Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

personal development

Five Reasons Executive Coaching Experiences Fail

By Leave a Comment

Five Reasons Executive Coaching Experiences Fail
Image Credit: Shutterstock

You realize that developing your leadership and that of your team gives you a competitive advantage. After all, behavior is what drives your company’s strategy, structure, culture, and systems.

You are also starkly aware that what got you to this point won’t carry you into the future. In this complex world, a commitment to developing talent at all levels of the enterprise is not a nice idea – it’s a necessity.

Where do you start? You’ll want to model from the top, and so you are probably thinking that a first good step would be to hire a coach for you and key members of your executive team.

Executive coaching has been highly recommended to you as leader as the best answer to your development.  You’ve read the statistics and they sound promising. The ROI for executive coaching has a healthy average of 7 to 10 times the investment, with some even reporting up to 49 times.

But you have a nagging doubt that has kept you from making a move to start the process. What if it doesn’t work for you? You’ve heard of a couple of stories where another decision-maker’s coaching experience didn’t meet expectations. Wasted time, energy, and money.

How can you make sure you get the same great results you keep reading about – and move confidently as you meet the future, now?

Here are 5 reasons that executives might not get the kind of return you read about – and how to start out right so that you can make an investment that pays off well for you.

Five Reasons Executive Coaching Experiences Fail

1. You don’t know what kind of coach you need.

Opening a coaches’ directory will reveal different kinds of coaches, and the choice can be overwhelming. Here are the three primary types of coaches so that you can see the difference:

a. Life coach – focuses on the whole person, personal and professional goals, aspects of life such as health, wellness, personal finances, life direction, and more.

b. Business coach – brings processes, tools, and concepts to team and enterprise growth (business coach and business consultant are closely related with quite a bit of overlap). Works on a variety of goals, including strategy, marketing, overall performance, and more.

c. Executive coach – helps unlock leadership potential, facilitating change in someone’s personal behavior that will ultimately result in achieving business goals. Executive coaches are typically hired to help C-suite, VPs and other executives with setting, supporting, and achieving personal improvement goals. Examples of focus can include developing greater leadership skills, managing staff, improving communication, managing conflict well, increasing productivity, increased agility, decision-making, and more.

2. Your coach doesn’t have the formal training and certification to be most effective.

Has your coach had the benefit of a robust accredited coaching program that utilizes proven methodologies for best adult learning and development?  And are they certified with the International Coach Federation or similar accrediting body so that you can be sure they meet highest standards in ethics and in practice?

3. Your coach doesn’t use a solid model and framework for results.

Unless your coach can use a solid model and process that keeps you focused on the goals you set with them, keeps you moving forward, allows you to assess progress as you move forward, and has the ability to truly measure outcomes, then you will not be able to bank on best results.

4. Your coach can’t meet you at your level to provide the support you need.

Coaches vary in their own levels of personal development and leadership experience. A coach does not need your industry background, or to have held the same position you now hold. However, they need to be able to help you navigate your growth and understanding where you are in your development and how you meet the world is vital to their asking the right questions to do so. The coach’s own leadership background, as well as their past client roster and client testimonials should be helpful indicators as to whether they can support you well in this regard.

5. You aren’t willing to do the work.

Change is challenging, and it requires great courage and vulnerability to look at one’s own “growing edges.” Many clients have hired coaches, only to go through the motions and not give the initiative the focus necessary to truly develop self. If you recognize that you are ready to step into a higher level of leadership, make the commitment to do the work. The results are life-changing when you give it 100%.

In order to manage well in an ever-evolving, complex world, having an able thought partner who helps you to see the landscape and navigate well is priceless. The ROI of executive coaching can be a game-changer for you, your team, and the company, if you are confident in how to go about selecting a coach, and if you make a strong commitment to change.

Why You Need Your Emotions for Rational Decision-Making

By Leave a Comment

shutterstock_232649068a

We spend a lot of our lives learning to master emotions. Sometimes they overcome us, and we goof things up. So we try to discount them or put them aside in an effort to be more rational in our decisions and actions.

But discounting or ignoring emotions isn’t really mastering them. You need your emotions in order to make your best decisions. Sound counter-intuitive?

In my work with high-potential female executives, I find quite often that these women have shut off their emotions, feeling these get in their way. Often, they have been told they were being too emotional in a certain situation, or they have found themselves overwhelmed with feelings when confronting a critical scenario, and it kept them from moving forward. Somehow, these women decided to shut off the “feeling part” of themselves in order to execute and get ahead.

Bad move.

Emotions are meant to trigger or alert you to something. When you ignore these, negative consequences are in store, not only for yourself, but for the way you are able to work with others, and ultimately succeed.

So how do you manage your emotions so that they actually help you get ahead?

