The Very Real Dangers of Executive Coaching

Over the past 15 years, it's become more and more popular to rent coaches for promising executives. Although a number of these coaches hail from the planet of psychology, a more significant share are former athletes, lawyers, business academics, and consultants. Little question these people help executives improve their performance in many areas. But I would like to inform a unique story. I think that in an alarming number of situations, executive coaches who lack rigorous psychological training do more harm than good. By dint of their backgrounds and biases, they downplay or just ignore deep-seated psychological problems they don't understand. Even more concerning, when an executive's problems stem from undetected or ignored psychological difficulties, coaching can make a nasty situation worse. In my view, the answer most frequently lies in addressing unconscious conflict when the symptoms plaguing an executive are stubborn or severe.

Consider Elie Habib. (In the interest of confidentiality, I exploit pseudonyms throughout this text .) He was an executive vice-chairman of sales at an automotive parts distributor. Consistent with the CEO, Bernstein caused trouble inside the corporate but was worth his weight in gold with clients. Things reached the verge of collapse when Bernstein publicly humiliated a postal clerk who had interrupted a gathering to urge someone to sign for a parcel. Then incident, the CEO assigned Tom Davis to teach Bernstein. Davis, a dapper onetime corporate lawyer, worked with Bernstein for four years. But rather than exploring Bernstein's mistreatment of the support staff, Davis taught him techniques for "managing the small people"—in the foremost Machiavellian sense. The matter was that, while the coaching seemed to score some impressive successes, whenever Bernstein overcame one difficulty, he inevitably found another to require its place.

Roughly six months after Bernstein and Davis finished working together, Bernstein's immediate boss left the business, and he was tapped to fill the position. Faithful his history, Bernstein was soon embroiled in controversy. This time, instead of alienating subordinates, Bernstein was suspected of embezzlement. When confronted, he asked to figure together with his coach again. Fortunately for Bernstein, the CEO suspected that something deeper was wrong, and rather than calling Davis, he turned to me for help.

After just a couple of weeks of working with Bernstein, I noticed that he had a significant personality disorder. His behavior was diagnostic a way of entitlement run amok. It's not in the least uncommon to seek out narcissists at the highest of workplace hierarchies; before their character flaws convince be their undoing, they will be very productive. Narcissists are driven to realize, yet because they're so grandiose, they often find yourself negating all the great they accomplish. Not only do narcissists devalue those they feel are beneath them, but such self-involved individuals also readily disregard rules they're contemptuous of.

No amount of executive coaching could have alleviated Bernstein's disorder. Narcissists rarely change their behavior unless they experience extraordinary psychological pain—typically a blow to their self-esteem. The paradox of Bernstein's circumstance was that working together with his executive coach had only served to shield him from pain and enhance his sense of grandiosity, as reflected within the feeling, "I'm so important that the boss purchased a special coach to assist me." Executive coaching further eroded Bernstein's performance, as often occurs when narcissists avoid reality.

My misgivings about executive coaching aren't a clarion involve psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, notably, does not—and never will—suit everybody. Neither is it up to corporate leaders to make sure that each one employee affects their demons. My goal, as someone with a doctorate in psychology who also is an executive coach, is to heighten awareness of the difference between a "problem executive" who is often trained to function effectively and an "executive with a problem" who can best be helped by psychotherapy.

Many executive coaches, especially those that draw their inspiration from sports, sell themselves as purveyors of straightforward answers and quick results.

The issue is threefold. First, many executive coaches, especially those that draw their inspiration from sports, sell themselves as purveyors of straightforward answers and quick results. Second, even coaches who accept that an executive's problems may require time to deal with still tend to rely solely on behavioral solutions. Finally, executive coaches unschooled within the dynamics of psychotherapy often exploit the powerful hold they develop over their clients. Sadly, misguided coaching ignores—and even creates—deep-rooted psychological problems that always only psychotherapy can fix.
The Lure of Easy Answers

The popularity of executive coaching owes much to the fashionable craze for straightforward answers. Businesspeople in general—and American ones in particular—always search for new ways to vary as quickly and painlessly as possible. Self-help manuals abound. Success is defined in 12 simple steps or seven effective habits. During this environment of quick fixes, psychotherapy has become marginalized. And executive coaches have stepped in to fill the gap, offering a sort of instant alternative. As management guru Warren Bennis observes, "A lot of executive coaching is a suitable sort of psychotherapy. It's still tough to mention, 'I'm getting to see my therapist.' It's okay to say, 'I'm getting counseling from my coach.'"

