Why CEOs Don't Want Executive Coaching

A recent study by the Stanford Business School found that nearly two-thirds of CEOs don't receive executive coaching or leadership development. And almost half of senior executives in general aren't receiving any, either. Paradoxically, nearly 100 percent said they would like coaching to enhance their development, as both Bloomberg BusinessWeek and Forbes reported in recent articles.

So, why do CEOs and other senior leaders say they want coaching but don't seek it?
I think the answer lies in what they've learned to think coaching provides, in contrast to what they think they need. Both views create a gap between desire and action. Ironically, that gap is unwittingly supported by most coaching programs, themselves. 

That is, most omit or misconstrue the core coaching element that CEOs need to grow their skills and effectiveness: Increased self-awareness, honest self-knowledge, about one's motives, personality capacities and values. The consequences of this absence play out in ways that diminish the relevance of coaching in the eyes of most senior leaders.

Self-awareness is crucial to leadership and it can be heightened through coaching. To explain why and how, consider the obvious but insufficient explanation for the paradox that CEOs want coaching but don't pursue it. Stephen Miles, CEO of the Miles Group, that partnered with Stanford on the study, pointed out that to CEOs, "coaching is somehow "remedial" as opposed to something that enhances high performance, similar to how an elite athlete uses a coach." Moreover, CEO's say they're most interested in such skills as conflict management and communication. Yet they put the need for compassion, relationship and persuasion skills far down on their list. They think of the latter as "soft skills," ancillary at best.

Both views reflect CEOs' perceptions. But those, in turn, reflect the failure of coaching programs to show that the infrastructure of successful leadership vision and behavior is heightened self-awareness about one's motives, values, and personality traits. That's especially true within today's challenging, fluid environment. Because of this failure, coaching programs unknowingly collude with CEOs' view that self-awareness is either irrelevant to leadership or of minor importance.

The higher up you go in companies, the more you're dealing with psychological and relational issues. Successful CEO leadership requires astuteness about others: their emotional and strategic personal drivers; their self-interest, overt and covert. These relationship competencies rest on a foundation of self-knowledge, self-awareness. And you can't know the truth about another without knowing it about yourself. 

Self-knowledge and the relational competencies they're linked with are central to a CEO's ability to formulate, articulate and lead a strategic vision for a motivated, energized organization. Self-knowledge builds clarity about objectives; it fine-tunes one's understanding the perspectives, values, aims and personality traits of others. When that's lacking, you often see discord and conflict among members of the senior management team; or between some of its members and the CEO.

Power and Empathy
Being able to see, understand and deal effectively with others' perspectives is key to successful leadership (as well as personal life). That capacity, part of self-awareness, is empathy. Two recent studies show its crucial role. One looked at the impact of power in an organization upon behavior; the other, its impact upon brain activity. Both studies found that increased power reduces empathy. 

One study, conducted by Adam D. Galinsky and colleagues at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, found that increased power tends to make one more self-centered and self-assured, but not in a good way: The researchers found that power makes one "prone to dismiss or, at the very least, misunderstand the viewpoints of those who lack authority." High-power individuals "anchor too heavily on their own perspectives and demonstrate a diminished ability to correctly perceive others' perspectives," according to Galinsky and his team, adding that, "As power increases, power-holders are more likely to assume that others' insights match their own."

The other recent study, by Canadian researchers, found the same thing by looking at brain activity when people have power. They found that increased power diminishes the ability to be empathic and compassionate because power appears to affect the "mirror system" of the brain, through which one is "wired" to experience what another person is experiencing. Researchers found that even the smallest bit of power shuts down that part of the brain and the ability to empathize with others.

These are highly important findings, because empathy, compassion and overall self-awareness are qualities of a developed, mature mind. One that's resilient to stress, able to manage internal conflicts, experiences interconnection with others, and maintains well-being. And, that therefore stimulates broad perspectives for understanding the problems and unpredictable challenges facing CEOs.

Much research shows that such capacities are essential personal strengths; certainly important to effective senior leadership. Moreover, studies find that you can grow them with conscious effort. The emotionally detached, un-empathic person, unaware of his or her personal motives or truths is not going to be very effective as a CEO or senior leader. We see examples of the consequences from time-to-time, when a CEO resigns or is fired. 

