That’s an impressive and enviable list of characteristics and skills! Who wouldn’t want to use you as a coach?

You may be working in companies with dozens of leaders throughout the organization, yet none are asking you for coaching, even though you possess the necessary skills to be an executive coach. This was my situation when I was director of training for a corporation that had a team of seven executives and twenty-five next-level leaders who directed the efforts of the organization. However, I was not hired to coach them. Initially I was expected to carry out training duties for the organization. Offering to coach anyone, let alone the top executive, would have seemed absurd to them. Yet later I found myself in the enviable position of being sought after as a coach by those very executives when leadership dilemmas intersected with their strategic and tactical issues. You too can bridge the gaps between your current situation and the more developed coaching relationships you want in your practice.

These concerns about role expectations boil down to three areas:

These reactions and others like them indicate a mismatch in understanding about your role. They come from an executive who will not consider his own responsibilities to provide strong leadership for the organization. He will often assume you should engage in activities that, from a Client Responsibility perspective, are really his responsibility as a sponsor and not yours as a change agent. He may be unable or unwilling to view you as a resource able to help him think through and maintain those sponsor activities, the most important ones being communicating the direction and goals of the organization, ensuring commitment to the goals, clarifying decision-making authority with key players, managing performance expectations and consequences, and providing resources.

Here are a couple of common questions and complaints about leaders in these situations:

Very few people are born great sponsors; most have to develop into the role. Some sponsors are lucky enough to connect with a great coach who can develop them. The coach does this by acting as an effective change agent who evokes stronger sponsorship from the executive. Rather than looking at the inadequacy of your sponsor, perhaps the question is, “Are you being a great change agent?” And, if not, “What can you do to be a stronger one?”

In acting as though you are in the Client Responsibility Model, always maintain focus on the executive’s responsibility for keeping a strong connection with his people and establishing clear expectations. Define explicitly how you will help him build greater clarity and stronger relationships. Act as though your sponsor is capable of joining you in this perspective, even if he has never demonstrated this ability before.

What should you actually discuss? Build credibility as a business partner by talking about business goals and results. Then link business challenges to the leader’s challenges, which provides a natural segue into executive coaching. Therefore, you need to discuss the executive’s goals, not your aspirations to coach. What you wish to accomplish professionally is not what executives stay up at nights fretting about. Concentrating on anything besides what preoccupies executives is fundamentally counterproductive to your own interests. Therefore, engage them in what they care about. You need to define your role within the context of what they are motivated to achieve. This is a realistic approach to leaders: they sponsor best when they have vested self-interests. Expand their horizons by linking new ideas, insights, and your capabilities to their passions, concerns, and interests.

Once you find yourself talking with an executive about his goals, here are some typical questions to ask in order to get more deeply into the conversation (Schachter, 1997, p. 1):

You probably recognize these questions as conversation starters for the contracting phase of coaching. The contracting phase is the perfect opportunity for focusing on the leader’s goals and strategies for attaining them.

These questions are potent tools for developing the executive’s thinking about his relationship with his team and the expectations he has of them. Congratulations! Just by asking these goal and team relationship questions, you open the door to coaching conversations and help the leader reflect on issues that may conceal ingrained challenges to the leader.

However, it is not wise to define the discussion beforehand as a coaching conversation, which can scare off many leaders. Instead, you can give your potential coaching customer a sample of what you can do. The experience, plus a debriefing of the conversation afterward (what was helpful about it, what further clarity he now has, and so forth), establishes a track record for your coaching skills. After a number of these conversations, you can point to the experiences and offer to facilitate further coaching conversations about the projects the executive finds particularly challenging. To the extent that you have managed your relationship well with the executive, he is more likely to take you up on your offer.

Find a way to say yes to the leader’s goals. Most organization consultants who also provide executive coaching take on other change agent responsibilities: facilitating, training, data gathering, mediation, or project management. The sponsor may draw you both back into the rescue perspective. This is the critical moment in the sponsor-agent relationship. Find a way to say yes to his goal by redefining for him which change agent tasks will better help him achieve his goal. Articulate your role and responsibilities in the light of the sponsor’s goals and responsibilities and discuss the interplay between the roles.

You may be asking yourself, What kind of dialogue can I have that would attend to both of our roles and work to align them? An example of this kind of conversation follows (it also gives your sponsor a heads-up on chances for success of his goals):

This kind of conversation requires your signature presence in managing yourself in the whitewater rapids of the leader’s urgency, anxiety, and impatience. This conversation will succeed if you avoid blaming the sponsor for his shortcomings, or giving up on him for being stubbornly resistant to strongly sponsoring the very changes he wants. Replace the impulse to blame or criticize with offering neutral information that is related to the sponsor’s interests. You are painting pictures of outcomes that the sponsor most cares about, for example, an organizationwide change in implementing standards. You describe your role relative to his and link both to the results that he wants.