There are three steps to managing and bridging your feelings so you can support your best thinking and actions:

1. Recognize the emotion you are feeling in a situation.

This may sound easier than it is. I once coached Sandy, a member of her company’s C-Suite, who could only name two emotions that she felt – anger and fear. Because of this, she continuously operated from the “fight or flight” part of her brain – high stress, and low reasoning. As a result, her decision-making suffered. We spent a couple of months helping her to identify and expand her lexicon of emotions as I coached her on how to handle specific situations. Why? Emotions are “gut triggers.” It means, “Hey, something is up, here! Pay attention!” This allowed her to move from a “fight or flight” mode to the reasoning part of her brain.

2. Decide how you want to manage the emotion.

Recognizing what emotion you are experiencing in a certain situation allows you to ask yourself how you would like to handle it. Just because someone has angered you doesn’t mean you need to express your anger. It means, instead, that you can ask yourself why you are experiencing this, whether it comes from a bias or is relevant and appropriate to the situation, and what you want to do behaviorally because of your reflection. This process puts you in charge. Once Sandy could identify the emotion she was feeling in a certain situation, she was able to reason more effectively, asking herself what this emotion was telling her, and whether this was viably related to the decision or situation at hand.

3. Allow your emotional self to collaborate with your rational self.

When you have checked in with yourself as to why you are feeling a certain emotion, where it comes from, and how you want to handle the emotion, you have made space for your rational self to join at the table. Having recognized how you are feeling, what the emotion is telling you, and deciding how you want to handle the emotion, you can now ask yourself to identify the real issue at hand so that you can resolve it most effectively. Sandy discovered that a colleague had undermined her to her staff. When she stopped to recognize how she felt about this, how she wanted to manage it, she then felt much more in control of how she dealt with the situation. Instead of operating from her “hot buttons” as she would have done in the past, she was able to discuss the issue calmly with him, and worked to resolve things.

How do emotions affect the way you work? Join us for our LinkedIn discussion and share!

Patti Cotton helps women executives optimize their effectiveness in leading self, others, and enterprises. Her areas of focus include confidence, leadership style, executive presence, effective communication, and masterful execution. With over 25 years of leadership experience, both stateside and abroad, Patti works with individuals, teams, and organizations across industries, providing executive coaching, women’s leadership development, change, and conflict management. She is also a Fortune 500 speaker. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

When Personal Crisis Hits: 5 Tips to Manage Your Professional Reputation

By 3 Comments

shutterstock_157635797a

Life is wonderful!  Life is amazing. But sometimes, stuff happens. And when it does, our personal “bandwidth” – our capacity for handling life and work – is asked to stretch.

This is normal. After all, encountering crisis and disruption is part of life. We may suffer the death of a loved one or experience a divorce. We may be called upon to manage a life transition for an aging parent, or to deal with a teen in trouble. No one is immune. Managing this effectively is key to keeping you on track both personally and professionally.

You see, as others at work and in the community learn about your situation and sympathize, they also expect your performance and abilities will be compromised. They assume this, because they think it would certainly affect them in that way.

So, whether you are able to continue working at capacity, in their minds, others will tend to subtly discount your ability to lead and perform well. This can have dire consequences on current and future opportunities for you.

How do you avoid this? How do you care for yourself, the situation, and manage perception so that you maintain your professional reputation?

Here are 5 tips to manage your personal and professional life when crisis hits.

  1. Take care of you, first. If you don’t take care of yourself first, by getting enough sleep, eating well, drinking water, and continuing to exercise, your capacity to manage stress, think clearly, and make decisions will be affected. It will also show through fatigue – the way you carry yourself, the energy with which you talk and approach situations. So make sure you are practicing some radical self-care.
  2. Manage the crisis itself by getting a plan and proper support. Identify the outcome you want to solve the problem, then reverse-engineer into a plan of action. Then, intentionally identify your support system. How do you need and want to be supported? Do you need resources? Advice? A listening ear? Probably all three! Identify those people who can serve as support and reach out to them. Let them know what is happening, and that you would like to call on them for help as the need arises.
  3. Don’t over-share with others. Keep your processing and the bulk of your sharing with your support system. A minimum of information on a “need-to-know” basis is key. Any sharing beyond this with colleagues, clients, and community is inappropriate and potentially harmful to your professional reputation in the eyes of others. In other words, no unnecessary details, and no ongoing updates with blow-by-blow developments as the situation progresses. A simple, “Thanks for asking, we are happy to have things settled down, now,” is helpful for curious minds.
  4. Prioritize and trim your workload and outside activities. Time to get lean and mean. Take a morning to prioritize, triage, delegate, so that you identify those initiatives and activities that are critical and necessary, those that can be delegated, and those that can be put on hold. This will provide mental and emotional space to best support your performance – and others’ perception of it.
  5. Lead a personal PR campaign. Announce to the world that you are on track and running! Deliberately connect with key stakeholders in your organization and outside in the community and subtly form an alliance with them to reinforce your viability. Identify those persons of influence and schedule time with them to catch up. What new trends or developments are occurring in your community, industry, or global marketplace that might affect them? Talk about a new project or the update on an existing one that might pique their interest, and share how it will positively impact. This takes a bit of planning, but you will have formed an unwitting circle of professional support to combat any doubts as to your current abilities.