To achieve fast results, many famous executive coaches model their interventions after those employed by sports coaches, using techniques that reject out of hand any introspective process which will take time and cause "paralysis by analysis." the thought that an executive coach can help employees improve performance quickly may be a high point to CEOs, who put rock bottom line first. Yet that approach tends to gloss over any unconscious conflict the worker may need; this will have disastrous consequences for the corporate within the future and may exacerbate the psychological damage to the person targeted for help.

Consider Jim Mirabella, an executive earmarked for leadership at an electronic games manufacturer. Ever since the CEO had promoted him to go of selling, Mirabella had become impossible to figure with. Colleagues complained that he hoarded information about company strategy, market indicators, sales forecasts, and therefore the like. The idea circulating through the grapevine was that Mirabella aimed to weaken junior executives' ability to form informed contributions during inter-divisional strategic-planning sessions. He was assigned an executive coach.

At the first meeting, coach Sean McNulty was impressive. He had a bodybuilder's physique and a model's face. Although he had been cocaptain of the eleven at the large Ten university he had attended, McNulty always knew that he was too small for professional sports and not studious enough for medicine or law. But realizing he had charisma to spare, McNulty decided, while an undergraduate business major minoring in sports psychology, that he would pursue a career in executive coaching. After earning an MBA from the number one university, McNulty soon became known within the local businessmen as a person who could polish the managerial skills of even the ugliest of ducklings.

McNulty's mandate was to shadow Mirabella 24/7 for as long as required to make sure that he would grow into his position. From the beginning of their relationship, McNulty and Mirabella had two private meetings each day, during which McNulty analyzed Mirabella's behavior and role-played effective styles for mastering interpersonal situations that Mirabella didn't handle well. faithful his jock background, McNulty reacted to Mirabella's avowals of ineptitude and anxiety with exhortations. "Quitters never win, and winners never quit" was a favorite comment of his. Still, sometimes McNulty would also chide Mirabella for being a "weakling" who needed to "act sort of a man" to affect the stress of his preordained role within the corporate.

By dint of McNulty's force of personality or indefatigability, Mirabella stopped fighting his coach's efforts to toughen him up. To all or any outward appearances, Mirabella began acting just like the assertive executive he wasn't. Once McNulty saw Mirabella's behavior change, he told the CEO that Mirabella was now up to work. But within every week of ending his meetings with McNulty, Mirabella became severely depressed. At that time, he turned to me for help.

I soon realized that Mirabella wasn't trying to sabotage his colleagues to urge ahead. He felt he was moving forward too fast. Mirabella was convinced that he had only been promoted because, just like the company's CEO, he was an Italian-American. Mirabella believed that he hadn't earned his success but had it imposed on him due to the CEO's wish for an appropriate heir to the throne. As a result, Mirabella felt enormously anxious and angry. "Why should I be forced to overachieve with great care I can fulfill my boss's dream to stay the corporate within the hands of Italians?" he demanded.

An even more critical component of Mirabella's emotional struggle, though, was his morbid fear of failure. He obsessed that the leadership style he had developed belonged to his coach—not to him—and he dreaded being exposed as a fake.

Had Mirabella's coach been fewer sports-driven—or better versed in interpersonal psychology—he could have anticipated that each one the learned bravado within the world could never prepare Mirabella for the role he was assigned to fill. Mirabella needed someone who would hear his fears and analyze their origins. within the end, Mirabella could function effectively as long as his advancement was predicated on his desires and leadership style—not on someone else's. Once he was ready to affect his inner conflicts associated with those issues, Mirabella's career proceeded without incident.

The Snare of Behaviorism

Even when coaches adopt a more empirically validated approach than McNulty did, they still tend to fall under the trap of treating the symptoms instead of the disorder. That's because they typically derive their treatments from behavioral psychology. Of course, behaviorism has been an excellent boon to psychiatry in recent years. Findings from this discipline have helped people enormously in controlling specific behaviors and learning to cope, especially situations. But treatments derived from behavioral psychology are sometimes too limited to deal with the issues that disrupt executives' ability to function.
One of the foremost popular behaviorist solutions is behavior therapy. This system is most frequently wont to help individuals deal with situations that evoke intense negative feelings—for example, helping drug addicts to "just say no" to temptation. Executive coaches use behavior therapy in several contexts. As an example, many coaches working with executives who appear to be lacking confidence employ the technique in an attempt to urge them to perform better. Unfortunately, learning effective responses to stressors often fails to assist corporate executives in affecting their intrapsychic pressures.
Take Jennifer Mansfield, vice chairman of coaching and development at an outsized software manufacturer. An acknowledged workaholic, Mansfield had followed a standard path within her corporation, rising through the ranks by fulfilling every assignment with stellar results. When she was promoted to a managerial position, however, Mansfield's self-confidence began to slide. As a boss, she found it hard to delegate. Familiar with delivering 110%, she was reluctant to cede control of her direct reports. She also found it impossible to offer feedback. As a consequence, her work, which of her subordinates began to suffer, and she or he was missing deadlines.

