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50 TOP EXECUTIVE COACHES
the organization’s strategy has changed or new demands are being made. Perhaps
those changes or circumstances are exaggerating certain behaviors and
magnifying the absence of others.
When the coaching outcomes have been set and the manager has a strategy
for action, her work is clear. I come back to visit her occasionally, to observe her
in action and to provide additional guidance. I get feedback from her
colleagues to see how she’s progressing. We have contracted around a specific
time frame that we both think is reasonable for successful change. To measure
that success, sometimes we’ll administer a 360-degree survey around those
specific behaviors or I’ll interview key individuals about their perceptions on
those behaviors. If we’ve been successful, we may or may not go onto another
behavior afterwards.
The Coach and the Client
Every coach brings different experience. My strength comes from my varied but
integrated background. I was educated as an anthropologist but have a PhD in
organizational behavior. I’ve spent time training to be a psychotherapist and I
have an MBA. I understand business, personal, and organizational issues. As an
anthropologist, I’m able to read situations across multiple levels and environments.
The ability to gather different perspectives and synthesize them, especially
across levels of analysis, is what distinguishes the very good coaches from the
average. The drawbacks are obvious for those with limited areas of expertise. A
therapist-coach, for example, focuses on the interpersonal issues but has no
appreciation for the organizational. A coach overly versed in business matters
may not have sufficient appreciation or empathy for the manager ’s life,
personality, and dilemmas.
It’s critical that a coach be able to put the executive at ease early on. Much
of that, in my case, relates to interpersonal style and even nuances like my
tone of voice. I think a tone works best when it shows it is open to informa-
tion, joint exploration, somewhat soft and paternalistic, but conveying the
offer of help. Even so, there is as much variety in approaches as there are
coaches in the field. While I use a mix of probing questions, concise observa-
tions and humor, other coaches have more confrontational or intense listening
styles. In some analogous research, studies done on the effectiveness of a va-
riety of psychotherapists have shown that more important than a particular
method is the quality of the relationship between the helper and the helped.
Likewise, I don’t think there is one correct coaching method. It’s possible
that two coaches with very different methods could get the same results with
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