Why have an Executive Coach
According to Right Management Consultants, 86% of companies they surveyed in 2004 used coaches to sharpen the skills of people they identified as their future leaders. IBM has a staff of over 60 certified coaches. “Coaching has quickly evolved into the mainstream because of the demand for faster results” says Michael Goldberg, president of Building Blocks Consulting, whose clients include New York Life and Met Life.
Coaching develops managers more rapidly because the process focuses on the issues that you are currently facing in your job. A book or training program can help you learn about some managerial approaches, but rarely is this knowledge applicable to your current situation. It is like the difference between reading about how Tiger Woods plays golf and being coached at a driving range on what you need to start doing now to just hit the golf ball more solidly.
The second reason coaching develops you more rapidly is the mutual accountability for results. If you dribble the golf ball off the tee, both you and your coach see the consequences of your joint effort (the coach’s suggestion, your implementation). You both expected better. Your coach suggests an adjustment, and you try again. You both keep working at it until you consistently hit the ball solidly. You hold one another accountable to work together on your issue until it is resolved. This is what makes coaching so effective.
A third reason why coaching works is that each coaching session encourages you to stop, think and discuss the positive and not so positive effects of your key managerial actions. Taking time to think about and discuss consequences of your actions with a coach will allow you to learn a lot more from your own process, accelerating your rate of acquiring executive wisdom.
A major drawback of coaching is that you must be a proactive participant in order to get much benefit. For instance, all you have to do with a book is read it. All you have to do with a training session is to attend and listen. For coaching to work, you must take the initiative in the coaching session to present to your coach unresolved issues you are currently facing and are most concerned about. This provides the basis for discussion and resolution in each coaching session.
If you only occasionally have a situation where you are concerned that your planned approach may not be optimal, or you are not comfortable exposing your managerial concerns and uncertainties to a coach, then Executive Coaching is probably not a good option for you.
One way that our coaches work well with clients is on a client’s goal to increase the capacity or performance of the client’s organization. Each coaching session starts by reviewing what worked well and not so well since the last session (e.g. learning from your experiences). The coach and their client then work together to plan next steps. Coaches frequently document these “agreed upon next steps” in a follow-up E-mail. The coach then uses that E-mail as a guide in the next coaching session to find out what actually did and did not work well for the manager.
Managers who are not actively involved in working to increase their organization’s capacity or performance, or do not want to work with a coach on the process, may not be good coaching prospects.
Another way that coaches and clients seem to work effectively together is by addressing “the issue de jour”. While the primary intent of a coaching arrangement may have been to focus on a client’s capacity building or performance improvement goals, managers frequently encounter new issues from unexpected sources that consume their attention until resolved. When a client really trusts and respects their Executive Coach, they will want to get their coach’s thoughts on these situations. When that happens, they have a real success story!
A Coaching Case Study
The Cambodian Family has been working with the Executive Coaches of Orange County since April 2004. The agency’s Executive Director, Rifka Hirsch, considers their coach a friend, counselor and mentor, and an influential facilitator of the agency’s current strategic planning process.
Twenty-four years ago, Rifka Hirsch was working on her Masters degree in Fine Arts and supporting herself by teaching classes in English as a Second Language to refugees in Santa Ana. She met a small group of Cambodian refugees, who had recently formed a nonprofit organization and were helping Cambodian families adjust to living in the United States. At one of their meetings, the group concluded that they really needed full time staff persons to coordinate their efforts to meet the community’s growing needs. They asked Rifka if she would apply for a grant, and she agreed to try. When they were successful in obtaining the grant, they hired Rifka to direct the new program.
Twenty-four years later, the agency is still ongoing, and Rifka and her team continue to apply for a wide variety of grants. Their exceptional grant writing skills have resulted in The Cambodian Family becoming an organization of nine program managers serving the many needs of the refugees and immigrants living in their area, regardless of their country of origin.
The new millennium, however, has not been kind to The Cambodian Family. First, the stock market decline hurt the portfolios of the foundations that were supporting them, resulting in significant cutbacks in the size of their grants. This was followed by 9/11, which resulted in less federal government funding for social service programs. Rifka tried to lead her organization out of the difficulty, but she felt like they were stuck in their old paradigms of funding, and could not find their way out of their “bottle”.
In 2004, Shelley Hoss, President of the Orange County Community Foundation, invited some Orange County Executive Directors to attend a Capacity Building Strategies workshop presented by the Executive Coaches of Orange County. Rifka and three of her managers decided to attend. The idea of a “Breakthrough Capacity Building Goal” resonated with their need to find a way out of their “bottle”. The workshop’s discussion of alternate capacity building strategies helped Rifka believe that it might be possible for them to escape from their limiting paradigms.
After receiving Rifka’s application for a coach, we sent one of our coaches, John Benner, to determine which of our twenty-three coaches might be the best match for The Cambodian Family’s needs. Rifka liked the way John listened, liked his sensitivity and compassion, and asked him to be their coach. Prior to joining the Executive Coaches of Orange County, John had been a senior vice-president of Lucky Stores, had served on several nonprofit boards, and most recently was the chairman of the board of the Food Industry Crusade Against Hunger. He had also provided strategic planning consulting services internationally in Russia and Poland.
