
What are some common challenges your clients face, and how do you help them overcome these obstacles?
My clients face many business challenges, and I help with the root cause: leadership performance. One of my favorite quotes is, “As the leadership team goes, so goes the company.”
Coaching can be suited to help address almost any leadership challenge for top performers—those who are struggling, or anyone in between looking to grow or navigate key transitions and decisions. I’ve found that coaching can especially help the following types of leaders:
1. Business owners or c-suite leaders looking to grow both their own leadership and their businesses. For example, I coached a new business owner who was purchasing her family business from the prior generation, and she leveraged the coaching to navigate some difficult family dynamics while also increasing the revenue of the company during her first year—providing a hard ROI for the coaching!
2. Leaders who have just hired or promoted another new or rising leader and want to set them up for success in the new role from the beginning. A McKinsey study found that leadership transitions fail about half of the time, but executive coaching doubles the likelihood of a successful leadership transition, as compared to traditional onboarding programs.
For example, I recently coached a company president who was brought in from the outside. He and the ownership team had a very rocky start, and I was subsequently brought in to provide coaching support. The coaching helped him to stick with the role, create a shared vision, and ultimately make it work, saving the company (and the leader) significant time, money, and energy.
3. Leaders whose teams are looking to create new clarity, alignment, and momentum around a new direction. One of the biggest impediments to a team’s success is when its members are rowing in different directions. However, alignment can happen quickly – for example, I was brought in by a business owner to help their organization create their 2.0 vision, mission, and strategy. The owner said they gained more clarity and alignment in the two days we spent together than in the past 20 years he’d been at the company prior.
Influential leaders regularly find themselves in seasons of change or growth, encountering unprecedented and unforeseen challenges. Coaching creates a space for them to clarify their vision, act with intention, and overcome challenging obstacles.
Engaging in this process helps ensure that leaders and their teams avoid costly mistakes and are more capable at the end of the process than they were at the beginning. Leaders are often surprised about how helpful this work can be, and how much clarity they can gain in a short time.