Building Self-Awareness
Self-awareness builds from honest self-appraisal about emotional strengths and vulnerabilities; your values and attitudes, personality traits and unresolved conflicts. You're a total person, not just a set of skills performing a role. 

One of Google's earliest executives, Chade-Meng Tan, teaches a popular course for Google employees that helps build such qualities. It's demonstrated positive benefits for success and wellbeing. And much research confirms that self-examination is critical for leaders' positive development. For example, Scott Keller, a director at McKinsey & Company, described the importance of overcoming self-interest and delusion in the Harvard Business Review. He emphasized the need for openness to personal growth and development, because "deep down, (leaders) do not believe that it is they who need to change..." and that "the real bottleneck...is knowing what to change at a personal level." Self-awareness also expands the capacity to know what not to pursue, not just what to go after, as Greg McKeown, CEO of THIS, Inc., described regarding what he learned from an Apple executive.

Coaching can provide several ways to enhance self-awareness. Here are a few I've found helpful to C-level and other senior executives.

Learn From Your Personal Time-Line: Describe key turning points in both your career and personal life, with an eye to what shaped your values, attitudes and behavior; how your career decisions and experiences have affected your personal development. Identify the consequences, both positive and negative. What does this knowledge point you towards, in terms of reclaiming and growing dormant or neglected parts of yourself?

The Capacities-Gap Exercise: List what you believe are your most positive personal strengths, qualities and personality capacities. Describe how each one has become stunted, blocked or deformed in their expression, in daily life. It happens to everyone. For each gap, describe what steps you could commit to taking, to enlarge those capacities and reduce the gaps in your role as a leader as well as in your overall life.

Identify Your Personal Vulnerabilities: All of us tend to develop a "cover story" along the course of our lives - what I called the narrower, "false" self in a previous post - beneath which is our "secret plot" - the real story, including our emotional blind spots, fears and pockets of dysfunctional behavior that can become hidden drivers of our lives. How can you rectify and grow through them?

Needless to say, effective leadership must also include necessary skills, vision and perspectives. For example, sustainable practices for long-term success, as business executive and sustainability thought-leader John Friedman regularly writes about, here.
Another is the movement towards joining business success with addressing social needs, as Richard Branson has described, where "taking care of people and the planet are at the very core of all businesses everywhere in the world." Adding that our current world of transparency and social media demands that "business reinvents itself and becomes a force for good in the world," he's leading a new effort in that direction, called The B Team.

Self-awareness and the growth it supports, combined with such business perspectives and practices, can and should be the heart of executive coaching and leadership programs.

Douglas LaBier, Ph.D., a business psychologist and psychotherapist, is director of the Center for Progressive Development in Washington, D.C. and writes the blog ProgressiveImpact.org. You may contact him at dlabier@CenterProgressive.org.

Get the Most Out of Executive Coaching

 

Remember “light bulb” jokes? My favorite was, “How many shrinks does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb must want to change.” It’s true: Unless or until a person decides to commit to change wholeheartedly, no coach can help move him or her one-millimeter off the dime.

 

Worse yet is the fact that, unlike light bulbs that lack the capacity for self-deception, humans bamboozle themselves all the time. Whether it’s a smoking cessation program or working with a coach to improve management skills, people claim they want to change or drop dysfunctional behaviors from their lives, but then fight like Ninja warriors to defend them. Worst of all, irrespective of how intelligent or professionally powerful a person is, it is a virtual certainty that after embarking on a change process, they will be partially or fully derailed by the feeling, “Better the devil I know than the devil I don’t know.”

The reason why backsliding on our ostensible commitments to change is so common is because most change is the result of compliance to a demand, incentive, or threat. “Lose weight or you’ll suffer a heart attack” coming from an M.D. is a directive most folks won’t ignore. Unfortunately, when incentivized to change in this manner falling off the wagon is common because our motivation wasn’t to change, it was to avoid a premature death.

