Brief Overview of a Typical Executive Coaching Requirement

NewCo, a leading provider of specialized products and services across the world, desires to exploit its current strong presence in India by establishing world-class management and people leadership practices among their highly skilled work-force and managers in India.

Continually improving ways by which teams work with each other, and by allowing the star performers to soar high, the Senior Managers hope to successfully build a Leadership Pipeline at the firm. An exponential shift in the quality of Leadership is sought to be achieved by enabling the firm’s Senior Managers to rise to the challenge of becoming more professional in their perspective, and performing to these high standards.

Towards achieving these goals, it is proposed that we should:

• Develop Skills that will enable our managers to position themselves for Best-in-Class performance
• Understand the managerial demands being made by the increasingly complex marketplaces
• Use Executive Coaching as a primary facilitator that will help our Managers to take a position of peerage, rather than be recognized for merely being good followers. 
• Achieve a positioning that will:
  • Underscore our Business Acumen and Leadership competences;
  • Showcase our willingness/capabilities to manage a variety of teams & to take on challenges in a modern workplace; and
  • Encourage us to confidently step forward to take our rightful place among other Senior Managers from anywhere across the world.

A Few pointers on Best-in-Class Skills for Today’s Managers

• Managers with team members, associates and Customers from across the globe are Service Providers, and more and more is expected from them than ever before. They are expected to deliver personalized problem solving, provide guidance and continually find and facilitate ways to share wisdom across Teams.
• The methods and practices the Senior Managers need to follow are the means to achieve their ambitions, not the ambition itself. The Manager is a Service Provider to his/her team members, and in this role, is expected to have the essential maturity and humility to make this distinction between means and ends, by building it into the relationships. 
• Harmonized individual ambitions aligned with the organization’s objectives will achieve more in less time. This calls for an approach to issues and decisions that are systemic and use simple tools and a few basic attitudes to guide their plans. The Manager-Leader’s effectiveness is enhanced when seeking alignment with the team members’ clarity of purpose is added to his/her repertoire of skills.
• Essential Senior Managerial Skills include: i) not being pre-disposed to a position of imposing one’s own world view on the Team Member(s) and other stakeholders; ii) Professionalism, iii) Assertiveness, and iv) Recognition of our role as change agents.
• In order to win/retain the mind-share of the team, we should not focus on merely the tasks, schedules and other hard parameters of performance, but also provide the required leadership through a repertoire of Life Skills. The Manager-Leader, as a service provider, should focus beyond the transactions on hand, and move to build on Relationships, and possible Partnerships with the receiver(s) of his/her service. 

The past Coaching assignments include numerous Senior Executives at levels of Senior Vice-Presidents, CXOs and Directors. The people I have coached are typically of 22+ years of work experience, and are running teams of sizes varying anywhere from 300 to 1200 people.

The on-going Coaching assignments comprise 8 CXO-level people (3 CEOs, 1 Executive Director, 2 Directors of Operations, 1 Director of Global Sales and 1 Deputy Managing Director) and 9 other Senior Executives at VP and Associate Director levels, across Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai.

The total Coaching experience aggregates to over 3500+ hours of Executive  Coaching.

The example areas of intervention that the Coaching assignments have addressed include the following six assignments that were completed over the last 8 months:

• Preparing a successful Senior VP for the Global Marketplace, and in replicating his success as the Head of Engineering Center in India.
• Helping a Senior Director to adapt herself to the vastly different culture of the organization that she has joined 10 months ago.
• Getting a Sales Director (heading multiple Sales and Marketing Teams in the Company) to balance his good skills at ‘Managing Up’ with the required finesse for ‘Managing Down’ as well.
• Putting together and implementing a high-impact 100-day plan for a Chief Financial Officer who has taken on a new, high profile position that reports into the US headquarters.
• Enabling a BU Head to see the difference between managing a team, and managing the individuals in a team.
• Inspiring a highly successful CTO to job-sculpt her new role to utilize her potential to the full, while avoiding the boredom that she was slipping into.
• Helping the Head of India Operations to present his center in a more favourable light, to win the kind of projects that the engineers in India would most like to do.

In keeping with the principles of Executive Coaching, all Coaching assignments have a metric that impacts organizational performance parameters. Typically, the person coached will end the assignment by making a presentation on a PAP (Personal Action Plan) to the Board of Directors and/or a group of peers.

All our Coaching assignments broadly follow the overall philosophy and methods of Marshall Goldsmith.