CHAPTER
15

Coaching for Leadership

LEADERSHIP IS EXERCISED BY PEOPLE AT ALMOST EVERY LEVEL OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL HIERARCHY. THAT IS WHY THE TOPIC OF LEADERSHIP IS OFTEN A FOCUS IN COACHING. MOST COACHES SEEK TO DEVELOP A KEEN UNDERSTANDING of leadership concepts and practices, as well as an appreciation for the special challenges and quandaries that leaders face. Some coaches become expert on the subject and use it as the foundation of their Personal Models of coaching. The majority, however, use their own professional and consulting experiences, augmented by reading and courses, to integrate leadership concepts, guidelines, and challenges into a broader coaching practice.

Understanding the demands of leadership in today’s organizations is essential. Although it can be challenging, many coaches without much organizational experience do absorb leadership vocabulary, learn to appreciate organizational challenges, refine their grasp of leadership options, and thus grow more confident about using their leadership insights in coaching leaders.

From your own experiences in organizations—as a leader, follower, consultant, volunteer, or observer—you probably have developed a wealth of ideas about leadership. Depending on the type of experience you have had, you might have made observations about formal authority and structure, dealings between staff groups and internal customers, power versus influencing, the challenges of leading physically dispersed locations, connections between leadership development and organizational objectives, organizational culture, and many other topics. These observations may have led you to consider broad questions about leadership: What does it mean to be an effective leader? How do leaders balance ambition and humility? Who are your role models for leadership effectiveness? What skills do leaders need to conduct the important interactions they have with others, such as building teams, running meetings, encouraging diversity, resolving differences, providing feedback, and so forth? The more you are a thoughtful student of organizational dynamics and leadership, the more able you will be to work with a real-life organizational leader who is struggling with similar questions.

Broadly speaking, coaches are called upon to work with leaders on their self-management, interpersonal effectiveness, and leadership impact.

At the same time, your clients will have their own ideas about leadership. Exploring their leadership principles, assumptions, and values is often a fruitful line of inquiry. A leader’s development may be narrowed by fixed beliefs about leadership, such as Leaders must drive people forward, or Leaders should be above politics. You can help clients by engaging them in questioning their leadership assumptions and identifying ways they emerge in behavior.

Leadership Challenges

Leading others is a very complex human endeavor. Leaders need confidence and self-esteem if they are to provide consistent direction and withstand scrutiny and criticism. On the other hand, excessive confidence has been shown to be a significant problem in isolating leaders from needed feedback and learning. Finding a balance between confident decisiveness and open humility is a key challenge for leaders.

In some situations it is also difficult to maintain the distinction between leadership and management. Leadership is a broader topic than management and is associated with vision, strategy, inspiration, challenge, and charisma. Management, on the other hand, may be thought of as the implementation of what leaders initiate. Managerial skills, such as contracting for performance, delegating, and providing feedback, may be subsumed under the leadership umbrella. Development goals may be tied to both managerial skills and leadership topics, often in the same client, regardless of level or title.

Another issue for leaders is decision making. Organizations are dynamic, and leading them requires making many decisions. There will be winners and losers as leaders make decisions that support some people but not others. While it is important for followers to feel that these decisions have a basis in logic and fairness, leaders cannot please everyone. In garnering support for the decisions they make, leaders must use informal alliances, positional power, and clear reasoning. Leaders who depend too much on pure logic or positional power will lose support from constituents. As an executive coach, you can counterbalance this tendency by helping leaders use a wide range of skills in conveying decisions.

Leaders frequently need to initiate change and make decisions with limited information; decisiveness is key and may be more important than finding the perfect answer. These decisions, especially when they affect people’s careers, are difficult on many levels—analytical, political, and emotional. In addition, these decisions sometimes cause leaders to isolate themselves to avoid being petitioned by those affected. You can help leaders make more balanced, tough decisions by facilitating a full exploration of the options, showing them that there is no commitment in listening to constituents, and providing support when they are feeling the weight of their impact on their employees.

Leaders also need to become comfortable with the exposure that leadership roles involve. Small actions and casual comments can have impacts beyond what the leader intends or is even aware of. Examples include who the leader says “hello” to in the morning, who is included in meetings and memos, where the leader eats lunch, or whose jokes the leader laughs at. Successful leaders need to learn to live in a fishbowl and find ways of tuning into how their words and actions are being perceived while maintaining the ability to think independently. You can provide an honest perspective about how leaders’ actions might be misperceived and help leaders build awareness of the alignment, or lack of it, between their intentions and how their actions might be perceived by others.

