| Executive
coaches hired to shape leaders | | |
| Catherine Hind, an executive coach
in Vancouver, Bristish Columbia, says that under the old business model, employees
who excelled at their jobs were often made leaders without ever acquiring the
necessary skills to motivate, lead and develop those beneath them. It was a sad
sort of "Peter Principle" scenario that left the new leader feeling
frustrated and ineffective and the company wondering where all the promise went.
That's where executive coaches come in. Armed with
various assessment tools, they analyze an individual's strengths and weaknesses
and factor in where the employee wants to go and where the company would like
to see them go. They then work one-on-one with the individual to help them acquire
the competencies they will need to get there and to be effective when they do. Hind
likens it to "Seven Habits" on steroids. "Covey
and all that stuff is great, but there's theory and then there's embodiment of
it. Coaching, because of its ongoing nature, supports the use of a tool like Covey,"
she says. "Studies have shown that you'll absorb maybe 15 percent of a seminar
at best, but if you combine that with coaching, it moves up to 89 or 90 percent
retention because you're going to absorb what is specifically relevant to you." Some
companies, including IBM, actually studied leaders throughout their organization
to identify leadership competencies for their execs to acquire. By using self-assessments,
management assessments and 360-assessments, they are able to track the progress
of employees through this ongoing finishing school. Markovits
says the use of coaches to grow leaders internally beats hands-down the previous
system of favoritism, fraternalism and that time-honored tradition, sucking up.
"Not everyone is a good role model. By having leadership
competencies, it sets out that this is what we want you to aspire to." It
also has opened corporate eyes to how to improve performance. In business today,
the focus has shifted from IQ, or intelligence, to EQ, or emotional intelligence.
The difference? "IQ is something you are basically born
with, and EQ is something you can develop your whole life," says Hind. "Coaching
directly interacts with your emotional intelligence. That is an area you can improve
upon with leaders. You can't make them smarter, but you can help them grow more
emotionally intelligent." Etiquette
lessons
Joel
Garfinkle, an executive coach in Oakland, Calif., works with an executive
for an average of 12-18 months to polish them up for promotion. "Mostly,
it's a manager saying, 'I want my employee to be more successful,'" he says.
"Either we are fixing a behavior or we're working to get someone who is already
successful to the next level." | 