And a final word on managing your personal situation and your work performance:  Schedule periodic reviews into your calendar until the situation is resolved. How are you doing? What needs to shift? It’s important to avoid allowing a situation to become chronic. If crisis mode is your “new normal,” ask for help.

When You Need More Focus

By Leave a Comment

Focus

A 5-Point Checklist for the Executive’s Brain

One of the requests I often get from clients is to help them gain more mental clarity. They complain of suffering from poor or cloudy decision-making, or an inability to move forward with projects. When they come to me, they may be worried that they are losing acuity, and have often already invested in various kinds of brain games, or rearranged their schedules to focus on bigger projects at certain times of day – but these haven’t worked for them.

If you are noticing you need more focus, or that you are finding it difficult to concentrate, it’s likely you are experiencing an imbalance somewhere in your work or life. I am not talking about work-life balance (that’s another topic!), but about a habit or approach that doesn’t support the brain’s larger operating system.

Now, I’m a proponent of working smarter and not harder, and like many of you, happen to love those brain games and methods of project management. But before you go out and invest large sums of money on programs, I suggest you review the short five-point checklist below, to see if you are missing anything foundational to supporting better mental clarity.

Just one of these five points, if overlooked, can foil focus in the most experienced and talented professionals.

 

  1. Get a physical checkup!

Let’s just get the obvious out of the way here. Your body is designed to work for you – and it will also work against you if something is out of kilter. If you inform your physician that you find it difficult to concentrate, she will look for high blood pressure, an absence of B-12, review your list of medications, and check for other physical imbalances that can lead to a lack of focus. She will also most likely talk with you about your health habits, such as eating the right (or wrong!) foods, getting enough sleep and exercise, and if there are any toxins in your home or external environment that might cause a loss of focus.

Coaching tip:  I’ve heard my colleague J.J. Virgin, foremost nutrition and fitness expert, talk about the terrors of simple carbohydrates. Remember that one fall-out of embracing this kind of diet is that it can result in clouding your focus. Check your labels, all you granola bar aficionados!

 

  1. Look for hidden energy drains.

What is causing your stress levels to rise at this point? Is there an unresolved conflict or unspoken conversation that is eating away at your mental energy? Or do you carry around mental “to do” or grocery lists, instead of writing down the items on paper? Both of these situations will take up brain space and diminish your focus. Stop using the brain as a storage tool, and allow it to be the processing tool it was designed to be.

Coaching tip:  Make a paper list of those things causing you stress or that you need to remember. But, hold on – we aren’t done, yet. Now, write down, by each item, the next step you need to take in order to resolve the question or problem. This last step helps you to see the way through problems to solving them, and can even help lower stress levels immediately.

 

  1. Give your brain a regular break.

There are physical, emotional, and mental reasons why your brain can only focus for a set amount of time before it fatigues, and this time can vary with circumstances. Suffice it to say that your brain needs regular breaks to stay energized and focused. A good rule of thumb is to break away from whatever you are working on each hour of your working day.

Coaching tip:  Set your alarm to go off every hour during your work hours. Get up each time, stretch, walk down the hall. If you can’t get away from your office, turn on some soft music, and take a look out on the horizon to give your eyes and brain something else on which to focus.

 

  1. Your brain craves water and oxygen to work at its best.

A tired brain can indicate that it needs water or more oxygen. When your water intake is inadequate, your brain cells become dehydrated. This results in synapses between cells not functioning as they should. Your brain needs oxygen, and breathing regularly doesn’t always do it. Oxygenate with some gentle exercise to get the blood flowing.

Coaching tip:  Save time!  Take a break, hydrate, and oxygenate – all at once. When you take your brain break (step 3, above), get a glass or bottle of water to drink as you walk down the hall. Upon returning to your office, and before sitting, try doing some modified squats or “in place” rowing, for 1-2 minutes. You’ve just given your brain a powerful boost!

 

  1. Develop the mental flossing habit.

Your brain never stops processing, and accumulates thought remnants and bits of dreams that float around in your head until you clear it. This “dross” can keep you from your greatest clarity.

Coaching tip:  Upon rising, free-flow journal for about five minutes to get rid of the bits and pieces of thoughts your brain has stored overnight. Let the pen take you where it wants to go, and write down what comes to mind – don’t force thinking. My clients report that this one morning habit changes their whole day, giving more clarity, focus, and productivity.

 

And a bonus coaching tip:

Stop trying to multi-task (which is really just jumping back and forth between various projects). This habit fragments the brain’s ability to focus and to get things done most effectively. If you want to enjoy greater mental clarity and heighten your productivity, pay attention to each item on your project/activity list one at a time. Decide on the next step for it, then schedule or delegate that step. Pick up the next folder and do the same. If interrupted during this process, care for the interruption, then come back to the same folder you had in your hand prior. This one shift in work habit has been studied, and is reported to have saved executives many hours weekly!