Leadership roles often require the performance of various symbolic tasks and appearances to reach as many employees as possible. These activities require much time and energy without clear or immediate payback. Thus, leaders also need to be skilled communicators and presenters, able to translate complex situations into readily understood explanations. Depending on the leader, these activities may be challenging and engaging or boring and frustrating. You can help leaders accept their mixed feelings about these activities and tolerate them better by helping them understand their importance to others in the organization.

It has been said that ultimately leadership cannot be taught but it can be learned. In facilitating that learning, you can stay attuned to four issues that come up repeatedly in coaching leaders:

1. The choice to lead

2. Stories that leaders tell themselves and others

3. Organizational influencing and politics

4. Polarities that drive the leader’s style choices

Choice to Lead

As described previously, management and leadership are conceptually different, but in practice they overlap. Every manager’s job has some leadership elements, even if on a small scale. However, as managers begin to advance through the managerial ranks, their responsibilities as leaders may be downplayed. As a result, managers may find themselves in roles with significant leadership demands without having consciously chosen to become leaders.1 They may have been promoted without really appreciating the demands of being a leader, or they may have been following advancement and financial incentives without fully considering their actual interests and other tradeoffs.

In the context of a trusted coaching relationship, you may want to explore your client’s choice to lead. It is possible such a choice has never been considered. Questioning your clients about their real interest in leadership challenges, aspirations to higher levels of leadership, and strengths and gaps for leadership activities may both deepen their understanding of leadership and confirm their true interest in the role. On the other hand, your queries may reveal a lack of connection to leadership demands and unspoken concerns about trade-offs in being a leader. These issues may be a hidden drag on your clients’ energy. Either way, conversation about the choice to lead can yield useful insights.

Leadership Stories

As discussed in Chapter 12, eliciting a client’s career story is a way to foster dialogue and build a productive coaching relationship. In coaching leaders, however, stories take on even more importance.2 Leaders rely on the stories they tell themselves about how and why they have achieved what they have. Those stories clarify their values and confirm lessons learned. They also reveal the client’s implicit beliefs about leadership, which may need to be explored and expanded.

Leaders also tell stories to their followers to engage and inspire them. Some have said that successful leadership depends on the ability to tell compelling stories. As experienced sounding boards, coaches can help leaders explore the power of their stories, especially those they tell others. Coaches can help leaders evaluate key questions about stories, such as: How engaging is the vision described in the story? How clear is the message about what needs to happen? How well does the story strengthen leader-follower connections? How strongly does the story motivate followers to be part of the organization’s future? You can use these prompts to increase a leader’s impact through both delivery and content improvements.

Organizational Influencing and Politics

Stories are especially helpful to the formal part of leadership in painting a picture of the organization’s future. Equally important are the stories that leaders use in the informal processes of persuasion: seeking support among influential followers; creating opportunities for informal discussion; giving some topics prominence over others; taking advantage of interactions that happen in the hallway, during lunch, or during travel or other occasions that can give a leader significant leverage. These informal influencing activities can be referred to as organizational politics, although the term carries a negative connotation for some clients. Clients who have been on the losing side of influencing a decision or who have been outmaneuvered by others may have rejected politics as an influencing tool, which is unfortunate. You can help those clients understand that politics do not need to be negative and are a fact of organizational life; avoiding them weakens leaders by reducing the number of tools they have to exert influence. While some clients may equate politics with underhanded or destructive behavior, you can help them identify the natural and essential elements of informal influencing that organizational politics embody.

Leadership Polarities and Choices

While there are many lists of leadership competencies, using polarities illustrates leadership skills more accurately than lists do. Every behavioral or stylistic choice that a leader makes tends to limit another choice that exists on the other end of the same continuum. For example, leaders who choose to encourage harmony cannot at the same moment foster overt debate.

Another implication of this idea is that too much of a particular leadership dimension can be counterproductive. As such, more is not necessarily better. Making informed choices requires leaders to have well-tuned situational judgment so that they can choose the side of the polarity, as well as the amount, that is needed at a particular moment.3 Taking the idea further, leaders who are more skilled and comfortable at one end of a polarity may tend to overuse that skill and miss opportunities for using its opposite. For example, leaders who are very comfortable with operating environments and making tactical decisions may rely on these skills too much as they advance in an organization’s hierarchy, resulting in the lack of empowerment of others. Limitations due to overuse can be significant gaps for leaders that you, as the executive coach, can help them overcome.

Examples of other leadership polarities include: interpersonal closeness versus distance, pride versus humility, approachability versus toughness, and empowering versus directing. Leaders need to be able to range across these continua and make conscious choices about which skill to use and how strongly to apply it.

You can help to bring these four leadership challenges to the forefront of your client’s awareness through asking questions and encouraging discussion. To the extent that you can anticipate these topics and leverage your ability to explore them, your leader-clients are likely to have more insights about likely developmental issues and what skills or behaviors they might need to work on in coaching.

