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Coaching Corner
Growing beyond your skillset
As a leader, you face complex and intricate challenges every day. At times it can be hard to pinpoint or even articulate these challenges. But until you can fully address and resolve them, they have the potential to stall your professional and personal growth, your career, and your team’s success. This is where professional coaching comes in.
In our Coaching Corner series, we share real-world coaching cases that come from our work with leaders.
The challenge
Anne has recently been named the CFO of a large multinational manufacturing group. It is a big change of direction: before this, she worked as a senior consultant with a top consultancy. Her appointment stems from a long and successful relationship with her employer, a former client.
Anne is ambitious. She is keen to make her mark and to move swiftly up the ranks as a potential successor to the group CFO. For this to happen, however, she understands that she needs to make a shift. She needs to pivot from the specialist approach of a consultant to a generalist leadership perspective. But it’s not easy.
While the organization is supportive of Anne and has faith in her abilities as a finance expert, some leaders have noticed that she stays in her specialist mindset too much. She is taking on too much work herself and failing to delegate. In conversations with management, Anne remains hyper-focused on how her function is performing. She isn’t strategic enough about how finance can better contribute to the business’s growth plans. What’s more, her attitude and body language can come over as passive. Feedback from the board and senior leaders is that Anne is being reactive and not proactive enough.
Eager to find a way through this, Anne accepts the offer from her organization to work with an executive coach.
Anne’s coach helps her to understand that her team needs to be empowered; letting them step up and take on the responsibility is about giving them the autonomy and trust they need to thrive in their roles.
The coaching journey
Anne initially expressed surprise at some of the feedback from her colleagues. While she understands the need to broaden her leadership aptitudes, she is dismayed that her ability to focus deeply on the needs of her unit is not as valued as it was in her previous role. Talking to the coach, Anne makes two discoveries. First, the culture in her new organization is very different: where long-term thinking, intellectual capacity, and specialization were highly valued at the consultancy, her new employers expect her to be more proactive about immediate business and growth objectives. Then there’s the question of style.
At the level of CFO, her employers expect her to be more direct and forthright with recommendations that touch the whole organization and not to wait for guidance and information from her peers or superiors. Anne has not adapted to this way of doing business.
The coach suggests that to attenuate this gap, Anne tries reframing her role. She is encouraged to think back to her consulting days and look at her organization and its stakeholders as clients again: to come into meetings with the board and other unit managers and proactively present ideas and recommendations. Anne readily agrees, but there is a problem.
Because Anne finds it hard to delegate to her team, she has so much on her desk that she will struggle to find time to prepare. She must learn to hand over work to her team and have them deliver the data she will need in meetings. Delegating is new to Anne, and she’s unsure where to begin.
Anne’s coach helps her to understand that her team needs to be empowered; letting them step up and take on the responsibility is about giving them the autonomy and trust they need to thrive in their roles. This is a breakthrough moment for Anne. She is able to reframe her relationship with her organization and her direct reports in ways that feel positive and achievable.
“She has made time to prepare for meetings such that her input is strategic and forthright, and she has noticed a significant transition in the interpersonal dynamics with peers.”
The impact
Anne has started to delegate far more to her team, and feedback from them and senior leadership has been universally positive. She has made time to prepare for meetings such that her input is strategic and forthright, and she has noticed a significant transition in the interpersonal dynamics with peers.
As Anne makes this shift, she is prioritizing conversations with her own manager to monitor her progress and performance. She feels empowered and in control of her career, and more confident about fulfilling her longer-term goals.
Questions to ask yourself:
- How open are you to growing beyond your existing skillset, and what will it take to do so?
- Are you open or resistant to feedback? Can you overcome or look beyond what feels hurtful to locate what is valuable?
- If you are moving into a new role or organization, do you stop to analyze what you need to flourish professionally and personally?
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In this series, we share real-world cases that come from our work with leaders. Read on to discover the specific challenges that face each of the leaders we have coached – and the insights that have helped them navigate their multifaceted challenges to find their own solutions. How might these insights and questions apply to you?
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