Coaching Case studies

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Case studies

Newly appointed CEO, business unit of 800 people

When our client was appointed as CEO of his Business, he inherited an organisation that had experienced 5 years of high-speed growth. His predecessor had overseen a doubling in the size of the headcount and had been particularly people focused and an engaging communicator. Despite the success of the previous 5 years there were internal divisions and external market pressures making the job of leading the organisation a challenging one.

Personal challenges facing my client included:

  • Colleague perception of being too inexperienced for the job
  • Communication style being reserved and more at ease in one on one situations
  • Predecessor had been highly respected and particularly well liked (‘large shoes to fill’)

I worked with my client to coach him through the first 12 months of his tenure as CEO. That work involved:

  • Increasing his understanding of teams and individuals’ behaviours
  • Improving his communication style to increase his ability to engage and obtain the support and commitment of his leadership team and staff
  • Building a set of personal goals for his tenure and his legacy
  • Building confidence in his decision making and leadership style (his personal confidence and also strategies to generate colleague confidence in him)
  • Providing a confidential ear, to offer support & challenge. (‘Now that I have taken on this role people just tell me what they think I want to hear’ was a common refrain in this period)

 

Manager making career decisions

I was asked by a member of the leadership team of a large organisation to coach a manager in her team who had handed in his resignation.

She accepted that she was offering the manager career support a bit later than would have been ideal, but felt he could well be making the wrong career decision. She was also keen to do what she could to retain him in the organisation.

I contracted with both parties, agreeing that the content of the sessions would remain confidential between the manager and myself.  I also ensured that both parties knew my role was to coach, not to achieve the resignation being withdrawn. I used an accelerated version of SIMA, over a period of one week. SIMA uses an interview technique to build a picture of a person’s motivations. In particular it focuses on the person’s pattern of success and how they achieve it.

 

In this case the SIMA programme resulted in the manager identifying a variety of reasons why the new job he’d accepted was unlikely to provide him with a satisfactory next career step.

Having withdrawn his resignation I worked with him over a period of three months to devise alterations to his current role, a short and medium term career plan and to evaluate a series of internal opportunities for his next career move.

Case studies

Senior consultant seeking help with a difficult client relationship

I coached a consultant who was finding it difficult to influence the Board members of a client. He had superior technical knowledge in the subject matter, but as a result of a clash of styles was finding that the clients were unreceptive and that both parties were finding the project un-fulfilling.

I spent some time with him, understanding the issues from his perspective and getting a feel for both his preferred style and that of the key client contacts.

I used SDI (Strengths Deployment Inventory) to provide him with a simple practical tool to help him identify his preferred behaviours and those of the client. This tool also gave him a better understanding of how his style changed under stress and how to identify changes in the client that might indicate conflict or stress.

Over a series of coaching sessions straddling a number of interactions between the consultant and his clients, improvements in the relationship and the quality of the project outputs were achieved.