It is also important to solicit the executive’s reaction to your position. What is his best thinking about what you just said? What are its merits, and what are his nagging concerns?

Here is a critical juncture in the conversation: Do you rescue the leader from his responsibility or continue to let him struggle with it?

The critical juncture in this conversation is when the change agent avoids becoming distracted by the leader’s frustration. Instead, the agent stays on course by keeping the challenge front and center with the leader and bringing immediacy to the conversation (his time constraint is the same issue that the managers face).

The more often you find these moments of immediacy, the more powerful your coaching will be, and the more likely the leader is to see you as a coaching resource. In this case, using immediacy segues to the real issue of how daunted the leader feels in dealing with time pressures and managing his leadership team.

As this example demonstrates, you can have a jargon-free conversation while operating within the perspective of the Client Responsibility Model. One of the model’s requirements is to stay on the task of building the sponsor’s responsibility, even if you feel obliged to rescue him from that responsibility. You do not have to be eloquent or graceful, just effective.

The kinds of conversations I have been promoting in this chapter are what I call coaching moments. They happen outside the context of a formal coaching contract but within the context of the executive’s work world and high-priority concerns. Opportunities to have these conversations are plentiful. They happen as the leader is focused on something else. You can build your credibility as a resource for the leader in ways he may not have imagined at first. Coaching moments can cover some of the same territory as the coaching phases, though in smaller increments. You can still:

These moments over time build your portfolio of coaching skills that can later develop into more formal coaching relationships. When you enter conversations with the leader that highlight the need for him to exercise stronger sponsorship, you get closer to his personal leadership challenges. When you show that you are calm enough, sturdy enough, and direct enough to have these leadership challenge conversations with him, he is more likely to invite you into more of those conversations. And leadership challenge conversations are coaching conversations.

Having goals for managing yourself within this kind of conversation is essential for staying on course (these are the same as the process goals from Chapter Two). Goals keep you from getting sidetracked by your own anxiety in the face of the leader’s impatience or irritation. Here are some examples of goals that I have had for myself, taken from several of these kinds of meetings in the past:

I do not pursue all these goals in each meeting. They are tailored to the executive, the situation, and my particular anxieties at the moment. It is best to have only one or two of them in a specific conversation.

Loyal resistance is a form of advocacy. Actually many of the activities I suggest in this chapter, such as focusing on the leader’s goal, tying your role and aspirations to what the leader wants to achieve, and finding a way to say yes, are forms of effective advocacy. As you recall from Conner’s definition (Chapter Four), advocacy means promoting an idea, solution, or role that you espouse in a way that induces the leader to sponsor it as something she wants and owns as well. Loyal resistance occurs when an executive wants something from me that I cannot support because I do not believe that it will work. Notice that the emphasis is not on whether I want to do it, but rather on whether I think it will work.

With loyal resistance, you are positioning yourself in a different, sometimes oppositional, place from the executive. However, since your intent is not to polarize your position with the leader, you show your willingness to support the deeper interests that she holds. In loyal resistance you do three things simultaneously:

When you use this triple focus, you are invaluable to the sponsor.

Getting on board the leader’s train shows her that you deeply understand what she is trying to accomplish. You do so by showing that you understand and support her goal and are finding a way to say yes to her interest behind that goal.

The tricky part is most often articulating your differences with her approach—how she wants to get there. You need to be thoughtful about your own perspective and have weighed its merits and obstacles carefully. If you can offer your viewpoint as useful information rather than a crusade or battle for the “right” position, the leader is more likely to listen to you. This is particularly true when you can tie your thinking to the executive’s desired outcomes. You can save a leader from herself by highlighting what she may not be noticing in a situation. In these circumstances, if you do not share your knowledge and reservations, you are holding out on the leader and withholding your best thinking from her.

When you add the third ingredient in loyal resistance, you add power to your position. Offer alternative solutions that address your concerns while fulfilling what the executive wants to accomplish. After all, leaders are most interested in getting to a destination, not in the pathway to get there. Presenting ideas consistent with their goals can sometimes open leaders up. The ensuing brainstorm can generate options no one had yet mentioned, and the conversation gains renewed synergy. You show again how valuable you are as a business partner. Leaders are very attracted to people who can join them in commitment to their goals, respectfully and robustly bring differences to the table, and offer alternative ways to think about an issue.