On Becoming a Leadership Coach

THE OPERATIVE WORD IN THE TITLE of this chapter is “becoming.” Human beings always become something. Those who like to learn set their intention to becoming a new and learned version of their self. Those who are mindful find ways to learn from the multiple events, surprises, and disappointments that comprise daily life; they also know they will never really “arrive” at a place of achieving “becoming”—like a river that continues to flow, the lessons are too numerous, our time is too short.

THE FIELD OF PROFESSIONAL COACHING IS an often misunderstood phenomenon. There is much debate and confusion about what coaching is and isn’t, what it does and doesn’t do, how it is similar and different from other interventions, and even how it is defined. This chapter provides an overview of the field. It traces the development of coaching from etiology to definition and explores the distinctions between different types of coaching and coaching and other similar interventions.

HAVE YOU EVER HAD MOMENTS in your coaching when you hit a roadblock that absolutely stumped you? Where you “missed” your client in some fundamental way? Where you suddenly realized that your client thinks in a very different way than you do? Most coaches have had experiences like this.

THIS Chapter IS NOT MEANT TO BE a scholarly treatment of the topic, but instead an effort to build awareness that coaching principles, philosophy, and practice are heavily influenced by, or at least related to, the diverse notion of “Eastern thinking.” It is my hope that it may inspire further thinking and exploration on the part of the reader.

ASK MOST COACHES WHAT OUR WORK IS ABOUT, what it is that we do, and you will likely get some variation of the following: we assist our clients in getting from where they are today to where they want to be. Whether the coaching objective is concrete or more vague, whether the challenge is tactical or aspirational, whether the goal is a solution to a problem, the overcoming of some obstacle, or addresses some element of personal transformation, we generally see our work as being about helping our client find his or her way from some point A to some point B. And, while there is truth to such a characterization, and while the work on this level is important and useful and necessary, I maintain that there is always something much more fundamental going on in an effective coaching relationship.

AS COACHES, WE HELP LEADERS MAKE the changes they seek in order to enhance their leadership, use their talents, and grow their potential. Making the change is one thing; embodying it is another. In our coaching role, we are uniquely positioned to awaken consciousness by shining a light on the body, a rich source of information. The body is a crucial participant in change. It holds history in its cells, and experience and emotions in its muscles. No significant sustainable change happens without it. As a coach, I see the impact of engaging the body is significantly greater than working with story and language alone.

MIRRORS CAN BE EFFECTIVE TOOLS for self-development. They give you a choice to see (or not) what is being reflected back to you. When I accept what I see in the mirror, I grow into a better version of myself. This is also true of what I call my inner mirror. This is the mirror in which I see the part of me that is sitting just below the surface, patiently waiting for my attention, the mirror in which I see reflected my relationship with my coaching clients. Like the mirror that reflects my physical image, this mirror allows me to interpret the reflection as I choose. Sometimes I will see an inspired coach, sometimes a harsh critic. The fact is, the mirror doesn’t criticize, judge, exaggerate, or minimize light or shadow. I do that. The mirror, whether external or internal, creates an opportunity for me to accept or reject who I am at this very moment. It can facilitate or hinder my process of becoming, a process that I find essential for personal and professional development.

COACHING IS, BY ITS VERY NATURE, a relationship. Many have labeled it a partnership, others call it an alliance. However you choose to describe it, it is still a relationship, and that relationship is at the heart and soul of coaching. The coaching relationship’s vitality, balance, and strength are what determine a client’s success.

IT IS ALMOST INEVITABLE THAT, as leadership coaches, we will encounter clients with situations and issues apparently similar to our own. These similarities may intrigue and stimulate us, or they may feel disquieting and uncomfortable.

NATALIE¹ LOOKS AT ME HESITANTLY, her normal certainty absent. The strong, confident, self-assured professional seems shaken. As she’s talking she looks at the floor, then glances up to see what I think, her shoulders tilted to the side as opposed to her normal strong presence with sustained, direct eye contact and squared-up, face-to-face posture.

In ontological coaching, leadership coaches seek to generate long-term transformational learning for their clients by engaging with their clients in the domains of language, body, and emotion. This chapter focuses explicitly on the domain of emotion and the role of emotions in coaching. We propose that without relevant emotional learning, lasting change does not take place for our clients.

COACHING LEADERS IS, IN MANY WAYS, different from coaching everyone else; and yet, in many ways, it is much the same. Leaders are, after all, human beings first and foremost. What’s different is the special pressure of being “in charge,” ultimately responsible for people and results, which means they are “on” all the time, under constant scrutiny, subject to endless second-guessing and their own impossibly high standards. In my work with leaders in a variety of organizations, I find that most of them struggle with the same issues of managing themselves, characterized by the set of distinctions examined here. Readers beware: There are no easy answers, only thoughts and ideas, and of course, more questions.

AGROUP OF COACHES, SITTING AROUND a conference table, sharing their best practices. Batting ideas around. Getting juice from the life in the discussion. One of them, Neil Stroul, offered up a framework that he had developed to organize the stories he was hearing from leaders, and he said that this framework helped him calibrate how he listened. We talked about what a leader has to do, what and how a leader thinks, and how a leader ought to learn. One of the other coaches, Karen Gravenstine, mused aloud that these organizing principles could be reordered to create an acronym “ALIFE.” We’ve used it that way ever since.

