Introduction
Our Journeys
We five authors came to executive coaching in ways similar to those who participate in our coach training courses—from organizational psychology, consulting, organization development, career counseling, and the personal helping professions. At the time we began to coach there was no formal practice of executive coaching. The need for individualized, just-in-time executive development emerged in the 1980s, in the form of requests for help from our human resources contacts. Taking a cue from A Chorus Line, a musical of that era, we responded with, “We can do that!” With very little definition or guidance, we originally provided those individual development services under various headings, such as developmental counseling, mental health consultation, occupational clinical psychology, or retention work. By the early 1990s, however, executive coaching had become the preferred label, and somewhat consistent expectations had been defined.
Although there was no training for executive coaches back then, there were many streams of skill, knowledge, and practice that fueled and shaped coaching work, including individual psychotherapy, leadership development courses, organization development (OD), and human resources consulting. At the same time, there were new ideas about management and leadership that were synergistic with the increasing demand for executive coaching. Managerial competencies beyond technical skills were gaining prominence, including an emphasis on the manager as coach and developer of talent. Approaches to leadership began focusing on soft skill areas such as communication and interpersonal dynamics rather than formal authority or command and control. Human resources practices were moving beyond personnel administration to include sophisticated succession planning systems and 360-degree feedback tools for individual development. Consulting and training firms and executive education branches of business schools were responding to, and advancing, these new ideas about leadership and HR practices and incorporating them into management and executive training experiences for clients.
Our early opportunities for executive coaching work evolved out of those swirling applications. Under the prevailing zeitgeist, executive coaching coalesced with a surprising degree of consistency around a confidential one-on-one relationship, informed by 360-degree and other assessments, organizationally sponsored, and anchored in on-the-job action planning. Certainly there were branded labels for coaching, reflecting a particular theoretical model or the desire to be differentiated in the marketplace, but the rough outlines of accepted executive coaching practice became clear quickly. Supporting that clarity was the fact that coaching was not yet a term used for services outside of organizational contexts. In other words, the term coaching had not yet ballooned to apply to personal, life, and career interventions.
By the early 1990s in the United States, coaching had become an accepted option for executive development. Even those firms offering more traditional classroom courses saw coaching as a complement to their efforts and grafted it on. The Center for Creative Leadership was an early innovator in executive development courses and used coaching to facilitate interpretation of assessment feedback as a basis for individual development planning. In addition, coaching found its way into increasingly sophisticated human resources practices. Competency-driven human resource planning, performance management systems, and action learning teams all triggered identification of leaders who would benefit from individualized, accelerated development. As executives and managers were selected for development, demand for coaching grew. Coaches were screened, introduced to prospective clients, and offered coaching opportunities, typically for six-month engagements.
In these early years, coaching qualifications were undefined, but some were favored: affinity for the business enterprise; insight about organizational life, especially at the top; the ability to engage executives one-on-one in a self-discovery process; and organizational sponsor management. Industry-specific knowledge, assessment tool facility, professional/human resources networks, and consulting experience were also immediately useful. Experience as a professional counselor and advanced training in psychology or other human service fields added to credibility but were not required. Eventually, a parallel phenomenon emerged as HR professionals began offering forms of coaching to managers in their organizations, and the role of the internal coach was born.
The authors participated actively in the growth of executive coaching and also were called upon to help improve its practices. Starting in the mid-1990s, we supported the development and case supervision of less experienced executive coaches. For all of us, these cases became very gratifying aspects of our professional lives. We discovered we enjoyed, and were effective at, guiding others in their coaching work. We also found a synergy between coaching the coach and our own coaching practices: Our cases became opportunities to extract lessons and provide examples, while the cases our students provided drew us into broader coaching issues and considerations of how to train coaches, whether they would be based inside their home organization (internal coaches) or become independent coaches offering their services to a variety of organizations (external coaches).
