Senior Leadership Coaching
Senior leaders and CEOs manage complex challenges in a world churning with change. No less a threat than external or organizational pressures, however, is under-performing leadership — never mind leaders who derail or undermine their workforce. Keeping grounded and constructive within a frequently over-stimulating fishbowl, under constant scrutiny while overloaded with information and conflicting interests, does not come easily for most people. Leaders who are healthy, centered and balanced carry their goals and their organization more effectively to its objective.
A senior leader acts as a sort of prism for their organization, which in turn will often — and often unconsciously — mirror the leader’s vulnerabilities. The potential for a stress fracture is reciprocal: what burdens a leader takes a toll on the organization, and vice versa. And yet in the face of competing pressures, self-reflection is often the first thing deprioritized — with the effect of narrowing, sometimes dangerously, the information a leader has to work with.
Goals
Senior leadership coaching is not so much a set menu as a consultation with a dietician. What does the leader have too much or not enough of to attain optimal sustainable functioning? How might they be supported to nudge their way toward a leadership style that helps them and their organization achieve their mission?
Trusted Advisor & Confidential Sounding Board
One of the biggest challenges of a senior leader is a sense of isolation in the face of a complex network of stakeholder interests. The ability to talk out loud to someone who can be trusted to be neutral, maintain confidentiality, and bring relevant perspective is often the most valued among the functions of a coach. People think better and more deeply when their partner brings interest, perspective, and respectful curiosity — and when clarifying questions or the occasional challenge to an assumption are part of the conversation.
I also engage my clients in work that deepens their awareness of their own emotional life — not only awareness of others’ emotions, which often gets the attention, but the subtler and more consequential awareness of what is happening within themselves. Many research studies in cognitive and affective neuroscience have demonstrated that when access to emotions is cut off, the capacity to make good decisions — or even any decision at all — is severely compromised. Like it or not, our emotions form the foundation of our functioning and intelligence. People who have adapted an anti-emotional mode of functioning are playing a card game with all the face cards missing from their hand, without realizing it.
Curated Support
Aside from confidentiality and neutrality, support is one of the most important roles a senior leadership coach can provide. The job is stressful beyond description. It can easily drive people to excess in the effort to cope with the pressures. Yet it is critical that support does not take the form of mindless sugar-coated approval. Effective support must be based on understanding of an individual rather than a rote formula to substitute for that understanding.
Honest and Timely Feedback
Relevant, helpful, honest and timely feedback is as valuable as it is hard to come by. In my work I offer feedback derived from two channels of information. First, from high-texture in-person 360° interviews across layers of reporting, board members, customers, and other key stakeholders. Data so gathered is anonymously, but candidly presented in a structured and sensitively relevant way. Second, I offer clients feedback throughout the engagement based on my observations and interactions with you. Shadow coaching allows me to give even more relevant real-time feedback. Feedback is not offered unfiltered, but in the context of the themes and meanings we arrive at together.
Leadership Skills
“Leadership skills” as described below might be thought of in analogy with physical fitness. Fitness has many components, from strength & muscle tone and development, cardiovascular fitness, sleep & nervous system health, etc. Improving one of these implies improving the other component of health. Although you may be aware of an area you would like to develop, for example improving conflict or negotiation skills, in reality all of the skills are interlinked with the others — just as the components of physical fitness are interdependent. Another way to say this is that improving in one area is likely to improve many or all the other areas. Self-awareness improves relationships and communication; which in turn eases tension and stress, allowing for more spaciousness that can foster creativity, clearer thinking and judgment, and better emotional regulation.
Other Coaching Topics
Onboarding to leadership role · Succession planning · Leadership style & building trust · Team coaching · Culture & values of organization · Women leaders · Board relationships · Work-life balance
Additional Background
I have been working with organizations and executives in the US, Europe and Asia since 2001, in the middle of my psychoanalytic training. Diving so deep into the psyche found me wanting 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 sometimes more — relevant than cultural differences.
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 when different languages, norms and values are thrown in. This led me into 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 a widely read article in the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, 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.
In short, I bring to leadership 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.