IN ESSENCE, OUR PRIMARY FUNCTION as leadership coaches is to help our clients make behavioral changes to achieve new or different results. Of course, we can’t do this for our clients; we can only help them identify and stay on the path to get there. Like coaches in other fields of life, we can increase the likelihood of success for our clients by structuring and making the most of practice. In our case, the practice focuses on behavior.

IN THE SAME WAYS THAT COACHES and clients come in all shapes and sizes, the environments in which coaching occurs are all different. For the sake of discussion, there is a distinction that needs to be drawn. The first type of coaching is “life” coaching. This type of coaching is more likely to focus on the client’s life ambitions, which may or may not be related to work, career, and leadership success. The second type of coaching is “organizational,” or “leadership” coaching, and it is the focus of this chapter.

AS COACHES OF LEADERS, we are quite skilled and practiced in building rapport with our leader/clients, asking penetrating questions, listening deeply, and understanding our clients and the worlds in which they live. When we’re with them, great things often happen. A new distinction is seen, a helpful insight is grasped, and the leader can often begin to write a new story for himself during the meeting. Powerful though those interactions may be, the question remains, “how do we keep the momentum moving forward between sessions?”

YOU’VE PROBABLY HAD THE EXPERIENCE of coaching a leader when you were sure that how they saw themselves wasn’t consistent with their behavior or what you believed was authentic for them. These people seem to be playing a role, or focus on their intentions—what they meant to do, what they were thinking at the time, or the story that they tell about themselves—rather than what actually happened. Assessments can play an important role in generating self-awareness in the leaders we coach, and provide information, beyond the leader’s self-perceptions, that can be directly applied to their most challenging situations.

THIS WAS THE BEGINNING OF THE coaching session with Sue. After this painful monologue from her, as the coach, I had to gather my thoughts about what I had just heard and observed and refl ect on what is appropriate to share with her. I noticed whenever she talked about the upcoming meeting, her shoulders rounded, she slumped down several inches in her chair, and her voice grew soft and monotonous. When she let out several deep sighs and threw her hands up in the air, I felt her exasperation. I understood her sense of hopelessness and resignation: that she had given up before she had even started the conversation with the boss’s boss.

COACHING, LIKE LEADING, lends itself to endless innovations and evolution. The evolution of leadership has covered a lot of territory— Theory X, Theory Y, situational, values-driven, emotionally intelligent, and Level 5 leadership, among others. Likewise, coaching has evolved over time, including performance-based, behavioral, cognitive, systems thinking, neurolinguistics, emotional intelligence, somatic, and holistic coaching, to name a few prominent ones. One of the beauties of evolutionary biology is that in any of its forms it builds on what is, innovates, experiments, and evolves. It’s nature’s gift to life—continual awareness, feedback, learning, and experimentation.

The CEO of a bottling company toured a plant whose employees were demoralized. The tour proved extremely successful, and the CEO’s approval of what he saw generated a visible lift of mood. Once the CEO had departed, the plant manager addressed the employees: “The boss really liked what he saw. He said it was the best he had ever seen. But why did you have the order of the products reversed in the coolers? It was embarrassing!” The employees’ mood instantly slumped.

LEADERSHIP PRESENCE IS a common coaching concern for aspiring leaders in organizations where technically savvy leaders—and even brilliant ones—climb the corporate ladder and find that they are navigating unfamiliar terrain and that the stakes are high. To succeed at this level, leaders must develop a strong leadership voice with peers, superiors, and subordinates. Many also must round off sharp edges that make them ineffective.

THIS EXAMPLE SEEMS EXTREME, yet many people who describe their commitments do so in the same kind of breathless rush, running through lists of “to do’s,” creating mental piles of commitments. As coaches, we meet people like this young woman frequently—high achievers who have gotten far in life by exceeding expectations. Eventually, they achieve a level of challenge that forces them to face up to the limitations of time, energy, and resources. Th ere are too many priorities. Everything is urgent. Nothing can be set aside or removed from the towering stack of “must-do’s.” At this point, an individual realizes that something is terribly wrong. “I can’t go on like this,” one of my clients said recently. “Even when I accomplish something important, there are three more things I haven’t gotten to. I need help sorting out my priorities and fi nding some work/life balance.”

AS SOMEONE WHO COACHES INDIVIDUALS, you might be intrigued to learn about an approach that uses your existing skills to coach a group or team effectively. Organizations all over the world are using action learning as a group-coaching method to develop teams, enhance leadership skills, solve complex problems, and improve organizational efficiency. Action learning is fast becoming a popular group-coaching method as groups work on real-time challenges and apply learning and action at the same time.

SUCCESSFUL TEAMS, WHETHER NEW OR EXISTING, need continuing support from the leader and the organization. A team coach can intensify this support by observing the team’s current functioning, assessing the team’s strengths and weaknesses, and, in collaboration with the leader, developing a plan for addressing any needed changes. Brand new teams in new situations require extra care and feeding.