APEx: Accelerating Potential and Performance Excellent
The Key Challenge: Leaders in comfort zone. Heavily involved in day to day operational issue resolving. A crying need to focus on creating and influencing future course of action.
The Solution: 9 month long Executive Coaching Journey with clearly defined “entry” and “exit” criteria, along with two mid-term “check ins”.
Key Features:
1. Defined “entry and exit” criteria for participants.
2. Cleary drawn out Individual Development Plan.
3. 90 minute one – on – one coaching, once a month.
4. Two mid-term check-ins with relevant “leadership development stakeholders”.
5. Moved participants from Knowledge to Insights, Insights to Action and Doing to Being.
Leaders from an organisation with an average tenure of 18 years were performing steadily. One of the key expectations from the Leaders were to focus on the future of the organisation where innovation meets and exceeds unstated customer expectations. Even with multiple feedback to work on this produced little result.
Our discussions revealed:
1. Ambitious set of leaders.
2. Fear of risk, avoidance of ambiguity, an expectation that status quo should be maintained all leading to Learning Anxiety.
3. High on Achievement Orientation, but blind to “perceived blocks”.
4. Wanting to influence in some cases, but not knowing how to influence.
5. Excellent team members, but Leaders end up undermining their effort by.
a. “intervening” too early.
b. Not listening and discussing their thoughts and ideas.
c. Not delegating accountability, while maintaining ownership.
6. Not being able to assess the effort of their activity versus the value they are to focus on.
Keeping this in mind, we defined an intervention with the following features:
1. 9 Coaching sessions of 90 minutes each.
2. Coaching Contract drawn out with clear expectation on outcomes.
3. Coaching Conversations designed to move the participants from Knowledge to Insights, to, Insights to Action and finally to Doing to Being.
During the intervention a marked change in how participants delegated and held their team members responsible for performance was seen. This freed up time for the leaders to focus on the larger organisational picture, and define and work on projects that impact the organisation in the future. At the end of this intervention participants reported significant awareness in insights related to achieving their life goals.