A COACHING STORY
A chief executive who hits every number, sent to me by a Chairman who had run out of patience and the uncomfortable truth my profession rarely says out loud. Not everyone who is sent for coaching is ready to be coached, and some need a different kind of help altogether.
The first thing he told me was that he did not need me.
He said it politely, the way senior people say difficult things when they want you to notice how generous they are being by saying them at all. He had been in the industry for more than twenty years. He had built the business that now carried a good part of the group. He had nothing against local coaches, he assured me, but what he really needed was someone from abroad, someone who had sat with global chief executives and could teach him to think at that level.
He had been sent to me by the group Chairman. He wanted me to understand that the Chairman had chosen me. He had not.
Twenty eight years in this work have taught me to listen very carefully to the first thing a client says, because it is often the whole story told in miniature. His first sentence was about where I came from. Not a single word about why he was in the room.
THE NUMBERS THAT KEEP HIM SAFE
Before we ever met, the Chairman had shared the picture. The board was tired. In the 360 feedback, one director had written something you rarely see on paper about a sitting chief executive. He has an ego the size of a football. Others had been more careful with their words, but they were saying the same thing. Meetings had become his monologue. Disagreement was received as disloyalty. Capable people below him had stopped bringing him problems, because a problem was taken as a personal insult.
Then there was the other side of the ledger. He hits the numbers. Every quarter. Nobody in his team has lost a job on his watch. Bonuses are paid. When I put the feedback in front of him, he did not dispute a single comment. He dismissed all of them in one sentence.
“They don’t understand me.”
The chief executive, on reading his 360 feedback
I want to be fair to him, because this is the part most writing about difficult leaders skips. Results are not nothing. A leader who delivers year after year and keeps people employed while doing it, has earned a real kind of authority. In many boardrooms that authority quietly buys silence. The numbers become a shield and every piece of feedback bounces off the same unspoken reply. Look at my results.
The trouble with that shield is that it protects the man and hides the bill. The bill does not show up on this quarter’s profit and loss. It sits in the decisions nobody challenged, in the director who has gone quiet in meetings, in the successor who will never be ready because nobody grows beside a person who cannot be wrong. Strong results from a leader who cannot hear are a loan the organisation takes out against its own future. The repayments tend to begin after he has left.
WHY HE WANTED SOMEONE FROM FAR AWAY
Eventually I asked him what a coach from abroad would give him that a local one could not. He spoke about global thinking, about exposure, about seeing the bigger picture. All reasonable words. I have heard them many times.
Underneath them, I suspect, was something much simpler. A stranger from far away does not know the industry he has dominated for twenty years. A stranger does not know the people who wrote that 360, or the history behind their comments, or what it sounds like when a team in this market is frightened of its leader. A stranger can be impressed. A stranger can be managed.
Someone who has spent decades inside the same rooms is harder to manage and he sensed that. So the first move was to disqualify the coach before the coach could see anything.
I have no quarrel with coaches from other countries. Some of the finest people in my profession are. But in all my years I have never once seen the passport of the coach decide whether coaching worked. What decides it sits entirely on the other side of the table.
THE WORD MY PROFESSION PREFERS NOT TO SAY
Coachability.
@Marshall Goldsmith, who has coached more chief executives than almost anyone, wrote back in 2007 that even the best coach in the world will fail if the person in front of them should not be coached. Among the people he described as not worth the effort were those who do not believe they have a problem, and those who believe everyone else is the problem. His conclusion was blunt. The first is hard to help. The second, he said, is impossible to fix.
The man in my chair was both. He did not think he had a problem and in so far as anyone said he did, the problem was theirs. They did not understand him.
This is where my profession needs to be more honest than it often is. A coaching engagement is paid for. A Chairman wants a result. A coach wants the work. Everybody has a reason to keep going, so the sessions continue with a client who attends without ever arriving. We call it building trust. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is simply billing.
Coaching rests on an assumption, written into the way the International Coaching Federation describes the work, that the client is resourceful and able to look honestly at himself. When that capacity is missing, coaching does not fail loudly. It fails politely. Pleasant conversations, a few insights nodded at and forgotten and a careful report to the Chairman that says a great deal without saying anything.
“The passport of the coach has never decided whether coaching worked. What decides it sits on the other side of the table.”
WHAT I TOLD THE CHAIRMAN
So I asked to see the Chairman on his own, and I told him what I believed. Coaching would not help this man, not now, and continuing would waste his money, waste the CEO’s time, and give everyone the comfortable feeling that something was being done.
He was not pleased. He had sent the problem to me so that it would be fixed.
I told him that what this leader needed was probably not one thing. It might first be consequence. As long as the numbers were good and the board’s frustration stayed politely inside a 360 report, there was no reason on earth for him to change. The board had to decide whether it was willing to make the cost of his behaviour as real to him as the numbers were. Feedback with nothing behind it is just weather. You complain about it and carry on.
It might also be something that sits beneath anything a coach should touch. I am not a clinician and I was careful not to pretend to be one. But when a highly capable person cannot let a single piece of criticism land, when every mirror must be broken before he will look into it, that rigidity is usually protecting something. Whatever it protects is not my territory. The ICF Code of Ethics expects a coach to recognise when a client needs a different kind of professional and to say so plainly. A good therapist, someone trained to work with what lies underneath, may achieve in a year what no coach from any country could achieve in ten.
Then I said the hardest sentence of the meeting. If he would accept neither consequence nor help, the board would eventually face a different question altogether, whether he was the right person to lead the next chapter of the company. That is not coaching either. That is governance, and it belongs to them.
A QUESTION FOR THOSE WHO DO THE SENDING
If you are a Chairman, a board member or an HR leader, I would ask you to pause before you send someone for coaching. Coaching is not a punishment and it is a poor substitute for a hard conversation the board has been avoiding. Before you spend the money, ask whether this person is ready to look at himself. If the honest answer is no, a coach of any nationality will only help him get where he is already going, a little faster and a little more articulately.
If you are the one who has been sent, I would ask something different. When the board, your peers and your team are all saying the same thing about you, in different words, at different times, ask yourself who exactly is failing to understand whom. Then ask the question that matters more than any coach you could hire.
“If every one of them is wrong about me, what would it cost me to discover that they were right?”
The ones who can sit with that question do not need a coach from abroad. They will find what they need almost anywhere, sometimes in the very people they had dismissed. The ones who cannot will keep searching for a coach impressive enough to agree with them.
It begins, as it always does, with being willing to be seen by the people who can see you most clearly.
Wishing you a week with a few more mirrors in it and the courage to look.
Niroshan Silva, MCC.
If this reached you, someone you lead may need to read it too.
