In 2015, I shifted from a 30+ year career in grad school-based leadership and business education to one of C-suite-based leadership support. To do so, I had to resolve a valuation question.
When a colleague suggested my background might dispose me to be being a sought-after executive coach, I bawked. To my mind, coaching I had experienced was a cross between shiny personality-driven, image management and pyramid marketing schemes. All the popular examples I (thought) I had seen were “sages on stages” with expensive hair. I don’t like gimmicks or manipulation. Leadership was always a serious business to me, so cultivating a bag of tricks was out.
My exposure to leader development came early in my career: I was a former-U.S. Marine Corps Drill Instructor, or “DI,” for Officer Candidates. I marveled at how the executive development process the Marines applied at Quantico could transform college-age officer candidates into very serious professionals equipped to assume battlefield fortitude for hundreds of young troops, millions of dollars of equipment and national security responsibility...in a matter of weeks. From my first platoon to my 168th doctoral dissertation, leadership was always a serious. But how to translate that value into service with executives in real time?
Can coaching support translate into serious “business?” Will dollars spent on coaching support translate into profit or savings equal to my investment? Can it drive business results? What is the business case for executive coaching? After testing with early clients, I happened upon three confident assumptions that led me to my answer:
First, the executive craves a quiet mind. Executives must keep focus on the personal and enterprise results. Our brains are energy misers, reserving calories for high stakes decisions and fight/flight reflexes. A beleaguered mind is going to miss things.
Second, the executive is fragmented. experiencing an interruption of focus every 10 minutes and 29 seconds (across 10-12 different work spheres), often self-interrupting every 11 seconds if using devices are within reach. It takes 23 minutes to get back on task. The best of executives live lives of high vigilance, low satisfaction and sometimes quiet desperation when whole days go by without advancing any of their own projects.
Third, resources dedicated to the costs of coaching in terms of time and costs are recovered in working smarter (than harder) and more deliberately (than reactively). Time is saved. Waste is reduced. Progress is accountable. Work-life balance is aligned. If profit and performance is linked, coach-supported decisions are shaped to mitigate trivial and avoidant efforts for the critical and necessary ones.
These insights converge into a support model which helps leaders embody healthy enterprise-leading mindsets while advancing culture-shaping initiatives in the workplace became foundational to my approach.
My Conclusion: Executives need a “Studio.” Like dojos for martial artists, yoga houses for yogis, greenrooms and dressing rooms for actors and actresses, the court, the field, the pitch for athletes...executives need a quiet place for mastery. For this reason, I welcome back each client at the beginning of sessions, to their studio for their executive presence, practice and performance. Then, we get right to work.