Congratulations! You’ve arrived in the C-suite by building your business or being promoted to the most senior leadership ranks of your firm. Your excitement and eagerness are palpable as you settle into the work of leading your team to make your corner of the world, and the marketplace, better. But you may also have more than a few butterflies in your stomach, doubts in the back of your mind, or questions about what it will take to succeed in your new role. As leaders evolve and grow, transitions bring some of the most exciting, yet challenging circumstances that they are likely to face throughout their career. Aspiring leaders typically have a vision for their organization, career, and impact that they want to have and draw on it as a source of motivation. It is the challenges, blind spots, and frustrations that tend to catch them by surprise. So today, we’re going to explore the question, what happens when the initial excitement of a new or evolving role or professional challenge moves from initial elation to “what have I gotten into?”

When leaders struggle with one or more elements of a transition, their experiences are often dismissed or diminished as “first world problems” that are only experienced by a few highly privileged individuals and are therefore less worthy of being addressed. While such critiques correctly highlight the specialized nature of these challenges, they also contribute to leaders’ feelings of isolation and loneliness precisely because their experience is different from most others in the firm. In addition, they fail to recognize the impact of good leadership on the people they lead. When leaders get better, their people win. When they struggle, their team shares in the experience. So, if you are a leader whose journey has failed to live up to the happily-ever-after promise of a Disney movie storyline, the first thing to know is that you are not alone. Your challenges are real, valid, and worthy of being addressed.

In the first two and half months of 2021 alone, the Harvard Business Review alone has published four articles about the challenges of leadership transition suggesting that struggles with leadership transitions may be much more widespread than a “first world problem” label might suggest. Experts and business development practitioners suggest many coping strategies from cultivating relationships and friends outside of one’s organization to joining a mastermind group or peer advisory team. Among the most widely adopted solutions to leadership transition challenges is executive coaching, an industry that grew by an estimated 21% from 2015 to 2019 when it generated an estimated global revenue of $2.8 billion. Leadership transitions create significant challenges for any leader, from low to high performers alike. And just like elite athletes, high performing leaders are the ones most likely to have secured access to an executive coach to help them sustain and improve their abilities.

Leaders are typically expected to hit the ground running every day, and research has shown that executive coaching provides a meaningful way for leaders to create the time, space, attention, and resources necessary to adjust to their role, manage weaknesses, and leverage their strengths for the benefit of their organization. In times of transition, executive coaching has been shown to develop insight into the way leaders think about themselves (psychological meaning) and to develop useful language to understand and express ideas, norms, and cultural expectations associated with their role (sociolinguistic meaning). These insights translate to executive performance as leaders draw on them in the course of their work.

The benefits and outcomes of executive coaching have long been understood, but research into the techniques and processes through which those benefits are obtained has only recently begun to emerge. In the current edition of Human Resource Development Quarterly, Nicky Terblanche explores the coaching techniques and processes that executives credit most for helping them successfully navigate career transitions. While an entire range of coaching techniques were documented by Terblanche, the five most frequently cited techniques stood out clearly as the most frequent and effectively used including (1) active experimentation, (2) questioning, (3) reflection, (4) challenging views and perspectives, and (5) exploration of frameworks and theory (Terblanche, 2020).

