My career development was also aided by the fact that I often found myself in the executive office sitting across from a leader and discussing crucial business issues. A leader was sometimes disappointed with a project’s progress. I had two choices: door number one—take his negative feedback personally and conclude that I, along with the rest of the executive team, had let him down; or door number two—search for a pattern in his leadership behavior that inevitably led us all to this point. (Throughout this book, I alternate he and she, using them interchangeably as pronouns for the coach, the executive, and the employee.) For my first year as an internal consultant, I chose door number one. Chalk it up to inexperience and a false sense of omnipotence (“it must always be my fault”). Given more time and a broader perspective, I noticed door number two opening frequently.

Another developmental thread in my coaching practice evolved from my work as a trainer in management development. Now let me say right off that the classes I offered in leadership training were good. They were engaging, experiential, and practical. However, the managers basically tolerated the training. They felt pretty smug and satisfied with their level of management skill back on the floor, or at least until they got stuck. However, when faced with pressing and immediate dilemmas about high turnover, troublesome employees, low productivity, or a failed change effort, they would come to my office for help. Their motivation to explore options for action was dramatically keener than their interest in the same issues in my classes. When the managers came to me one-to-one with their issues, I was happy to help them navigate through dilemmas regarding tasks or team challenges that they found personally daunting.

I was midstream in my own coaching practice before I thought of myself as an executive coach. It developed naturally out of these organizational projects when leaders came to me for help. I was ten years into coaching when I began to articulate the coaching method outlined in this book. Now, many years later, executive coaching, both one-to-one and with teams, is the primary focus of my work.

I find coaching executives highly rewarding because the work is challenging, inspiring, fun, and stimulating. I have been blessed with clients willing to look within themselves for the key ingredients of significant change in their organizations. This kind of journey requires full engagement and risk taking on the part of both client and coach.

My passion is to work with executives at the crossroads of two highways: road #1, developing leadership capacity, and road #2, achieving business results. When executive coaching focuses on this intersection, organizations enjoy a two-for-one deal: executives are developing while they are driving for results. They are not taking time out to develop but taking “time in” to develop while they get their work done. What could be a better contribution to organizations than to work with executives at this crossroads? For too long, companies have segregated these functions of leadership development and bottom-line results. Often the people involved with these functions do not develop ways to work together for greater synergies. The kind of executive coaching I define and describe in this book is a perspective that comes from working at this crossroads and finding those synergies. The essence of executive coaching is helping leaders work through their dilemmas so they can transform their learning directly into results for the organization.

Others enter the field of executive coaching through different routes, such as counseling. Regardless of your background, if you identify with one or more of the following statements, you will find this book useful:

First, this book is written for professionals who coach leaders of organizations. These executive coaches have the privilege of working with the men and women who lead and influence the direction of today’s organizations. With this privilege comes a responsibility to partner with leaders in significant ways in order to contribute to successful change efforts. The work of executive coaches now has its own literature.

Second, unlike coaching methods that use techniques to leverage changes within the client, Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart focuses on the need for coaches to use their own presence with the client. Executive coaching is not about imposing skills training on leaders. Fundamentally, it is about learning to be with leaders as they navigate through their world and finding key moments when they are most open to learning.

Let me be clear about being, learning, and doing. Being, learning, and doing do not trump the need of our clients to produce business outcomes. Executive coaching has to be relevant to achieving business results, and coaches should be business partners with their clients (Chapter Five). This involves helping leaders face their own challenges in attaining business results, to see how they can hinder their own progress. In these pivotal moments, the manner in which a coach manages the relationship with the executive facing those challenges can make the critical difference in the coaching outcome and thus the business outcome.

Third, this book focuses on the larger systems forces at play that require the attention of the executive coach. By “larger systems forces,” I mean an organization’s force field that shapes and influences the individuals working within it (I define the interactional force field and its effects in Chapter Three). Individuals subconsciously react to this field with their own emotional responses, either helping or hindering their effectiveness. Executives act and react within this field, along with everyone else they lead. Coaches who fail to see how the system affects their clients will not understand why their interventions sometimes fail. When coaches use skills presented in the general coaching literature and do not incorporate a systems approach, their efforts will yield limited results.

A systems viewpoint allows coaches to see the executive’s world in a new way. Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart explores a systems perspective and shows the implications and choices for the coach who maintains that perspective.

Although coaches need a systems viewpoint to understand their client’s environment, they also need to realize what effect their client’s system has on them. This is the central premise and challenge of the book. Coaches must tune in to how the client’s force field affects them, so they can maintain their equilibrium within it and help the client to do the same. When coaches hold this bifocal view, seeing their client and themselves within the system, they can use the skill-building technologies in the coaching literature effectively. In fact, they can finally realize the full power of these skills.

Just when it seems that a philosophy about presence and systems will lose its practical application, a method emerges to clarify that way. When the method becomes too rational for the topsy-turvy challenges of organizational life, a way of remaining in the moment saves the method from being trivialized. Perhaps the image is more like Alice of Through the Looking Glass when she finds herself in the wood of the vanishing path. When one is following a well-worn trail (the method) and that path disappears, one needs a way to attend to the forest (using one’s presence in the moment) and orient oneself within it.

Following is an overview and sequence of the content in the book.

Chapter Two addresses the need to develop a signature presence, a way of bringing forward your backbone and your heart as a coach. I describe four conditions that promote a strong presence, benefiting both coach and executive.

Chapters Three and Four cover specific ways of using systemic dynamics to read a client’s system and recognize the system created between the client and coach. There are many system variables to study. Chapters Three and Four focus on some of the central ones. As a coach, you will find that when you attend to these systemic concepts, you are more likely to free a client and an organization from the detrimental qualities of their own system.

Chapter Eleven covers how a coach can help an executive who needs to coach employees. Executive coaches often work with clients who struggle with being effective coaches themselves. This chapter explains how to assist executives in becoming more effective coaches.

Appendix A contains the four essential activities, with matching outcomes, for each of the coaching phases. You can use it to prepare for a coaching session and then check back afterward to see if you covered all the essential bases of that coaching phase. Appendix B has an extensive self-assessment survey organized by the activities and skills needed for each coaching phase. You can identify your strengths and weaknesses regarding the coaching method in this book. Appendix C covers key questions to ask clients during the contracting, planning, and debriefing phases of the coaching method. Finally, Appendix D explores the territory of combining coaching with consulting. It lists the competencies you need to have if you want to broaden your practice to include larger organizational consulting efforts.

There are stories from my coaching practice and typical vignettes throughout the book that illustrate the coaching concepts and the methods you can apply to the challenging situations you encounter when you coach clients. I invite you to use the material in this book to visit your past, present, and future coaching experiences with new eyes.