Coaching Senior Leaders

Leadership issues for senior level, or C-suite executives (such as the chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, chief marketing officer) require a modified approach to coaching—a change of style that allows you to be in sync with the pressures of being at the top of an organizational hierarchy.

Senior leaders generally do not get to their positions because they are reflective or even conceptual. Moreover, they probably do not want to give up whatever set of skills and behaviors got them to their current level. Thus, when building credibility with senior-level managers, you may want to avoid too much introspection, abstraction, or critiquing past habits. The willingness to do these things may come in time but requires patience as your credibility is tested more than at lower organizational levels. When working with senior leaders, it is even more important for you to do your homework about the client’s organization and background, as well as about the broad topic of leadership at the top of organizations.

The use of psychometrics and standardized 360-degree questionnaires is generally less frequent at senior levels of the organization. The statistical norms are less meaningful, and clients are likely to find less value in being labeled using dimensional language. Unless the assessments are tied to a developmental program that senior leaders attend, they generally prefer that you do qualitative data gathering. In addition to doing informational interviewing to gather data about these clients, you may also be able to contract to shadow them during actual meetings, and some coaches emphasize it in their Personal Models. Because shadowing involves your direct observation of the senior leader in action, during daily activities or important meetings or presentations, it presents an opportunity for you to provide immediate feedback that can be a powerful intervention. Shadowing requires that the client be completely open with others about your presence and the coaching process.

Senior leaders are likely to treat all outside professionals as consultants. Unfortunately, they may lump you into that same category. As a result, they expect you to be prepared, even though they may not be. They may also expect you to be unusually flexible about scheduling and changing appointments. In addition, they may seek to change your contracted work if it suits their needs or interests. So-called mission creep can occur as your coaching relationship morphs into recruiting, team building, and even career counseling. You need to know your own boundaries and how much you can flex them in order to be prepared for senior leaders who have expectations that are not part of your usual coaching relationships.

As confident as senior leaders can appear, they often really need and value a journey partner. Their executive roles can be isolating and lonely, at the same time that they are heady and privileged. Coaching can help meet their emotional needs for connection, honesty, and support in ways that their collegial relationships may not. Senior leaders appreciate the contrast to their thinking that your observations and ideas represent. In fact, senior leaders may contract with you to be a sounding board for their thinking and not be that interested in data gathering or development plans. Such a relationship can be very useful to senior leaders as long as it focuses on a leader’s development and does not become consulting on HR or organizational decisions.

Finally, C-suite executives may or may not want their Human Resources VP involved in their coaching. Be careful not to assume that involvement as you might with coaching at lower levels. Instead, contract with the leader about how to include HR, if at all. Looking in the other organizational direction, you may want to explore if there are board directors who have a role in the senior leader’s development and contract for their involvement as sponsors or stakeholders in the coaching engagement.

CASE ILLUSTRATION: NICE GUYS SOMETIMES GET THE TOP JOB

While stereotypes abound, senior leaders are not always confident, polished, and politically astute. Those qualities are certainly valuable, but there are many ways to be a leader and still achieve great things. All leaders bring to their roles both strengths and deficiencies. Organizational culture plays a role in the type of leadership style that will be effective in each situation. In the case that follows, the senior leader’s professional and personal characteristics had served him well, and they are likely to be essential to him in the future, but only with the coach’s help in making adjustments and building confidence about leadership at the top.

Marsha, an executive coach, was asked by her HR contact, Eric, to meet with the COO, Tom, who was interested in working with a coach. Eric told Marsha that he would not have his usual involvement in the engagement and that Tom had his own budget for development. Marsha had substantial prior experience coaching in the organization, but she had never met Tom. She did know that he was respected for his technical expertise, was generally liked, and had been asked to head up a new business venture for the company. Marsha did not know what to expect at their first meeting, but they quickly clicked and began getting into the serious issues that were troubling Tom.

First, there was the issue of Tom’s boss, the CEO. He had made it clear to Tom that he believed Tom needed a stronger leadership presence. Tom didn’t disagree with this assessment, but from a practical standpoint, he didn’t know what he actually should do differently and even if he did, whether he was capable of being a different type of leader. Marsha’s follow-up questions and explorations during the next two coaching sessions revealed Tom’s story. He was proud of his engineering background and enjoyed applying its discipline even to nonengineering problems. In the current job, however, there was never enough information, and the time frames were too short to allow the usual analytical rigor that he preferred. In some cases, he even was unsure if he had identified all the essential variables, let alone get thorough information about them. He also had strong inclinations to be cooperative with others and a supportive team member.