Her boss presumed Mansfield had an assertiveness problem, so he hired a teacher from a consulting company that specialized in behavioral treatments to figure together with her. The coach assumed that Mansfield needed to find out to line limits, to criticize her subordinates constructively, and to avoid the trap of doing other people's work for them. Within two months of what her coach deemed successful training, Mansfield began to reduce, grow irritable, and display signs of exhaustion. At the time, I happened to be coaching the software company's COO, and he asked me to speak to her. It didn't take long to ascertain how behavior therapy had unearthed a drag Mansfield had managed to stay covert for years.

Companies have an adamant time handling workaholics like Mansfield. Such individuals tend to sacrifice social and avocational pursuits in favor of labor, and businesses value their productivity. It's hard to understand that these people have struck a Faustian bargain: trading success for "a life." Mansfield became a workaholic because she harbored an incredible fear of intimacy. Although she was young, attractive, and likable, her parents' divorce and her mother's subsequent emotional suffering (communicated to Mansfield as "all men are bastards") left her scared of forming intimate relationships with men. Those were easy for her to avoid when she managed discrete projects by fixing 80-hour work-weeks. But Mansfield could not do so when she became the manager of 11 professionals, seven of whom were men. For the first time in her career, males were showering her attentively, and therefore the consequences were extremely disruptive.
Mansfield could neither comprehend nor deal with the eye she received once promoted to the role of boss. While most managers would view the schmoozing and lobbying for attention that her reports engaged in as office politics, Mansfield saw these attempts at currying favor as trial balloons, which may cause dating. She wasn't sexually harassed; Mansfield was merely experiencing interpersonal advances that threatened the protective fortress she had erected against feelings of intimacy. The higher Mansfield managed the lads in her division—and the more her constructive feedback improved their work—the more intimate they seemed to become as a natural outcome of their appreciation.
I passed this diagnosis along to the chief vice chairman of human resources, and he concurred. Mansfield's coaching ceased, and after her boss and that I conducted a carefully crafted intervention, he agreed to hunt outpatient psychotherapy. Several years later, Mansfield was thriving as a manager, and she or he had developed a more fulfilling personal life.

Not all executive coaches are as indifferent as Mansfield's was to underlying psychological disturbances. But those oversights are common when coaches specialize in problems instead of people. Such coaches tend to define the issues plaguing an executive within the terms they understand best. If all you've got maybe a hammer, everything seems like a nail.

The Trap of Influence

Executive coaches are at their most dangerous once they win the CEO's ear. This puts them during a position to wield world power over a whole organization, a scenario that happens with disturbing frequency. Since many executive coaches were corporate types in prior lives, they connect with CEOs much more readily than most psychotherapists do. They're fluent in business patois, and that they move quickly from discussions of improving an individual's performance to conducting interventions which will help entire business units capture or retain market share. Unless these executive coaches are trained within the dynamics of interpersonal relations, however, they'll abuse their power—often without aiming to. Indeed, many coaches gain a Svengali-like hold over both the executives they train and, therefore, the CEOs they report back to, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

Many coaches gain a Svengali-like hold over both the executives they train and, therefore, the CEOs they report back to, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
Take Rich Garvin, the CEO of an athletic shoe manufacturing company with sales in more than $100 million a year. Despite his company's size, Garvin had never hired a teacher for any of his direct reports. He knew that his HR director used trainers and coaches, but Garvin was a finance guy first and foremost. And since the athletic industry was flying high, he left personnel matters to those that were paid to stress about them. But within the late 1990s, the marketplace for athletic shoes collapsed. In Garvin's world, the first immediate casualty was his COO, who snapped under the strain of failing to satisfy sales estimates for three consecutive quarters. The COO began venting his frustration on store managers, buyers, and suppliers.

Garvin was under the gun during this difficult time, so he skipped the standard steps and sought the services of an executive coach on his own. He picked someone he knew well: Karl Nelson, whom Garvin had worked with at a severe consulting company once they were both starting their careers as freshly minted MBAs. Garvin thought he could trust Nelson to assist manage his COO's anger and to mentor him through the storm. He also liked the sound of Nelson's coaching approach. It had been supported by a profiling system that diagnosed managers' strengths and weaknesses and charted career tracks that might optimize individual managers' productivity. This technique was almost like the Myers-Briggs inventory, with many of psychologist Abraham Maslow's self-actualization principles thrown in. Garvin believed that Nelson and his system could help the COO.
Within six months of taking the assignment, Nelson claimed that the once-raging COO was calm and capable of fulfilling his duties. While this successful outcome was aided in large part by the athletic shoe industry's recovery, Garvin was nevertheless impressed together with his friend's accomplishments. When Nelson suggested that he apply the profiling system to all or any of the company's key executives, Garvin didn't provide it a reconsideration.

