Interaction is the key and therefore these engagements can involve more onsite time. For one client, I committed to two days a week for a year. The “workday” started around 11AM and executive team meetings often started at 10PM and went into the night. While this may seem irrational, it mirrored the development engineers’ hours and left the day for interacting with business people on the traditional schedule. I received invitations to “hang out” instead of meeting requests and the conversations weren’t bounded by a rigid schedule but rather started and ended guided by the dialog.
The intake process is different because little historical information exists. Often they have no prior boss or performance review. Typically they don’t know what they want to work on. They don’t have much understanding of the expectations that others will have of them. The result is that they need more guidance from the coach. This is a challenge in that they distrust people who tell them how to behave or what they have to do. Therefore, it takes more time and care along the way. Even when initial goals have been identified, the engagement tends to unfold in a more organic way with experimentation being the norm.
At the heart of the engagement is a focus on skill building, strategy development, and other issues—but often in a different way. They want to start from a clean slate choosing what they will and won’t do without much regard for traditional wisdom, best practices or proven techniques. These interactions often challenge a coach’s belief structure.
The following example is illustrative. A young CEO posed this question: “Why do I have to have company meetings? I can just tell someone if I want them to do something different.” Answers bounced in my head: setting the vision, functional alignment to achieve common goals, reporting results, motivating people, and so on. Then rethinking; if there is regular interaction and people ask when they want to know something, maybe company meetings aren’t really required – yet. As coach, I was often trying to balance timing needs for structure in a very young and growing company. The coach in this setting needs to continually call into question whether or not an established ‘best practice’ is appropriate for this client/company at this time.
INTERVENTIONS TO HELP LEADERS GROW
Several factors govern what we do: the client and company goals, what the client has the ability/willingness to address, and the most urgent issues. Almost every engagement in this sector involves some work on leadership and management skills, top leadership team development, vision and strategy alignment, decision making skills, role clarity, interpersonal interactions, problem-solving and execution. Some of the most frequent issues that arise are around policy and rules, improving relationships between young innovators and experienced leaders, and dealing with issues of wealth and making a difference.
The diagram of this new engagement style (Figure 2) depicts the coach/client dialog at the center of the engagement. It is in this dialog that the majority of the work is done. I use the term dialog quite intentionally meaning an exchange of ideas and opinions. Good coaching skills of listening, mirroring, registering impact, invitational challenges are all useful here. These dialog sessions can be either a planned time or a short conversation following an event.
A typical client/coach dialog can be about clarifying the vision, asking who needs to understand it, what are the key tasks and activities, how can results be measured, and finally, who will do what to make it happen. Within the dialog, the coach needs to register impact about what makes sense and what needs to be worked further. So much of my own development has been to optimize my ability to be a good dialog partner. To be useful, I have to be able to assess my biases, understand the basis of my ideas and opinions, and have best possible understanding of this specific context.
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