Now he was head of the team, and the climate was not to his liking. There was internal competition for his support, and he sensed some crosscurrents among people who might actually gain something by his failure. He also admitted that the job was draining him. He couldn’t seem to stay ahead of the demands and sincerely didn’t know if he could satisfy all the internal clients, his own staff, and his boss. Finally, during earlier assessments, he had learned that he preferred an introverted style. He could be effective leading people, usually on technical challenges, but he needed his private time, too. He wondered aloud whether he was cut out for the constant exposure, demands, and political forces at his current level in the organization.

Tom seemed to find some benefit in unburdening himself to Marsha; trust had developed. However, they both agreed that they needed some additional data. Since standardized assessments had not helped Tom evaluate his suitability for leadership, Marsha chose a qualitative approach, opting to interview Tom’s boss and eight other colleagues. This process even included getting Eric’s perspective on the situation. After completing the interviews and summarizing the themes, Marsha discovered that Tom was doing better than either he or his boss thought. He was well regarded for his integrity, intelligence, dedication, and experience. His unforgiving standards for himself did not really show up in what others were experiencing. People recognized that this new venture was a major challenge for all concerned, and they offered suggestions. However, they all believed that Tom had a good chance of making it succeed. They also suggested that Tom’s boss had unrealistic expectations for progress. Marsha confirmed that competition and politics surrounded Tom’s role; the company’s recent and rapid growth had created a scramble for resources and influence.

Marsha and Tom discussed the situational variables, his strengths, and his new challenges thoroughly. There were several outcomes from this discussion. First, they agreed that Tom had some equity as a leader in the organization and that it would buy him some time to adjust to the new role. They labeled it his “learning to lead” agenda and decided that they would use it to shape immediate and short-term leadership challenges that Tom would need to learn to deal with. They would also include Tom’s boss in some of that discussion. Second, they would take seriously, but hold in abeyance, decisions about whether Tom really wanted to be a leader at his current level. Third, they would identify the truly exciting challenges that the position offered and bring out more of the upside of them, while still being cognizant of the demands on Tom. Finally, they contracted for biweekly coaching sessions for a longer course than the usual six-month engagement, estimating that it would probably take closer to a year to provide Tom with both the learning and interpersonal support that he would need.

Supervisor’s Observations

Coaching senior leaders is a challenge that requires both significant skill and flexibility. Executives expect you to step into their situations quickly and make positive contributions based on very limited information. They also expect you to take the lead on devising a coaching process that meets their needs.

Marsha appears to be handling the situation with Tom well. She created a safe place for Tom to deal with his uncertainties, and she was able to contain them without denying their importance. She used his story well to build insight about both strengths and possible gaps. Using qualitative data-gathering methods provided valuable input and, more important, room to maneuver.

There are several scripts in Tom’s thinking that they will need to revisit several times and hopefully rewrite, such as his need to lead through being technically correct and his belief that conflict is bad and to be avoided. In addition, she will find it helpful to remember that clients sometimes confuse the results of quantitative and other standardized tests with truth; introversion is a preference, not a dictate. It will help Tom to be reminded that there are many very effective leaders who are introverted. Leadership is about behavior, not traits, and Tom has choices, which Marsha can help him make, especially as he develops his own sense of what effective leadership means for him.

They have made a good start on their coaching relationship and Tom’s development, but there is much work to do. In addition to a substantial leadership learning agenda, tailored to Tom’s particular style and situation, he may need help managing his boss’s expectations. The boss probably has a very different leadership style, and Tom needs the confidence to differentiate the boss’s approach from his own. Tom also needs help accepting some of the trade-offs in being a senior leader, such as constant visibility, balancing personal and professional priorities, empowering others but also holding them accountable, and wanting to be a nice person but making decisions that some people won’t like.

Assuming the coaching succeeds in the medium term, more advanced topics will increase in importance. Tom could then work on being more political in building alliances within the culture and setting a vision for his unit that ties in with the larger organization. Ultimately, the success of Marsha’s coaching supports the success of the company, truly showing the action learning aspects of senior leadership coaching.

Takeaways

Image While not every coach is an expert on leadership, it is important for you to have familiarity with leadership definitions, concepts, and models.

Image There are key challenges in being a leader that coaches need to grasp: exposure, difficult decisions, symbolic activities, and constant communication demands are examples.

Image Leadership and management are different but overlapping concepts; coaches often work on both.

Image Four issues that come up repeatedly in coaching leaders are the choice to lead; stories that leaders tell themselves and others; organizational influencing and politics; and the polarities that drive the leader’s style choices.

Image Senior leaders are apt to treat coaches as consultants, so mission creep needs to be monitored. Most leaders, however, really value a coach’s observations and perspectives as a counterbalance to the isolation of their executive roles.

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