In my last two Insights, I answered the question, “Does executive leadership coaching develop high-potential executives?” and explained the steps in effective leadership coaching.
To help illustrate the points I made in my previous Insights, here is an example from my coaching practice:
I worked over a period of time with a managing partner of a large, multi-state law firm. They had offices in 12 cities.
What the firm was doing was acquiring small firms in target cities in which they wanted to expand, and this meant they had to evaluate the people who were currently working in those firms.
They had to look at the management structure, evaluate the support people and really move toward creating a unified culture for this new, ever-growing firm.
Not an easy task.
I was asked to help this managing partner by a senior partner who had worked with the managing partner over a period of time and saw the fact that he wasn’t making decisions in a timely fashion, especially important decisions.
So the first thing we did was the three of us—the senior partner, the managing partner and myself—had lunch and the senior partner told the managing partner, “You need help in executing decisions because I believe you know what decisions need to be made, but you don’t make them promptly enough.”
And then the senior partner reviewed with the managing partner a number of decisions that he had not made in a timely fashion.
The managing partner then said, “I really want to be 100 percent certain before I do things.”
He was being rational, but what I saw as I began to coach him was what interfered with most of his execution of the decisions was that he really didn’t relish confrontation.
So, for instance, in one of the firms they acquired, they had a marine law practice. And marine law was not a major specialty and was not part of the strategic direction that the firm wanted to move in.
And the managing partner needed to tell two senior partners who were engaged in marine law that there was no place for them in the newly reconstituted firm, and that the firm would support them in creating a boutique practice so they could strike out on their own.
The managing partner knew these two particular senior partners wouldn’t want to do this and that confronting them about it would be difficult.
So the managing partner would avoid confronting them. He knew what he had to do, but somehow he just hoped that someone else would step in and solve the problem for him.
Of course, that didn’t happen, and some of the more powerful people who worked with this managing partner were getting increasingly impatient because taking over these other law firms was supposed to increase profitability, but it wasn’t happening quickly enough.
So I worked with the managing partner and made him more willing to move promptly to execute decisions, and over a two-year period, he did improve his behavior.
What ended up happening, however, was the managing partner came to me one day and said, “You know, I don’t like doing this job; I think I’m going to go back to being a lawyer.”
For him, the coaching was successful because it helped him see that what the job required wasn’t ringing his bell.
And I see this often, especially in the legal and medical field, because you want a physician running a hospital and you want a lawyer running a law firm, but the skills and interest patterns are really different.
But that’s often what happens. As the job requirements change, the requirements for success change. This is an important lesson to keep in mind in executive coaching.