During the subsequent year, Nelson suggested a variety of personnel changes. Since those came with the CEO's backing, the HR director accepted them, no questions asked. Because she was afraid to buck the CEO's handpicked adviser, the personnel director also said nothing about the issues that ensued. These stemmed from Nelson's exclusive reliance on his profiling system. For instance, in recommending the promotion of 1 East Coast store manager to regional director of West Coast sales, Nelson ignored the man's unfamiliarity with the region and, therefore, the people he was appointed to manage. Not surprisingly, that move—and many of Nelson's other ill-conceived selections—bombed. To compound the matter, word of Nelson's status and his often horrific recommendations circulated through the corporate like wildfire, leading many of us to both fear and resent his undue influence over Garvin. The negative emotions Nelson generated were so intense that underperforming, newly promoted managers became the targets of an undeclared, but uniformly embraced, the pattern of passive-aggressive behavior by the rank and file. Such reactions ranged from not attending meetings to ruining orders to failing to stock goods promptly.

Psychiatrists who've studied the Vietnam War are only too conversant in this sort of hostile reaction to ineffectual leaders. Lieutenants fresh from ROTC training were hazed, sometimes even killed, by veteran troops who resented what they seemed to be an illegitimate attempt by the "F—ing New Guy" (FNG) to exercise authority. Military psychiatrists soon realized that these FNG lieutenants, clueless about the laws that governed life on the front lines, had been pulling rank in an attempt to say authority. The troopers didn't take this well. In their view, the new lieutenants didn't pile up to their predecessors, who had learned to let their hair down. To deal with the FNG syndrome, the military cautioned lieutenants to require it easy until the troopers accepted that they had developed field credentials.

When the second decline in sales confronted Garvin, this one precipitated by the FNG syndrome, he had no concept Nelson's activities had caused the matter. Because he believed that Nelson was an expert altogether issues of personnel functioning and efficiency, Garvin increased his reliance on his friend's counsel. He had become a victim of what, within the language of psychiatry, is named "transference"—a dynamic that gave Nelson extraordinary psychological power over Garvin.

Most people understand transference as "falling in love" with one's therapist. While this will be a manifestation, it paints an incomplete picture of the phenomenon. Transference are often positive or negative. Mostly, it's a strong feeling for somebody whose traits mirror those of a significant person—typically a parent—from one's past. Garvin formed a positive transference toward Nelson (who "saved" his COO). That placed Garvin within the role of an information-dependent child vis-à-vis an expert parent. Garvin relied on his coach to return up with best practices for handling problem executives. CEOs often form these kinds of relationships with their coaches.

Not all CEOs experience transference. Even so, coaches can quickly expand their influence—from training to all-purpose advising—because CEOs don't wish to lose face. Company leaders understand what coaches do and sometimes feel personally liable for selecting them. As a result, they feel more in charge of their coaches' successes or failures than they might if a psychotherapist were assigned to the case. Within the same vein, when the CEO personally endorses a business plan, a variety of psychological factors conspire to form it difficult to abandon that plan. Garvin had confronted thereupon situation when he authorized the systemwide use of Nelson's personnel development procedures.

Garvin's story had a cheerful ending. Eventually he was persuaded to usher in a consulting company to deal with the issues besetting his company. On the consultants' recommendation, he terminated Nelson's contract, and therefore the FNG syndrome ceased. Not all CEOs are that lucky.

The Importance of experience

To best help, their executives, companies got to draw on the expertise of both psychotherapists and executive coaches with legitimate skills. At a minimum, every executive slated to receive coaching should first receive a psychological evaluation. By screening out employees not psychologically prepared or predisposed to profit from the method, companies avoid putting executives in deeply uncomfortable—even damaging—positions. Equally important, companies should hire independent psychological state professionals to review coaching outcomes. This helps to make sure that coaches aren't ignoring underlying problems or creating new ones, as Nelson did.

Psychological assessment and treatment are not any silver bullet—and can be gratuitous. As an example, a teacher who trains executives to reinforce their strategic-planning abilities needn't be a psychiatrist. But don't assume that each one executive who has planning problems lack the required skills. Can a mental disorder interfere with developing a business plan? If the client suffers from a depressive disorder, which is understood to dam one's ability to interact in constructive, goal-oriented behavior. Without safeguards to stop coaches from training those whose problems stem not from a scarcity of skills but psychological problems, the executives being coached and, therefore, the companies they work for will suffer.