Associates for Professional Development's Coaching Blog

Coaching a Reluctant Leader

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Executive Coaching can be an unsettling process to someone who has not had the opportunity to participate before. Sometimes the whole idea of talking with someone who will be messing around in their business can lead strong individuals to hesitate in their participation.

Reluctance to coaching can take several forms:

• Failure to set up appointments
• Missed appointments
• Not doing the work
• Avoiding difficult topics

All of these behaviors can be traced back to set of common themes. Internal, personal resistance to change. A fear of someone getting too close. Not wanting/willing to look weak. A perceived loss of control.

Powerful But Not Fatal. All of these themes are powerful, but they do not have to be fatal. Coaching is the process of facilitating change.

Openly addressing any of the above behaviors gives both the coach and the coachee the opportunity to discover things they did not know about themselves, including the ability to deal straightforwardly with very difficult issues.

Identify and Label. The most important step in dealing with reluctance is to identify it and label it in an honest, straightforward way. Calling it what it is frees both parties up to have the hard discussion around what is creating the reluctance and what they want to do to remove it.

This recognition and removal opens up opportunities to talk about where reluctance may be showing up in other areas of the individual’s professional life. This is where the real growth begins.

Keeping a Leader On Track: Interventional Coaching

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Turnover at the executive level is expensive and disruptive. The average cost to replace an executive is three times his/her salary and the organizational turmoil that is caused is almost inestimable.

Interventional coaching is a viable option for preventing a potential high performer from derailing and causing loss and disturbance to the organization.

Interventional Coaching

Interventional coaching engages the coachee’s leader in the process in a much more active role than in developmental coaching. The process is more focused on goals that are agreed upon by the leader, the coachee, and the coach. The meetings alternate between private meetings with the coach and the coachee, and meetings that include the leader.

Typically the process includes:

• Initial meeting with the coachee’s leader to confirm needs.
• Coach meeting with coachee privately to begin to establish relationship.
• Coach, coachee, and leader meeting together to establish goals and objectives of coaching program.
• Administration and interpretation of assessment materials.
• Coach and coachee begin in-depth coaching on a regular weekly or biweekly basis, analyze data, identify style and personality issues and determine how those issues promote or detract from the individual’s effectiveness, and create a plan to address goals and objectives that are surfaced.
• Periodic meetings with the coachee, the leader, and the coach to ensure that progress is being made in the areas of concern for the organization.

Interventional coaching is a proven method to produce behavioral change in individuals. When the person who is struggling is a valuable leader in your organization, you will typically see a high return on investment.