5 Reasons Your Executive Coach Isn’t Working

Executive coaching is a multi-billion dollar industry. You’d expect it to work. Often, it doesn’t.

In this article, I’ll expose 5 flaws at the heart of executive coaching that change how you should think about leadership — and who you trust to develop it.

The first flaw is with performance coaching. It’s a sacred cow of executive coaching in many quarters that the whole purpose of hiring a coach is to improve your performance at work — to make you better, faster, more efficient and productive. So if your business produces widgets, coaching you will enable you to make and sell more widgets, increase your turnover and raise your profit.

Now I’m not here to argue against profit — profit is a fundamental of doing business and if you can’t make a profit or surplus, your days as a leader are numbered. But the thing about profit is that however necessary it is — and it is very necessary — it is not sufficient to build a sustainable business. Why? Because sustainable businesses have to sustain not only the profits they make, but also the people that work in them.

And if you make people subservient to profit, bad things happen which we can see all around us just now. Wellbeing, inequality, safety, the social fabric and the environment all get compromised when profit is put ahead of people.

Significantly, elite athletes, whose performance is the only measure of success, suffer from the highest incidences of mental health crises.

To avoid this bear-trap, coaches need to focus on the whole person in front of them, not just their performance. They need to focus on who their clients are, not just what they do. They need to explore the processes in action at every level of their being, not just the results they get. This means exploring how they think, how they feel and how they perceive — not for the coach’s benefit, but for the client’s. Self-awareness is a key to leadership and the true objective of coaching is to hand that key to the client. And when you establish a degree of self-awareness, your performance looks after itself.

So if your prospective coach is obsessed with your performance, remember that performance is an effect, not a cause and it is the causal world where the levers of real and sustainable change lie.

The second flaw is with motivational coaching which is based on the premise that as a coach, it is my responsibility to provide you with the energy to achieve your goals. Although this is absolutely possible in the short term, long term it is not sustainable, nor even desirable. Your energy is your responsibility, not mine. This dynamic is very much in keeping with the original meaning of the word ‘coach’ which is a metaphor for carrying the client to their destination, rather than the client carrying themselves, under their own steam.

As I’ve often said, a good coach doesn’t know where the conversation is leading — if they do, they are mentoring, not coaching. But although they may not know where they are going, they will generally be one step ahead of the client! And you cannot motivate someone without knowing their destination.

So where does the client’s energy come from — it comes from within and takes the form of inspiration. Good coaches release this inspiration by turning the clients focus inward and opening their eyes to their inner world of thinking and feeling. As the client begins to realise that their inner dynamics are responsible for their experience of things in their outer world, so they take responsibility for them and the inspiration follows suit. Knowing the power you have to determine your experience of life releases huge amounts of enthusiasm, energy and resilience.

The 3rd flaw of executive coaching is the idea that all you need is some training and a certificate. This is one of the reasons why so many people gravitate towards becoming a coach — and the very same reason why so many of them do not succeed in making a viable living out of it. Only today I heard of a senior executive who wants to change their coach because their interactions feel too much like therapy. And just as a brief aside, coaching is not therapy, though it may be highly therapeutic.

The idea of fixing people that appear broken in some way is very attractive to a portion of the population. In some cases it is, without doubt, a displacement activity, one which distracts their own feeling that they, themselves, are broken and need fixing. After all, sorting out another’s problems is so much easier than having to confront your own. But the reality is that no one is broken — certainly not those holding senior leadership positions — and that to approach them as such is to misunderstand what is actually going on and to misdirect your own energy.

It is certainly true that you do not have to be a CEO to coach a CEO — in fact that kind of relationship is better termed mentoring than coaching — mentoring being the sharing of knowledge from having successfully performed a similar role previously. You might say that mentors focus on the ‘what’ of leadership whilst executive coaches focus on the ‘how’. The disciplines you bring to coaching form the lens through which you see your client. A psychologist will tend to see their clients as complexes of thoughts, ideas, mindsets and belief-systems with the attendant feelings that they evoke. An HR professional will be aware of latent talent to be developed, perhaps of someone that needs support during change.

Many coaches come from a commercial leadership background, myself included. However, I do not bring that operational experience directly as a mentor would, rather it provides me with context for my leadership clients, particularly with regard to understanding the pressures of the role, the relationships around them and the navigation of challenges.

Having said all of that, the aspect of coaching which is the real game-changer for the client is the degree of personal development — particularly self-awareness — that the coach brings to the relationship. And by self-awareness, I do not mean the awareness of personality, ego, character etc., although all those are included in the objective self. I mean awareness of the subjective self, the witness and observer of the life one lives. It is only through this kind of self-awareness and metacognition that one gets a glimpse of the realities behind all the thinking, feeling, speaking and doing that floods our experience of life.

The 4th flaw of executive coaching is the mindset flaw in which the coach zeroes in on the mindset of the client and attempts to change it. Carol Dweck famously introduced the concept of the growth mindset which instills the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through dedication, effort, and persistence, rather than being innate traits as the fixed mindset believes. And whilst a growth mindset is, without doubt, infinitely preferable to a fixed one, it is a mindset just the same. A mindset is a set mind — the opposite of a healthy mind which is open, impressionable, neuroplastic and alive.

Trying to change someone’s mind is fraught with difficulty — practical and moral. By all means offer alternatives, but as soon as you try to change another’s mind, you are taking responsibility for what is not yours to take. Best case — if you ever succeed — you are simply changing one set of beliefs for another. A good coach’s objective is to offer the client glimpses beyond mindset where perception is pure and untainted by the habitual movements of mind. This is the realm of intelligence, beyond personal psychology, intellect and emotion.

Fifth in the list of executive coaching flaws is the structured process. By this I mean a process, methodology or algorithm which effectively generates an ‘if this, then that’ decision tree for the coach to lean on. It effectively predetermines and limits the possible outcomes of the interaction between coach and client and — in my view — is the antithesis of coaching. Good coaching doesn’t know where it is going. Seriously? Yes, straight up. Although the coach should generally be one step ahead of the client, they should not know where the conversation is leading. This makes it alive and keeps both client and coach in the present, now moment, where the real insights are to be had.

You’d be right to object to a complete lack of structure — there needs to be a minimum, viable structure, but that too can be determined in the moment and needs to be led by what I call non-judgemental curiosity. Non-judgemental curiosity entails the coach following their curiosity but with the suspension of any judgement or criticism. This creates a line of enquiry that opens a path to clarity and insight which a structured process cannot achieve. Relinquishing a defined process is rather like letting go of the sides of the swimming pool when you are learning to swim — scary but liberating at the same time. And unless you do let go you will never swim properly.

So there we have 5 flaws of executive coaching which can so easily undermine and limit the amazing impact that coaching can have. If you wonder whether you’d benefit from executive coaching, I have the tool for you: the Inner Leadership Mastery Profile which will diagnose where you are on your leadership journey and how to go further. Link in the comments.

See you in the next article.