Active experimentation involves behavioral experiments in which the coach and client collaboratively decide on behaviors to modify and try out between coaching sessions. These behavioral test-drives create structured opportunities to learn from both the leader’s personal experience and by processing the reaction of others. Creating opportunities to safely stretch beyond their comfort zone allowed leaders to expose themselves to behaviors and communication techniques that were not initially comfortable or familiar to them, but that ultimately had the potential to prove more effective and efficient than their natural behavior patterns and communication methods.
The Socratic method of questioning, in which the “coach asks incisive questions that stimulate reflection and promote alternative perspectives,” is perhaps the oldest and most time-honored technique for facilitating human development (p. 23). While it is possible for productive peer-to-peer development to occur when equally unskilled peers engage each other in a Socratic dialogue, the process is usually much quicker and more productive when led by a skilled and knowledgeable practitioner. They are able to ask informed questions and guide the conversation knowingly in the direction needed to help the leader arrived at useful insights more quickly. While Socratic dialogues can address lofty, philosophical, and psychological concepts, it is often the simplest questions such as “how do you know that?” or “if that’s true, what are the implications?” that can create insights and spark ideas that become immediately applicable to the executive’s performance on the job.
Critical reflection is a pedagogical cornerstone of adult education, human development theory, and is directly related to the critical leadership skill of workplace problem-solving. Executive coaching utilizes critical reflection by “allowing the [client] to reflect during and after the coaching sessions on insights and outcomes of experimentation” as well as those that coalesce across multiple sessions throughout the engagement with their coach (p. 23). As simple as this technique my seem, the phenomenon described by Hummel in his book Tyranny Of The Urgent causes reflection to be new for many executives, and a difficult practice to develop on their own. Executives routinely credited their executive coaching engagement with creating both the cadence and accountability needed to ensure that time was taken for adequate reflection for learning, development and professional growth to take place. Even more importantly, this was demonstrated to be a lasting outcome. “[O]nce they experienced the benefits of this practice, they applied it regularly and it has become part of how they think even after the coaching intervention had ended” (p. 25).
Contrary to the dominant expectations and best practices of non-directive coaching proponents, Terblanche found that executives place a high value on coaches that directly challenge their views or force them to consider issues from different perspectives. This is surprising given the International Coaching Federation’s list of Core Competencies that articulate how coaches should draw out and help their clients to explore their beliefs but stop short of calling for coaches to challenge them directly. While a definitive cause for this finding was beyond the scope of their study, it is likely that the business setting and demanding nature of executive positions may lead executives to be slightly less defensive about their professional beliefs and assumptions and to value direct approaches as a means of saving time.
Another surprising finding is that executives found it valuable when their coach presented them with research-based frameworks and theories that were applicable to the executives’ role. The notion of a coach using direct instruction or imparting knowledge is not generally advocated by non-directive advocates, and yet it was clearly valued by executives and helped them to understand and navigate their leadership transitions. “[I]n certain contexts, such as career transitions, clients value the acquisition of knowledge directly from their coaches… the new knowledge provides an informed, even pragmatic basis on which to practice reflection and experimentation, thereby increasing the effectiveness of these two known agents of change in coaching” (p. 27). Terblanche’s findings lend support to the notion that business coaching can and should differ slightly from other coaching disciplines such as life coaching, in that the business context places a high valuation on techniques that shorten the path between coaching inception and client insights and provide coaches with more freedom to utilize research and theoretical models to directly prompt their clients to explore issues and concepts related to their professional role.

Three of the five executive coaching techniques that executives cite as most helpful for navigating transitions are well-grounded and understood by traditional coaching theory, practice, and perspective. Active experimentation, questioning, and reflection have long and recognized histories in the traditional non-directive approaches to coaching that currently dominate the industry. However, the value that managers place on the acquisition of new knowledge presented directly from a coach in “the form of theories and frameworks” shared by their coaches “on how they [are] learning, changing, and the challenges they [face]” is a new and exciting development (p. 23). While this finding may be relatively new to coaching researchers, it resonates with lived experience of coaching practitioners who have observed their clients closely. “Knowing what is happening to them and understanding their transition in the context of an existing body of knowledge seemed to normalize” participants experience “and helped them to put” their journey “into perspective” (p. 23).

Leaders do their work on a constantly changing field of play. Dealing with transition is a daily requirement of the job. It’s difficult but rewarding work, and executive coaching helps leaders do it better.

Let’s get to work!

About the Author

David Macauley

A passionate business educator and innovator, David Macauley helps businesses and organizations succeed by developing, equipping, and empowering their people.

As a Convene's first Chair in Austin Texas, David engages business owners and CEOs to inspire business performance with an eternal perspective. David's Convene group members work in fellowship to profitably grow their businesses, build their leadership skills, and develop their people through peer-to-peer collaboration and one-to-one coaching. Click here to learn more and connect with David!