In the past, senior managers in the UK have often resisted the suggestion that they might benefit from coaching or mentoring, seeing it as akin to an executive comfort blanket. For some, this would have indicated a kind of failure. Similarly, businesses may have been reluctant to support their executives in this way even when there have been strong business reasons for doing so.
These days attitudes are changing and at Spindler we know many senior executives who are ready to say that coaching and mentoring has played an important part in their career success, while at the same time bringing clear commercial benefit to their organisations.
“Our coaching and mentoring clients tend to fall mainly into two groups. We see upwardly mobile individuals who, having achieved success within their function, are now being asked to take on wider leadership roles and are facing very different sets of challenges. We also work with people who may have been Chief Executives for some time, but are finding that they are running into obstacles in the way of real leadership effectiveness,” says Nigel Bates.
Often the need for development emerges as a result of re-organisation or merger. Or it can simply be part of helping an executive come up to speed in their role, particularly if they are newly appointed.
The first step in any coaching or mentoring programme is an initial assessment day. By combining deep, evidence and competency based interviewing with occupational psychology, we benchmark people’s leadership capabilities against their external senior executive peer groups. We identify and agree both their strengths and development needs, and end a busy day with an outline plan as to how these will be addressed. Usually, but not always, this means a coaching/mentoring programme.
As an essential part of the assessment, the coach/mentor and client are joined for half of the day by one of our panel of experienced, graduate business psychologists.
Clients then go on to meet their coach/mentor on a regular basis, initially for half a day per month. Our facilitative approach is highly flexible and is tailored to fit exactly his or her needs and circumstances.
To start with, the focus is on new techniques and insights, but quickly we move to relate these to real day-to-day challenges that they are facing in their work. Each session starts with a debriefing and review of tasks agreed at the previous meeting.
“We generally find that after a while, clients start to bring their own agendas of real live work challenges that they know will test their leadership abilities and that they want us to work on together. This is always a rewarding moment,” says Nigel.
He stresses, “The key is to remember that while we give clients pragmatic and practical help with their leadership challenges, help them untangle their thoughts and give them perspective on issues that initially seem extremely complex, ours must always be a facilitative role which is about helping them to change behaviours and embed new approaches into their everyday working lives. It should never just be an executive comfort blanket.”
If you are interested in a discussion about the benefits of executive coaching either for yourself or colleagues then call Nigel on 0118 939 4506
