One very useful aspect of coaching is the chance to gain clarity on topics that are important but perhaps a bit…“foggy”.

Clients who maximize their coaching often use our coaching meetings to surface the niggling items that have been floating around in their minds, just below the level of their conscious awareness. These are the items they sense but aren’t sure if they are actually important. The client may not have articulated these thoughts out loud to anyone, or even themselves. But even attempting to voice them in the context of the situation usually starts to shine clear “sunshine” on their core issues.

Ali is a wonderful coaching client of mine, who is very strong in many respects. He is highly strategic, thoughtful, analytical, hard-working, results-oriented, respectful, warm, friendly, polite, and very well-liked by colleagues at all levels. He is strong in both performing the substance of his work as well as in leading his people.

In fact, the only thing that Ali didn’t do as much of as he could was offer his valuable, forward-thinking opinion readily, to benefit his organization. He tended to hang back, out of respect for more senior organizational leaders, assuming that they knew more and better than he did about the topic areas on which he presented.

One concept that haunts many of the executive coaches I work with in supervision is what “success” means, as a coach.   Of course, while success can be represented by many possible aspects of our coaching work, one very concrete measure that coaches often use for themselves is … money.

During supervision, an executive coach I work with, “Liz”, was clearly feeling bad about herself in comparison to other “successful” executive coaches she knows.  When Liz and I started to explore what success meant to her, it turns out she was feeling bad about herself because she wasn’t making as much money as she thought they were making. 

A coach-friend quoted the following maxim to me recently, which I found very interesting: “If you don’t introduce something new into a system, the system stagnates.”

Now, there are all sorts of possible support and applications for this thought. For example, if we don’t put food into our bodily systems, they stop functioning. That’s on the physical level. Similarly, I would say that mentally, if we don’t learn something new on a regular basis, we likewise begin to stagnate.

Sometimes, my coaching work weeks appear to have a theme. This week, the theme is: “When you anticipate having a difficult conversation, what would happen if you assumed that the other person was resilient?”

Right now I have at least 4 clients (and 1 friend) who are dealing with a conflict where they are having a hard time speaking up on their own behalf.

Corporate America tends to expect, and even prize, logic. So where and how do emotions, goals, agendas, etc. (e.g. “politics”) fit in? In other words, what do we do when these non-logical aspects arise, and contradict our logical expectations? What do we do when we expect simple, straightforward, logical behavior, purely meant to further the group’s goals — and we don’t get it?

In this research study, Dr. Lilian Abrams and colleagues report on global perceptions and practices on coaching supervision. The objective of this research study was to do an initial global study on a broad range coaching supervision issues, including current practices and perceptions of coaches who work with a Coach Supervisor.

I’d like to tell you a true story about “Suzanne’s” results from coaching (my client’s name and select details have been changed to protect confidentiality). She is the highest-level female leader in a traditionally male industry — think aerospace engineering. All of her senior leadership and peers are male, as are the majority of her line staff. Yet, after joining initially in a functional role, Suzanne rose up through the company over 20 years’ time to her current leadership role as a regional VP.

Some of us really hate to feel like we are “selling” ourselves. We want to feel authentic with others; we want to connect with them on more important, more “real” topics at hand; and we would strongly prefer that the quality of our work, our thinking, and our very being show up and stand out on their own, without us having to make a big deal out of it. The idea of spending time crafting a message about ourselves and our accomplishments, to sculpt how we land on others, makes us cringe.

A few years ago, my dear colleague Yvonne Thackray asked me, “Who are your ideal clients?” I was puzzled by the question. “I can work well with any leader who wants to work with me”, I said. To me, it was a simple question of them being motivated to achieve their coaching goals, and their feeling with a comfortable fit with me. She countered by saying that she suspected that that might not be the full picture. She suggested that I might want to identify and work with a smaller subset of better-fit clients, if I could identify them.

In a recent coaching conversation, a senior-level female executive, Angela*, raised the topic of the tension she was experiencing between encouraging a subordinate to be collaborative, and that person’s respect for her authority.

Angela is a senior-level retailer who manages a $900 million division which is part of a larger business. She is a fast-moving leader who focuses relentlessly on results. She expects all her directs and other colleagues to exhibit strategic innovation and agility to help achieve those results.

One of the hardest things for any of us to see clearly are our own strengths and development areas. Yet it’s vital, especially for leaders, to know their own strengths. These are likely the foundation for how they got to where they are, and what keeps them there, both for their own success and that of their organizations.

Of course, development areas are also important, so that leaders know the new behaviors they need to display to keep growing and achieving. However, it’s a leader’s strengths that are often under-utilized as a powerful tool for greater impact.

A heuristic is a rule or method that helps you solve problems faster than you would if you did all the computing. It sounds fancy, but you might know a heuristic as a "rule of thumb."

Derived from a Greek word that means "to discover," heuristic describes a rule or a method that comes from experience and helps you think through things, like the process of elimination, or the process of trial and error.

Everyone has their own unique path to becoming an executive coach. 

I personally came to executive coaching only after completing graduate psychology and business degrees, and after then spending more than another decade actively performing a wide variety of organizational development (OD) and leadership development (LD) work.