Key Principles from Our Executive Coach Training Programs
These experiences led us to deliver courses on executive coaching starting in 2002. Since then, we have refined and clarified our ideas about coaching and how coaches learn. These insights are the basis for the design and content of this book. A core idea is that executive coaching is a whole-person activity. All coaches bring unique knowledge and experience to their practices, but in a more profound way we bring our personalities, values, implicit beliefs about adult growth, and our own individual styles of connecting with others. Thus, this book does not advocate any specific coaching methodology but rather helps you, the reader, define your own approach and model. We are confident that becoming overtly aware of what you bring to executive coaching will provide you with a richer foundation than training in a standardized technique.
In creating this book, we have been very aware of the importance of doing and applying, as well as learning and understanding. To the extent a book allows, we have tried to capture the essence of an apprenticeship experience rather than only providing guidelines. We have included numerous examples of coaching casework. Every coaching topic is accompanied by a detailed illustration from a case, and that case is further explored from the perspective of a case supervisor. As our students have discovered, learning is enhanced both by application and by reflecting on the experience. Case supervision is the best way we have found for new coaches to use actual experience as a springboard to understanding how executive coaching actually works and, by extrapolation, discovering their edge as a coach.
Anchored in our whole-person philosophy and no-one-best-way approach is a strong emphasis on helping coaches to individualize their approaches. Our preferred method is to ask every coach to reflect on, and actually define, his or her own model of executive coaching. The Personal Model, which you will find detailed in Chapter 1, is an organizing principle for our courses and for this book.
We believe that this learning approach prepares coaches to deliver executive coaching services better than any other method available. To the extent possible, we have included all essential input to help you build your executive coaching practice; however, most of the success is up to you. Coaching is a competitive field and growing more so every year. Our experience is that those coaches who are willing to carve out time from their noncoaching work to pursue the type of coaching that they want to do and promote their coaching using professional networks are the ones who get traction and engagements. This applies equally to internal and external coaches.
Goals of This Book
This book is intended to give all coaches at whatever level, internal as well as external, fresh ideas about how to improve their executive coaching skills, expand their personal ranges, and grow their coaching practices. You, as a reader, may have little, some, or substantial coaching experience. Our goal is to provide varied stimuli to engage you, whatever your level, in the search to define coaching in ways that feel right to you. We hope that even if you have no executive coaching experience, this book will help you determine your interest in tackling issues that are part of delivering coaching in organizational contexts. The book also speaks to challenges for internal coaches by recognizing both similarities and differences from their external coaching colleagues. Finally, the book would be useful to students in coach training programs or to those who lead and train internal coaches within organizations.
Recording your thoughts and reactions is always a good way to begin the process of mastering content, and we encourage you to keep a journal as you move through the book. In addition, think about what you are willing to do in addition to reading this book. Doing some actual coaching and receiving case supervision will significantly catalyze your learning as you read. Attending forums and professional meetings, as well as doing additional reading, will further facilitate your learning.
The goal of this book is to expand the choices and options for your exceptional approach to coaching. Part I consists of three chapters that build a foundation for all that follows. Chapter 1 outlines the process of defining your Personal Model of coaching; Chapter 2 describes what being an executive coach requires in terms of interests and competencies; and Chapter 3 defines key terms and provides perspectives about the field of executive coaching.
Your Personal Model of coaching is informed in part by insights you gain from the important content areas of coaching, which are presented in Part II. Each chapter in Part II includes our latest thinking on topics within the practice of executive coaching, influenced by the questions, reactions, and suggestions of the students in our courses. These topical chapters also contain case examples illustrating the options and case supervisors’ perspectives about more subtle elements of the cases. The last chapter in Part II, Chapter 20, is an exception because, instead of a topic, it outlines the increasingly important role of the internal coach.
In Part III, we prompt you to consider key questions that are essential to drafting the three outputs of your Personal Model of coaching. Chapter 21 presents how to describe your emerging approach to coaching; Chapter 22 covers building your executive coaching practice; and Chapter 23 outlines planning for your future development as a coach. Chapter 24, the final chapter in the book, brings all the pieces of the Personal Model together by telling the story of one rising executive coach.
We expect that you will find some surprises in this book and possibly even ideas you disagree with. From our teaching experience, however, we are confident that this approach to teaching executive coaching will engage you. Based on our experiences, we also know that your real learning will happen as you reflect on and apply these ideas to actual coaching engagements and, in so doing, shape your own approach to executive coaching.