Executive Coaching
Goals
- Articulating professional development trajectory with targeted and meaningful particulars
- Increasing understanding of self and other people, thereby optimizing relationships
- Learning strategies for variety of challenges, from stress resilience, personal confidence, or productivity, with knock-on effect to team and organization
- Aligning personal growth with improved organizational effectiveness
Approach, Process & Tools
On the one hand, executive coaching can be a thrilling individual journey of personal growth and change. It can efficiently pinpoint the behaviors, habits, emotional or communication style that most impacts how you show up for yourself and others. On the other hand, it often takes place within a work environment crisscrossed with stakeholders and interests and external drivers, including time. An effective executive coaching process involves creating a safe and contained space for reflection and learning, while leveraging and being responsive to the learning opportunities inherent in being coached on the job or about a job.
Together we balance the time to understand and appreciate you: through your own reflections, through my input, and input from others — through high-texture information-gathering interviews. These three inputs are woven together to identify the themes and direction of coaching, and coalesced into a development plan.
Managing the process of coaching, including working collaboratively with your organizational sponsor (such as manager, HR, board chair) on your development is one of several powerful opportunities to change. Improving personal skills and relational interactions is another; as well as surfacing hidden or unconscious factors influencing you.
Other examples of what may happen in executive coaching
- Creating and sustaining a non-judgmental, supportive space to facilitate self-reflection and insight
- Getting deeper understanding of your own behavior and motivation, thereby leading to skills in managing your own mental states, energy, and thought patterns
- Helping to organize ambiguity or confusion around managing people and culture aspect of organization
- Straight talk and feedback to help you to read others and increase emotional intelligence
- Embodied and experiential learning
- Attunement to the unstated, subconscious, often nonverbal inner forces of psychological and emotional habit, in the service of getting a better handle on what and how to change
In the service of an executive coaching engagement, I use a variety of tools and lenses. These include:
- Live 360 interviews & review of feedback from interviews
- Discovering, articulating and choosing meaningful goals for a Development Plan
- Real-time coaching, also known as Shadow Coaching
- Cognitive-behavioral skill development
- Improving emotional intelligence
- Fine-tuning communication skills
- Improving negotiation and conflict management skills
- Reviewing and understanding relevant relationship dynamics
- Real-time feedback through the coaching interaction
- Focus on embodied learning and nonverbal cues
- Increasing mindfulness and somatic experiencing
Other Areas of Coaching Focus
- Career transition
- Creativity
- Imposter syndrome
- Life changes
- Peak performance
- Relationships
- Women leadership
Additional Background
I have been working with organizations and executives in the US, Europe and Asia since 2001, around the same time I was thick into my psychoanalytic training. Diving so deep into the psyche found me compelled to balance it with a wider lens. I started working with corporate leadership teams during a 3-year stint at Trompenaars Hampden-Turner, a boutique consultancy specializing in multinational companies. While the main work consisted of aligning cultures in cross-border mergers and acquisitions; and helping global teams articulate vision, mission and values for their organization , I rapidly found that for any kind of team coaching, including leadership teams, all of the individual-related issues and skills were just as, if not more relevant, than cultural differences.
However, one prominent issue that surfaced in working with multinational teams was the complexity of negotiation and communication in conflict. These are challenging enough within the same culture and language, but can become unwieldy for so many different reasons when different languages and norms and values are thrown in. I did some training on negotiation at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation (PON), followed by some teaching there as well. I joined a Working Group of PON Members including Roger Fisher (author of Getting to Yes) and other founders and law professors who saw a convergence between the principles of psychoanalysis and integrative negotiation. Within that group I wrote and published Trust and Other-anxiety in Negotiation, in which I describe the deepest personal motivations of attachment as described by psychoanalysis, and the trust or mistrust that can manifest in the context of real-life organizations and cultural clashes; while my co-author David Laws described strategies to move beyond mistrust and conflict.
In short, I bring to executive coaching all of my experience and the lenses and tools with which I have been trained, to bear on our work, as well as the perspective of working 20+ years with leaders and executives across a broad spectrum of industries, roles, and coaching challenges.