Executive Coaching - A Guide For The HR Professional.pdf

Howard’s Story 135
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seem to affect me like they wanted to. I met with the head of HR,
who said she had just the person in mind that she thought could help
me. And, just like that, my executive coaching experience began.
Needless to say, I believe that my overriding thought as we
started was “caution.” The first couple of sessions were extremely
important to me. My company was paying for this, but I was the
client. How was this supposed to work? Exactly what could I say to
the coach? What could we talk about in confidence and what would
be reported back to the company? She understood my anxiety and
addressed this topic head on. As I look back on it now, without gaining
my trust in this area, I don’t believe there would have been any
effective coaching at all.
As I write this piece, I try to think of all of the ways that she has
helped me. And I try to put them in order of importance (yes, it’s true;
I think this way all of the time now). I think there were a few key areas
that are the most important. First of all, after meeting with my bosses,
my coach was able to reassure me (over and over) that I was considered
a valuable senior employee in every sense of the word. Like
most things, I believe that the coach intuitively understood that when
your world is rocked, as mine was, reassurance is never in short supply.
As we got to know each other more (and she was clearly more
open with me), she was even more specific about this assurance
issue. By telling me that, in her opinion (which by then I placed great
faith in), there were no underlying, unstated negative undertones of
any kind about my bosses’ belief in me, I think she provided me with
an important building block.
She once said to me that sometimes she has clients who just
need a little nudge and that I personified that type of client. Certainly
my wake-up letter from the owner made me look deeply inside
myself. My lack of focus on the most important issues at work has
been an overriding theme of my entire business career. I have always
known this instinctively. But it had never threatened my career before.
So I didn’t need the coach to explain this to me. What I did need was
help learning how to focus.