I read back through this year’s editions last week and noticed something I had not intended.
Almost all of it is about what goes wrong. Two senior people who stopped speaking to each other. A chief executive privately certain he was a fraud. A ledger of ordinary Tuesdays left unattended until the account closed. Every word of it worth saying. All of it, taken together, a partial account of the work.
Because the reason I have stayed in this for twenty-eight years is not the diagnosis. Anybody can name what is broken in an organisation after a week of interviews. What has kept me here is what I have watched capable people do once somebody has named it.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN A LEADER ACTUALLY CHANGES
Far less dramatic than the stories suggest.
There is rarely a moment. In almost every engagement where something genuinely shifted, the sequence was the same and it was unremarkable to watch. A leader hears something about himself that he would have been perfectly entitled to dismiss. He does not dismiss it. He goes away and tests it quietly against people who have no incentive to flatter him. He comes back some weeks later having concluded that a reasonable part of it is true. Then he does the thing nobody writes about, which is to keep doing one small thing differently for long enough that the organisation starts to believe him.
That last part is the whole of it and it is deeply boring. He stops answering first in his own meetings. He stops rewriting the report before it goes up. He leaves the decision with the person he gave it to, in public, when it would be quicker to take it back. None of this appears in an annual report. Within a year you can see it in who stays.
THE RESEARCH SAYS THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD
There is a study I go back to more than any other, and it is not flattering to my profession.
In 2004, Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan published work in strategy+business drawn from more than 86,000 responses about over 11,000 managers who had been through leadership development. They were looking for what actually predicted whether a leader was seen by colleagues to have improved. It was not the programme. It was not the quality of the coach. What predicted improvement was whether the leader kept going back to the people around him, asking how he was doing, and following up. Again and again, over months.
I have never met a coach who enjoys that finding. I have come to like it enormously, because of what it implies. The capacity was in the room before any of us arrived. The most a good coach does is create the conditions in which a leader will use it and then get out of the way while he does. Anyone in this field who believes he/she is the active ingredient has misread his own results.
“The capacity was in the room before any of us arrived.”
WILLINGNESS IS NOT A WEAKNESS. IT IS A POSITION.
The stubborn assumption, still alive in plenty of boardrooms, is that a leader who wants an outside view must be struggling.
The evidence points almost exactly the other way. In 2013, Stanford Graduate School of Business, its Rock Center for Corporate Governance and The Miles Group surveyed more than two hundred chief executives, directors and senior executives. Two findings sit oddly together. Around two thirds of the chief executives were receiving no outside leadership advice at all. Yet when those who did receive it were asked whose idea it had been, close to eight in ten said it had been their own.
Nobody made them. They asked. Their directors largely agreed that they were open to it.
That matches what I have seen across nineteen countries more closely than anything else in the literature. The leaders who ask are not the wobbling ones. They are usually the ones with the clearest view of what unchallenged certainty costs, because they have paid for it once already and would rather not pay twice. Asking is not an admission. It is a decision about risk.
THE CHAIR HAS MOVED
Something in that same Stanford survey has stayed with me. More than sixty percent of the chief executives said the work they were doing in coaching stayed strictly between themselves and their coach. Only about a third of it reached the board at all.
That was where the practice sat for most of my career. Coaching arrived through a side door, usually after a problem had already become visible and it was discussed carefully and quietly, as though it were a medical matter.
What I see now, more often than I did a decade ago, is different in kind. Chairs asking for a view before there is a problem to fix. Boards wanting an honest read on how their executive team actually behaves under pressure, on whether the succession bench is real or theoretical, on whether the debate in their own meetings is genuine or performed. That is not therapy for one executive. That is an advisory function, sitting nearer to audit and risk than to training, on the reasonable understanding that the largest item on most risk registers is behavioural and nobody has written it down.
I do not take that shift for granted. It was not won by coaches becoming more impressive. It was granted by directors who worked out that the quality of the conversation at the top is a governance question, and it can be withdrawn as easily as it was extended.
WHAT IT ASKS OF US IN RETURN
If this work is going to sit near the board, it has to be worth the chair.
The evidence that it can be is reasonably solid. A meta-analysis by Tim Theeboom and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2014, drew together the available studies and found consistent positive effects across performance and skills, wellbeing, coping, work attitudes and a person’s ability to set and pursue their own goals. Coaching works, and it works across a broader range of outcomes than most sceptics assume.
The same analysis carried a finding that ought to be pinned above every coach’s desk. More sessions did not produce better results. Longer engagements were not superior. Whatever is doing the work is not duration.
Which is why the right question from a board is never how many sessions have been delivered. It is what has changed, who else can see it and how soon this can stand without us. A coach who has become part of the furniture has stopped being useful and started being an expense. The aim is to become unnecessary, deliberately, as fast as the leader can carry it alone.
WHY I STILL BELIEVE IN THIS
The fashionable view is that people do not really change after a certain age. That character sets, that the most you can hope for in a senior leader is better management of what is already there.
I have watched that be wrong too many times to accept it. Not with everyone and not on demand, and never as quickly as anyone would like. But I have sat with men and women in their fifties and sixties who took an unwelcome piece of truth, turned it over for a month, and then rebuilt the way they ran a business around it. That keeps happening. It is the most hopeful thing I know about my own species, and I get to watch it at close range, which is more than most people get from a career.
The best leaders I have worked with were not the ones with the fewest blind spots. They were the ones who stayed curious about themselves long after they had earned the right to stop.
It begins, as it always does, with someone who is willing to hear one true thing and then act on it quietly, on an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody is watching and there is no credit in it at all.
Wishing you a week in which someone tells you something useful, and you find you do not need to defend yourself.
— Niroshan Silva, MCC. Written at my kitchen table in Ratmalana.
