Executive Coaching

I have mainly coached Executives in defined areas, such as presentations, leadership, teamwork, and meeting skills. With a variety of cross-cultural overlays, such as manners and etiquette, on these areas. With Chinese management I have to be indirect, and often provide profitable mistakes then wait to see if the management sees the benefits and is willing to adapt.

Executive coaching normally comes about after a need is discovered, evaluated, and a coach is matched up with the client. Very often the process is traditional, akin to traditional project management, so they want traditional minded coaches. In one example I was given a set number of hours to help an accomplished bilingual Chinese woman executive overcome her barrier making presentations to her rarely seen English-speaking board of directors. The reality was that the barrier was much wider and her high profile offered the opportunity for her to role model and to coach quite a few other Chinese to overcome the same basic barrier. Our undercover widening of her goals dramatically improved her morale and the overall benefits, while staying within the HR cost-time limits. This under-widening pattern is widely recognized and adopted in agile software development.

The Agile Approach

The Agile approach does the most important stuff first, working against the time and cost constraints. It is very lean. It shows results-in-service ASAP, reviews, and keeps adding more most-important-stuff in reviewed cycles until the decision maker says 'done', which may be well before the time or money runs out.

Traditional up front estimates are notoriously inaccurate, especially when working with human attributes. Agile provides fast ROI, with in-service reviews, adapting to reality as it goes.

That difference, between traditional “here is the plan, now follow the plan” and the agile “early reviewed in-service results, review the needs and do, repeating within the constraints” is a reason why I don't often see the same HR department twice. Worse, my “bad” pattern teaches executives to be entrepreneurial. Which is why I advocate giving the execs a measure of control over the process to make them more entrepreneurial-agile. It also means that my services are best priced by value, not dollars/time.

Okay, now that we've eliminated Executive coaching, let's go into Business.

Specialists, or VIPs

I do a lot of things in the margins, where change occurs. That's one reason why books have margins, so we can add notes and make informal updates. My ebooks are designed to be 'living', changing on the go. I put the ebooks at Google Docs so you can download them again and again as they get updated or customized – allowing for change. That's why I've injected this 'Margin' bit between Executive and Business.

A lot of people are professional specialists in some way, maybe not exec and not necessarily 'normal' business. If that's you then we need to treat you as some kind of VIP, move you into the center, and design a custom program around your situation. Eg “Import Export Specialist Coaching.” It could start light, simple examples might be using Lean PDCA loops for coaching, or OODA loops to respond more like a fighter pilot, or go deeper into your speciality. Thus learning-by-doing what-you-do during the coaching. Think about it, talk it over with some people/maybe me, then email suggestions to put me in the loop, and let's see what we can do.

Another factor. If you browse the Catalogue you'll find areas like Deming's 14 points, or the 14 Mistakes Managers make, or simply speaking, teamwork, and leadership stuff, that can be included to enrich a program.

Business Coaching

Finally, into the heartbeat of the business.

A common business coaching promo is “At XXX we design our coaching programs to fit our customer's needs.” The Needs Analysis, again. Or, in China we would call it a VIP program. I designed various VIP programs for clients in China, always based on 'their' analysis. In every case we wanted a Western coach/trainer who would review the program with the client, face-to-face, and adjust as needed. That often generated smoke and feathers and both coach and VIP program adjustments, for various reasons that always had cultural aspects. The design and buy-in should include the coachee (and maybe their team) so they don't feel that it's being inflicted on them. An in-house analysis is often HR ROI focused. An external Needs Analysis shows the thinking of the external analysts, and what they're selling. I feel that one of my goals is always to look at things a little differently than what you already have on the table, to enrich the solution set. Then we prune back to some simple working approach. Please let the pruning leave some branches on the tree, leave room for fruit.

One way to do things is to specify that part is officially needed training and part is more what-the-coachee-personally needs coaching, and aim to display working results from both parts ASAP.

A common pattern is “just don't get it.” Maybe oblivious, denial, fear, or keeping close to one cookie jar and too far to the next, or just group-think creating local reality. It's linked to designing and doing a common cookie cutter training program that goes through the motions and demonstrates “we did something, but it didn't work.” It's also a common business killer. If you think you're facing such a wall now, and need a door, call and we can talk about doorways.

Once the base program is designed and up and running, we normally get into coaching calls, by telephone or Skype. I'm a consultant, I actually prefer face-to-face 'at the coal face', dealing with real things in real time. That's what I do every day. So I prefer that calls come during working hours, as part of working time, with smoking hot issues at hand. I like to do things, I roll my sleeves up, so my bias is showing. Let's make it real.

Some coaching outfits specify bi-weekly calls. Good learning and agile work practices suggest shorter cycles, especially while learning how to absorb and make the changes. If you're busy, your priorities are somewhere else, then a standard twice a month session might do just fine. Reality says we need to check and try it, adjust, come up a trial solution that fits your situation, and adjust as we go.

Typical business coaching engagements last between 3 and 6 months. I've had many much smaller projects, that often get snipped off when goals are reached inside the original time frame. That's good, a normal agile pattern meets goals faster, better, and cheaper. It's also good to have good focus. And traditional project planning isn't agile/entrepreneurial. Naturally, I often think we could do better if we went longer working on new opportunities, for you and other people, that show-up during the program.

Here's another common coaching blurb: “Prices start at $750 for a 3 session set.” That's fine, paying me ahead of time is good, proper, and welcome. More is better.

Issues with it are: 1) paying ahead is used to build commitment, and agile recognizes that money doesn't motivate talented people all that well. 2) we need to build commitment based on trust, usefulness, benefits, some give and take, really a growing relationship. A small team. 3) The value you get from me is best priced on that value, not per time.

Lets make it better.

So what and how much do you suggest?

Try   604-657-9595    or    Vic@windwaterwine.com