Executive Coaching

I work with an individual over a series of frequent and confidential one-to-one sessions.  I ensure that
the coaching objectives are clear as quickly as possible and we will together meet with the client’s line manager/coaching sponsor to ensure that the coaching objectives are also tied to the business needs. I support and challenge coaching clients to gain insight into their behaviours and to start to make significant changes – but often starting with small tweaks.

I am a member of the British Psychological Society and am qualified in both Test User Occupational Ability (level A) and Test User Occupational Personality (Level B). I will sometimes use tools and psychological models to help further exploration and am a trained user of the Hogan Leadership Assessments, EBW Emotions and Behaviours at Work psychometric, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®), FIRO-B (Interpersonal Relations Tool), NEO PI-R, Strengthscope, and Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument.

360 Degree Feedback
I use 360 degree feedback skilfully and carefully in many of the coaching programmes, often a pivotal part of helping leaders to really understand how they are perceived by others, to see their development areas and also their unique strengths clearly.

Although each client comes with a unique history and set of challenges to explore in coaching, there are some common areas that can arise for senior leaders:

• Leadership transition: exploring the new requirements as a leader; working on new leader identity and being deliberate about how you want to come across; managing self in the new role; exploring and understanding what needs to change; managing changes to existing relationships and building new relationships; finding new support; navigating particular challenges; setting new priorities
• Developing emotional intelligence including increased self-awareness (often through the use of 360 degree feedback)
• Self-management when in a stressful or demanding role and managing emotional reactions
• Maintaining and building or re-building levels of confidence
• Work load management, in particular boundary management and learning to delegate effectively
• Career progression: looking ahead to the next role and proactively working towards this
• Navigating the maternity transition before and during maternity leave and after the return to work
• Managing relationships across the firm, particularly new, difficult or complex ones
• Assertiveness and holding difficult conversations with colleagues and direct reports
• Managing anxiety and high standards for high-performing individuals
• Well-being: addressing the impact of working at full tilt and ensuring an understanding of the impact of stress and the importance of resilience and recovery

The transition to senior leadership is difficult! Some of the challenges that senior leaders face as they undergo transition include the following:

• Lack of preparation for the role (as many as 83 percent of global leaders think they are unprepared for their new roles, Keller and Meaney, 2018)
• Lack of concrete feedback once they are in the role
• Increased visibility and scrutiny – as explored in one of the main leadership transition models, the leadership pipeline model (Charan, Drotter and Noel, 2011), visibility at the level of general manager (as opposed to functional manager) is “much more intense from above and especially from below”
• Anxiety, lack of certainty and stress
• The requirement for a transformation or change to ways of working, to beliefs and behaviours and to what has defined an individual’s professional identity previously

I have always worked with leaders in transition in my career – firstly working in Executive Search and throughout my career as an Executive Coach – and I have noticed that confidence is often significantly affected at this point. One of the key coaching outcomes frequently described as the coaching programme finishes (and observed throughout by myself and by organisational stakeholders, as well as by the leaders themselves) has been increased confidence. This motivated my desire to understand more, in my doctoral research, about confidence at this transition point.

My research explores both the individual and organisational challenges to confidence for leaders during the transition to senior leadership. Some of the organisational challenges (those that resulted from what the organisations were not doing to support leaders and which impacted confidence) were found to include: lack of feedback, lack of support, a feeling of difference and sense of loneliness, lack of empowerment.

My research provides a new understanding of confidence within the specific context of senior leadership transition. Confidence was described across the following four areas:

• a feeling of ease and energy; remaining in control (primarily of emotions); having clarity (e.g., of direction, purpose and leader identity); being able to be vulnerable as a senior leader.  The experiences of loss of confidence, shown as the opposite of each of these, were even more prevalent in the findings, and these were described as:
• exhaustion and energy depletion; loss of control of emotions; lack of clarity and an experience of ‘stuckness’; the inability to show vulnerability as a senior leader. These experiences have been drawn together in a framework that is deliberately configured as a circle to show how each of these four areas interconnect

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How coaching has been shown to support leaders facing challenges to confidence during the transition to senior leadership:

• Safe space of coaching: shown to be critically important in allowing the leader to explore, share, and alleviate, their experiences of loneliness, weight of responsibility, and vulnerability and all the more so because they didn’t feel able to do this within their organisation.
• Clarity: by giving them the space to talk about and reflect on their challenges; exploring ‘stuckness’; helping the leader to find direction; clarifying priorities; and enabling the leader to move forward.
• Identity work: helping the leader to explore the requirements for a different leader identity and to work on a revision of former identity and to embrace ownership of new leader identity
• Normalising: leaders appreciated that experienced coaches were able to draw confidentially on the experiences of other clients they had worked with at this transition point, helping them realise that their experiences were shared by others.
• Feedback: shown to provide important reinforcement, affirmation and feedback to the leader in several ways, including by challenging the leader’s perception of themselves by conducting a formal 360 process.
• Support: research suggests that the coaches provide a critical role in supporting the leader, often when support feels lacking from the organisation, a feeling of just “being there” for the leaders, taking away some of the loneliness experienced and providing challenge and reassurance.