Jack and changing for good  

The challenge

Jack is a high-powered senior executive with a multinational company facing a real conundrum. Thanks to his exceptional track record in the execution and delivery of high-value projects, he has been put forward for promotion to CTO at the end of the year. However, his future peers at the C-suite level have concerns. While there are no doubts about his technical prowess, Jack is known to become domineering and overly critical with subordinates – a trait that emerges when he feels under pressure to perform. To address this, Jack proactively seeks out the support of an executive coach before making the shift to his new position. Jack adopts certain techniques to help him lead more effectively. For a while, things improve, and his team’s performance remains buoyant over the quarter. This shift in behavior lasts around eight months following the end of his first coaching journey before cracks start to appear. As the quarter closes and Jack’s imminent promotion begins to loom, the pressure increases – and with it, a return of some of Jack’s problematic leadership behaviors. Feedback from HR and his team members motivates him to return to his executive coach for more help in making a longer-term and sustainable shift.

The coaching journey

Talking to the coach, Jack is initially despondent about being unable to stick with new behaviors. He cannot understand how or why he has returned to bad habits and feels unsure about how to proceed – and whether he is cut out for senior management at all. Together with the coach, however, he begins to ask himself deep and important questions that relate to the benefits or advantages that he believes his deep-rooted “bad habits” have brought over the years. Gradually, Jack sees that certain behaviors feel comfortable, familiar, and secure. However detrimental they might be to his leadership practice in the future, exerting (excessive) authority over his team members right now when the pressure is on, gives Jack a feeling of control – something that he feels he needs. As he works through this with the coach, it becomes apparent to Jack that although he has been able to change his behaviors temporarily, this need to feel in control has inevitably reasserted itself over the longer term, effectively setting him back to square one in his leadership style.

This is a breakthrough for Jack. Being able to step back and observe his relationship with certain patterns of behavior and the instant gratification, comfort, and feelings of control they provide, he is now able to create some distance from them. At this point, Jack’s coach uses a mixture of techniques to help him interrogate these behaviors more deeply. Among other things, he is encouraged to visualize the benefits that he perceives his negative behavior bringing as a clutch of balloons he holds in his hands – an analogy that helps him to see the confidence that these benefits bring him now, but the likelihood that they will pop or explode further down the line and leave him empty-handed unless he modifies the behaviors the underpin them.

Over several coaching sessions, Jack is instead encouraged to start looking for ways to integrate his behaviors more sustainably: to analyze and review the comfort that they give him in the moment but to appreciate how they can impair his leadership of others in the future. Jack’s coach encourages him to create a timeline for change where he can retain the comfort of being in control, while simultaneously giving others the freedom to experiment and create; where he can assert himself and his ideas, while simultaneously making space for the perspectives and input from his team members.