Executive Coaching
Goals
Approach, Process & Tools
Executive coaching can be a thrilling individual journey of personal growth and change — pinpointing the behaviors, habits, emotional or communication patterns that most impact how you show up for yourself and others. At the same time it takes place within a work environment crisscrossed with stakeholders, competing interests, and external pressures including time. An effective process creates a safe and contained space for reflection and learning, while remaining responsive to the learning opportunities inherent in being coached on the job.
Together we balance the time to understand and appreciate you: through your own reflections, through my input, and through input from others via 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 coaching process includes working collaboratively with your organizational sponsor — manager, HR, board chair — on your development. Improving personal skills and relational interactions is another opportunity; as is surfacing the hidden or unconscious factors that may be influencing you without your awareness. Where relevant I also offer shadow coaching — real-time observation and feedback in your actual work context — and bring particular attention to the embodied and nonverbal dimensions of stress and the nervous system and how you lead.
Other Areas of Coaching Focus
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 three-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, I rapidly found that for any kind of team coaching, individual-related issues and skills were just as — if not more — relevant than cultural differences.
One prominent issue that surfaced in working with multinational teams was the complexity of negotiation and communication in conflict. Challenging enough within the same culture and language, these become unwieldy for many reasons when different languages, norms and values are thrown in. I did training on negotiation at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, followed by some teaching there as well. I joined a Working Group 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, describing the deepest personal motivations of attachment as understood through psychoanalysis, and the trust or mistrust that can manifest in real-life organizations and cultural clashes; my co-author David Laws described strategies for moving beyond mistrust and conflict.
In short, I bring to executive coaching all of my experience and training, as well as the perspective of working 20+ years with leaders and executives across a broad spectrum of industries, roles, and coaching challenges.