Initially, John met with Rifka and all her program managers as a team, and tried to lead them through a strategic planning process. As Rifka puts it, “John was easy to work with. He listened well, asked significant questions, and got us thinking. Sometimes he shared his perspective and suggestions, but he never pushed them on us. After a few months, we’d created a strategic plan on paper, but for a while nothing happened.”
From Rifka’s perspective “It became clear that half of us wanted immediate action, and the other half wanted to think more deeply about the issues and implications. John proposed that he and I meet one-on-one, to help consider how to proceed. And he also met individually with all my management team to interview them and get a better sense of how each of them saw their roles in our future. Our meetings were very helpful to me. John would share his approaches to dealing with situations similar to mine, but let me decide what was best for us, and what pace was best. John was truly a coach and mentor.”
From John's perspective, things were moving more slowly than he was comfortable with, but he appreciated the agency and the good work they did. He was attracted by the feeling that The Cambodian Family really was a family, with everyone’s children and loving relationships permeating the atmosphere every time he visited. He wanted to help them change, and he was challenged to figure out how.
Rifka says that “About a year into the process, a ‘breakthrough’ idea started bubbling up from the staff. We decided to have a major event to celebrate The Cambodian Family’s twenty-fifth anniversary. It was totally different than anything we had ever tried to do before, and it was a great success.” John Benner thought the event “was almost magical in its appeal.” Rifka said “It gave us the confidence that we might be able to develop and implement a strategic plan for getting us out of the bottle. Several months later, we put our new ability to the test. We organized an event to celebrate the Cambodian New Year. It too was a great success!”
Rifka goes on to say, “We are in the process of planning an agency-wide transformation that will give birth to a new Cambodian Family, in a new location where we can offer child care and other programs to meet the changing needs of our community, with new ways of funding our organization, and with an evolved leadership to carry us into the future. This transformation plan goes way beyond our original desire for a strategic plan. Getting out of the bottle was a prerequisite to envisioning our transformation.”
Rifka reports that “John is now leading us through this transformation planning process. We are applying for grants to help us fund the process. We will produce a business plan that will redefine The Cambodian Family and our work in the community. None of this would have happened if John had not sat with us through the process, been patient with us until we could find a breakthrough idea that we were ready to act on, and then lead us towards defining a much bigger vision than we ever could have imagined prior to starting our journey. We needed a credible outsider like John to keep encouraging us through all the processes that we had to go through. He listened, and was a mirror so that we could see for ourselves what we have and have not done. He cared. He chose to be there for us. He is our mentor.”
Disclosure Statement
The relationship of an Executive Coach to a client is business oriented. Its purpose is to increase the capacity of your nonprofit to do more good work in our community. Executive Coaches volunteer their time because they want to help make Orange County a better place to live, especially for people in less fortunate circumstances. We accomplish this by coaching nonprofit managers in how to increase the capacity and performance of the nonprofit services that they provide.
In order for a coaching relationship to work well for a nonprofit, a client needs to make their manager or Board aware of the relationship, and get their support. As the relationship develops, it would not be unusual for a coach to ask their client to validate the importance of achieving proposed objectives, and the appropriateness of the proposed strategies, with their manager or Board. On the other hand, it may be appropriate to treat some of the sensitive underlying issues as strictly confidential between the coach and client. The coach and the client should discuss and agree on the private issues that need to be kept private, while keeping management informed and supportive of the coaching objectives and strategies for improving the nonprofit's business.
Each client also needs to be aware that their coach is a part of the Executive Coaches of Orange County (ECofOC). Just as we ask you to keep your management aware of the business aspects of the relationship, our coaches keep one another aware of the issues that they are trying to address in their coaching assignments, and the approaches they are using address these issues. This continual sharing of coaching strategies for dealing with nonprofit issues makes your coach, and all our coaches, better coaches. In addition, if other coaches have alternate ways for addressing your issues, those coaches are likely to share those ideas with your coach in or after the meeting. When you work with one of our coaches, you are getting access to the expertise of all of the coaches in ECofOC.
Any case discussions with other coaches are about strategies for dealing with nonprofit management issues. We do not discuss individual clients. However, it is also understood that in any coaching relationship there may be some issues so sensitive, organizationally or personally, that a client does not want their coach to seek advice from other coaches. Clients and coaches are encouraged to confirm with one another any need for total privacy on these issues. This enables both of them to protect confidences and build the mutual trust that is essential to an effective coaching relationship.
Our coaches agree not to recommend goods or services from sources that they have an interest in, or to accept any fees or commissions arising from their coaching relationships. In consideration of the coach furnishing management and/or technical assistance, the client agrees to let ECofOC tell its prospects that you are one of our clients, and that you waive all claims against ECofOC, its coaches and any affiliated organizations and personnel that may be involved in providing assistance to our clients.
The Application