Managing Leadership^®

It should go without saying that open and ongoing communication is essential to the effective operation of an enterprise. Nevertheless, it always does need saying. Even among those who should know better; those who are responsible for the communication within an organization often fail to do it adequately among themselves.

A recent Wall Street Journal article talks about how some executives have even resorted to jointly seeing the same executive coach for what amounts to relationship counselling. The subjects of the article, a company’s CEO and COO, went to this counselling for 2 1/2 years in order to sort out their feelings and to help them work their way through some difficult decisions.

The article goes on to reveal that this approach doesn’t always work, and that there aren’t many executives who feel “secure” enough to employ the method. One pair that did try it, it is reported, continued to disagree. Another pair claimed that they chose, successfully, to take a more direct approach: they simply had a two-hour meeting every week and talked with each other.

Why these disparate results? Because counselling isn’t the issue. Some people simply have private agendas or are otherwise disinclined or insufficiently mature to collaborate at the senior executive level. Counselling for people at this stage in their careers won’t influence that in the slightest. Only adults who are focussed on the job at hand will be able to accomplish it. The use of a coach merely masks the underlying ability of the executives to cooperate in any event, including on their own without the coach; it does not and will not solve their ingrained unwillingness or inability (we are presumably talking about grown-ups, after all) to do so. In the latter case, it is a pointless exercise that is profitable only for the coach. So, the use of coaches for this purpose is either unnecessary or futile.

There is a legitimate, albeit limited, place for coaches. Professional development is an appropriate role, and in particular, the preparation of managers for crossing the threshold into the world of executive decision-making. Long-term counselling, on the other hand, represents merely a grasping by the field for new markets and an effort to so blur the definition of their services that accountability and professionalism can be determined by them, and not their customers.

It doesn’t reflect very well on the executives who employ coaches for this purpose, either. The activity smacks of the self-involved, imperial assembly of a coterie of coddlers, the very existence of which inflates the executive’s distorted view of his or her singular and extraordinary importance and personal value.

Any board that becomes aware that its executives are spending investor funds in this fashion should start the search for successors right away. And the directors should not merely fill an empty slot. They should make sure they’re hiring managers who can play together.

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Technorati Tags: communication, executive coach, CEO, COO, executives, Professional development, managers, directors, Wall Street Journal