Psychologists who have studied intrinsic and extrinsic motivation since the 1970s — most notably, Professor Edward L. Deci — demonstrate that when a person acts in response to extrinsic motivators — the promise of money; the threat of punishment — commitment to a behavior is short-lived. This is why when the cat’s away, mice will play. Mice don’t want to change their behavior, i.e. playing games, but they do when cats are present. However, since change (the cessation of play) was instigated by an extrinsic force — Tabby — if Tabby isn’t monitoring the mice, thse rodents instantly revert to form.

What, then, should you do if you think you want to change and, like so many of your peers, put your faith (and a huge financial commitment) in a coach? Is it possible to develop an authentic commitment to executive coaching through sheer willpower alone? No. But what you can do is develop a mindset — i.e. new “automatic” cognitive messages — that will help you counter your own resistance to change. 

What follows are the exercises I use most often to help new clients initiate coaching with the best mindset possible. If, prior to the onset of coaching you experience the attitude adjustments they are designed to foster, the change process should be profoundly less anxiety- and resistance-provoking for you than it is for those who dive in unprepared. 

1. Ask yourself, “Cui bono?”
Recall a golf lesson or the clumsiness you suffered during an introductory yoga class. Now recall how you responded when the club pro or yogacharya gave you critical feedback. No big deal, right? Well if you’ve never been to an executive coach, I guarantee that the first critique you receive will not be a NBD experience. Why? Golf or yoga are peripheral to an executive’s definition of self. Being a stellar manager is central, so when someone pokes that realm of your self-concept the usual reaction is “ouch!”

The best way to reduce the possibility of being stung by an executive coach’s constructive critical feedback is to remind yourself that it is (a) not ad hominem and as such, (b) comparable to the club pro’s efforts to correct your slice. To do this with ease, learn to employ the Latin phrase “Cui bono?” — literally, “as a benefit to whom?” — after each critique you receive. The rational portion of your brain knows that no competent coach would gratuitously put you down. Now you need to train the more primitive, more reactionary parts of your brain to think that way too. By making “Cui bono?” the mantra you bring to assessment sessions with your coach, you can learn to accept that any and all feedback from him or her is intended to be helpful, not hurtful.

2. Be sure you wouldn’t rather hire a cheerleader than a coach.
Many consultants and coaches know that they can build lucrative client bases by treating protégés the way Little League coaches deal with their pre-teen charges: Everything the kid does evokes a “good job” or “atta boy!” 

The problem with an automatic “good job” reaction is that it is useless and often — even by pre-teens — seen for what it is: Balm for under-developed egos. An 11-year-old with burgeoning self-esteem would much rather hear “keep your eye on the ball” after striking out than “good job,” but if you want to hear cheering regardless of how you perform, caveat emptor. An ethical coach doesn’t bring pom-poms to meetings with clients, so hire to your needs.

3. Learn the difference between participation and commitment.
Having spent 30 years as a psychotherapist and coach, I can assure you that acting the role of a “participant in a change process” is not nearly the same as being committed to actually changing yourself. Many people claim to be involved in a change process when, in fact, they are holding their true selves in abeyance. Years ago, many gay men married women because they held the deluded belief that the process of being part of an intimate heterosexual dyad would change who they were. In time, virtually all discovered that suppression doesn’t work and that role-playing without conviction has no chance of effecting change.

Coaching cannot change you one iota unless or until you’re really committed — until you have skin in the game. Before I work with a client who needs to make major changes, I share the aphorism my baseball coach once told me to drive home the distinction between authentic commitment vs. going through the motions: “There’s a huge difference between participating in baseball and being committed to it; it’s like a bacon and egg breakfast. The chicken participates in the breakfast. The pig, on the other hand, was fully committed.”

Since you won’t change unless you really want to, and nothing — not the highest-priced coach or public declarations about your intention to change (which, presumably, will humiliate you if you fail) — will help you to succeed, it behooves you to learn how to thwart your worst tendencies in advance of tackling change. This is what cartoonist/philosopher Walt Kelly, in his possum persona, Pogo, was referring to when he said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” If you accept this fact of life, coaching — and every other change process you initiate — will become surprisingly simple.

Steven Berglas

A faculty member of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry and staff member of McLean Hospital for 25 years, Dr. Steven Berglas is now an executive coach and corporate consultant based in Los Angeles, CA.