How Does Coaching Help a CEO?

There are many ways a skilled coach can help CEOs and senior leaders, from being a journey partner relied upon to be honest and nonjudging, to being powerfully direct in giving immediate feedback during shadowing or during sessions that can help the leader gain immediate insight to relevant behaviors. The coach can also gather intelligence and feedback from other stakeholders who may be eager to communicate information to their leader, but who may be inhibited by time, access, or fear of being an unwelcome messenger – whether the information is about the leader’s style, or critical information about the business they want to bring to the leader’s attention but for any reason run into barriers to do so.

Other ways coaches can help senior leaders include:

• Improving self-awareness, self-management, and emotional intelligence. Developing awareness of how you are perceived and possible gap between that and what you intend.
• Get better at reading others and improving your relationships with them as a consequence.
• Become conscious of, and develop skills in managing your own mental states, your level of energy, emotional states, your thought patterns.
• Work on Vision and Values, a series of conversation that can be personal and wide-ranging in the service of identifying what is important; to have the space and sounding board to do that effectively.
• Understand what in your particular makeup makes it easy or hard to manage power, make tough decisions, to build alliances or deal with conflict; to inspire or influence others.
• Identify immediate challenges for the leader while crafting the arc of a longer-term growth path
• Develop the leader’s personal style of leadership
• Help leader think matters out loud, check their own reasoning, get new perspectives while exploring the issues, and get feedback on the thinking process
• Provide support in the face of doubts and uncertainties; or the emotional toll from the wear and tear of the job; help regain balance and strategies to reduce stress
• Help leader be thoughtful about their priorities including personal aims and the pursuit of meaning and expression of their most important values.

What Doubts or Concerns do Senior Leaders Have about Coaching?

I already have more on my calendar than I can manage. I don’t have time for it. This will just increase my stress.

If coaching increases your stress rather than alleviating it then it’s a good call to avoid it. However most leaders err on the side of spending not enough time examining where they are putting their resources, what the impact is, and what they might do differently to optimize their own contribution. If coaching works, it will help you “work smarter, not harder.”

I’m here to do business, not get into touchy-feely abstract conversations or my personal background or critique my performance.

The aim of organizationally-engaged leadership coaching is to help both you and your company succeed. Research has shown that human engagement is the most important factor in the success of any enterprise. Coaching is an evidence-based, scientific model of how best to engage the whole person so that they can be their best, to their own personal satisfaction, and the company’s benefit. Coaching strives to find the most direct, shortest path to a learning and change process while reflecting on an individual’s vulnerabilities only when it’s relevant to growth, never gratuitously. Far from critiquing performance, my style is strongly influenced by the strengths-based positive psychology model of coaching, which means starting with identifying your strengths and leveraging that as a platform from which to look at what kind of tweaks would get you the most benefit.

How do I know Jenai Wu Steinkeller, Ph.D. has the kind of experience and credibility to help me?

I have worked as a coach or consultant to company owners, entrepreneurs and CEOs, some privately held, others public with market cap over $40bn. Client industries in the US, UK and Europe have included life sciences, information, semiconductor, real estate, pharmaceuticals, legal, hedge fund, food, and arts. As a coach, organizational consultant, or psychoanalyst, I have helped thousands of clients. Rigorously trained as a psychoanalyst and psychologist through Harvard and Northwestern Medical Schools, I am less interested in having many clients as I am in having clients I can truly serve. Therefore I invite conversations that test whether I can be of help to you.