Executive coaching: the premier one-to-one consulting

Executives face ever more varied and demanding challenges. Changed conditions and new tasks bring entirely new requirements. What applies to mountaineers is also highly relevant to politicians and managers: the higher you climb, the thinner the air and the icier the wind blowing against you.

In addition, the summit is usually reached in the company of only a few, and the executive is often alone in the most difficult situations. With whom can I discuss sensitive topics at all? With whom can I reflect on my questions, perceptions and impressions without taking a risk? These and other questions occupy many people at the top of an organisation or organisational unit.

What has long been an important success factor in competitive sport is increasingly being accepted and sought after in business and politics too: coaching. Top people from business and politics use experienced interlocutors as executive or business coaches. With them, they discuss and reflect on personally and professionally relevant topics, challenges, questions, opportunities, risks and also crises, and work out solutions.

Topics that could otherwise not be discussed inside or even outside one’s own organisation can be worked on in an absolutely protected space, in the strictest confidence and in a personal one-to-one conversation. Very successful top politicians and top managers no longer want to do without this effective and helpful support, because they have come to value working with a qualified sparring partner.

Top executives fall short of their potential if they lack the capacity for self-reflection and cannot deal confidently with their own limits. Both personality dimensions can be described more precisely.

Self-reflection is the ability to observe oneself from a helicopter perspective within a social fabric, especially in one’s own organisation. It is important to establish what one’s own environment triggers in oneself and vice versa. The manager recognises that their own behavioural options are the most important instrument of intervention for achieving personal and organisational goals. Impact comes from personal intervention.

That is why it is so important to know what one triggers in one’s environment as a top executive through one’s own actions, and how the environment affects oneself. From this, insights can be gained into which factors have a strengthening effect and which tend to be a hindrance.

transformis assumes that leadership is a co-creative process. Both the possible and the impossible are always achieved together with others from one’s own organisation or environment. This attitude rules out projecting undesirable developments onto “the organisation” or “the employees”, because one always sees oneself as an essential part of the whole.

The capacity for self-observation thus increases the chance of increasing one’s own impact in a targeted way and evaluating it continuously. In this way, the need for corrections can also be recognised early and corrections can be initiated in good time.

A further important success factor for leadership is the ability to assess one’s own abilities realistically. It prevents action out of overconfidence or underestimation. It is also a prerequisite for handling one’s own need for complementary skills in the leadership role with inner confidence and for surrounding oneself with people who can compensate for one’s own deficits.

This enables a top executive to feel competent even in difficult, uncertain, opaque and highly complex situations. If a leader’s sense of their own competence is severely shaken, all their actions and efforts are no longer geared to the factual requirements of the situation. They then serve to restore their own positive sense of competence.

Knowing one’s personal stress limit is therefore an important prerequisite for successfully coping with stressful situations outside one’s comfort zone.

Executive coaching is an effective way of further developing these two personality dimensions and thus significantly expanding one’s own performance, even in difficult and very demanding situations.

The starting point for close collaboration is contracting. In it, coach and coachee clarify four questions. What is the specific occasion for the coaching? What is the concern, and what is to be achieved? What contribution is expected of the executive coach and of the manager themselves? By what are the results of the coaching to be observed and evaluated?

The contribution expected of the coachee is an important starting point. The more concretely it can be worked out by what the manager’s success is observed and measured and what results they have to deliver, the more concretely the coachee’s relevant topics can be worked on.

It is equally important to work out which strategic and operational tasks have to be mastered, what kinds of decisions have to be made and what conflicting goals and paradoxes the coachee will be confronted with. In addition, the relationship and network work associated with the tasks is an important success factor. These conditions have a considerable influence on the manager’s requirements profile.

The analysis of the stakeholders relevant to the coachee provides important information about the expectations to be met and about influencing factors. Six questions, among others, are worked on intensively. Who exerts formal and informal influence? Who decides on resources? Who depends on whom? Who has which demands to meet? Who has which interests? Who is networked with whom, and who influences whom?

Following Reinhart Nagel, the result can be presented as a map on which the stakeholders are arranged by importance and intensity. These can include superiors, customers, suppliers, banks, political bodies and internal units such as HR, communications, marketing and production.

Different methods are used in stakeholder analysis. One that has proven itself is arranging the most important stakeholders with particular sculptures. This method, reminiscent of a game of chess, enables coach and coachee to quickly gain a clear picture of complex relationships.

The web of influence and expectations in which the coachee operates or will operate becomes clear. Opportunities and risks become transparent, and interdependencies become apparent. As soon as there is a comprehensive picture of the relevant components, one’s own positioning can begin.

Stakeholders and stakeholder groups can pursue very different goals and forms of influence. It can therefore be critical to success to develop a differentiated positioning strategy. The position paper has four components: specific core messages tailored to individual stakeholders or stakeholder groups, change goals, measures including immediate measures, and monitoring.

Every challenge requires a coherent requirements profile for the manager. Potential, risk factors in stressful situations, one’s own motivators and competences play a major role here. Competences are a mix of knowing, wanting and being able, figuratively speaking of head, heart and hand.

A manager’s personal profile plays a central role and can be described as layers. The foundation is the personality with potential, risk factors and motivators. Above it lies behaviour, and at the top, competences.

Top executives who know themselves well and can assess their strengths and development opportunities act more confidently and effectively. Alongside self-image, what matters is the assessment by others, that is, how the person is seen and judged by others.

Very different methods can be used to obtain a valid external view. The appropriate methods are selected individually together with the coachee. The jointly developed development plan feeds into the 100-day programme.

Top executives are measured by their first 100 days in the new function, the new role or the new office. These first 100 days are decisive. During this time they are under particular scrutiny, and the aim is to position themselves positively in the organisation. The first 100 days determine what people associate with the new manager and whether they trust them to solve the tasks set.

How to use this time successfully is worked out in detail in a 100-day programme. All the information available up to that point undergoes an intensive evaluation process and feeds into the programme. This results in a concrete 100-day programme.

Drawing up a plan is one thing, implementing it successfully another. In regular reflection meetings, it is worked out where the coachee stands, how they observe the implementation process and how they and their environment are faring. The aim is to further develop one’s own capacity for reflection, to discover one’s own blind spots and to determine the next steps. Developing alternative courses of action that effectively extend one’s own radius of action offers great added value.

On request, the coach accompanies the coachee on site, that is, on the job. The perceptions gained are then evaluated together with the coachee. As a rule, this leads to a significant development of competence.

A review also takes place as part of the regular reflection meetings. It checks to what extent the expectations of the coaching agreed in contracting and the contributions expected of the coachee are being met.

The strengths of the approach become apparent against the background of the demands on top executives. Rapid global change leads to constantly new requirements in business and politics. The need for lifelong learning demands constant personal development. Recipes that may still have worked in the past are losing their effectiveness.

Looking more closely, one recognises that successful leadership increasingly faces the challenge of managing contradictions. One’s own maps, hypotheses, experiences and observations must be critically examined and questioned.

One’s own blind spot can mean that key developments and the associated risks and opportunities are not seen in time and feed into decisions far too late. Personal entanglement in conflicts can also significantly limit one’s own impact.

Executive coaching is an effective way of significantly expanding one’s own scope for action, increasing one’s potential impact and dealing more confidently with one’s own limits. The result is convincing performance for the benefit of the organisation and a higher personal quality of life.