client:

Client: “In this slide, I intend to make it clear to people what their role is and how important it is that everybody understands their personal accountabilities.”

Me: “Roles and accountabilities are certainly important. What is your purpose in presenting this slide?”

Client: “I want to make sure we are all aligned and people are motivated.”

Me: “How else could you present it in a way that motivates people?”

Client: "<long silence> I’m really not sure. What are you thinking?”

Me: “Well, I wonder if you could invert the idea and lead with the superb opportunity to be on a winning team collectively addressing an important client need with excellence. Once the compelling purpose is articulated–the goal of achieving excellence–then you can emphasize that it takes a team, and each member of the team needs to understand their role and their accountabilities.”

Blind Spots

One of the primary benefits of the coaching process is that it can enable a client to become aware of new choices. As coaches, we explore blind spots —related to the client’s perception of the choices available—that may be getting in the way of the desire for change. Often, for example, a person’s mindset is a false binary spectrum that excludes all the possible choices between the two poles. In the coaching profession, this is often referred to as “polarities.”

For example, the executives I coach sometimes believe there are two choices in their leadership: results-oriented and people-centric. Most will agree these two options are not necessarily opposites: people-centricity often drives the best results.

A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a client who believed that they had to choose between a low-impact corporate job or starting their own business. After a brief exchange, I asked whether these were the only choices. The client was unable to see how the role in the right organization could offer many of the benefits of owning a business. Unfortunately, finding a fulfilling role within his current company was not an option the client could recognize on his own, but he immediately focused on it for the remainder of the coaching session when I brought it up.

I Just Want to Talk

When I start a coaching session, I’m trained to engage in a little bit of “small talk” and then pose two questions:

Q1: “What is the most important goal or change you want to work on today?”

Q2 “When we’ve finished today’s session, what do you want to walk away with?”

In coaching parlance, this represents the “contract.” About half the time, the client apologizes for not teeing-up a goal or change to focus on prior to the call, often expressing a certain feeling of guilt or failure. However, usually following that expression of these feelings, the client spends a minute or two riffing through what’s on their mind and manages to come up with a specific change or goal and a desired outcome in response to this question I pose: “given all of that, what shall we work on today?”

Other times, I discover the client wants me to only listen. In these cases, pushing the client to define a focus- or change-goal is not at all what the client wants, nor even what they need. This is their opportunity to express what’s on their mind in a confidential vessel and it does them a lot of good to riff.

For those who have sat at the top of a large organization, finding somebody to talk with who will keep the conversation confidential and engage in it without bias is nearly impossible. In a pure coaching session, this is something we’re trained to avoid: we are expected to continue looking for a specific area to work on and ensure the client takes something away, including an action step.

In my experience, giving the client enough space, for however long it takes (e.g., multiple sessions), will benefit the client and, with a little patience, will lead to the outcome ultimately desired by the client.

Advice

Professional coaches are trained to refrain from offering advice. Usually, this makes a lot of sense because the last thing a coach wants is for the executive to perceive and act based on what’s important to the coach.

Other times, when possessing the expertise, the coach can offer the client invaluable advice at the right time. A few weeks ago, I was working with a Director at a global technology company in Australia. This executive was working 60 hours a week, leaving little time for physical exercise or family. As a result, he was stressed, overweight, and tired.

I let him talk about his current reality in his leadership for about 15 minutes instead of driving him to a “contract.” At one point in the conversation, I asked him how many direct reports he led and how well he knew each. When he mentioned twelve direct reports and said it was difficult to build a relationship with each (because there were so many), I mentioned that this figure was far off the mark of leadership best practice. We discussed the consequences, and I offered an alternative approach based on my experience leading organizations.

Summary

There are thousands of professional coaches in the marketplace and thousands of executive leaders who could benefit from their services. In a role that tends to create a feeling of isolation and loneliness, what executive leaders want most is a safe vessel, a place where they can be listened to by a professional who is open, honest, and confidential. For this reason, a blended coach and advisor—perhaps a Coachvisor or an Executive Confidant—offers more flexibility to respond to what the client needs at any given moment.

Not all coaches are ready or willing to broaden the scope of their coaching relationship with a client and may not have the expertise in the areas the client needs support. This “Executive Confidant” approach requires great flexibility and a reading of the situation.

David Ehrenthal is an Executive Coach, Advisor, Confidant and a Principal of Mach10 Career & Leadership Coaching . David can be reached at [email protected].