Executive Coaching: Leading Change

Our Coaching Specialty: Coaching executives who are leading change
We are especially effective at helping executives and managers whose employees are dragging their feet or otherwise struggling with, or resisting, the change. We show leaders how to build support for unpopular or controversial change programs. Often coaching focuses on how to solve the "people problems" associated with planning and implementing change.

Leading change is unnatural
Leading change successfully requires executives to do the unnatural, if not the almost impossible. They must solve the logical problems attending planning and implementing major change while simultaneously dissolving the emotion-based resistance their followers have to the change. The mindsets and the skills of these two tasks are exactly opposite and very tricky to perform simultaneously. Rational problem solving works on the logical problems but makes the emotion-based reactions worse! We help executives wear both hats. Simultaneously. Successfully. What results? Change efforts that stick!

Importance of remaining human
Pressure to change, and even more so, the pressure to lead a change can cause us to revert to crisis survival mode. Our focus often shifts to moment-to-moment survival. We call upon a very limited set of skills that protect us in a crisis. This limited, 1-dimensional set of skills works in the short run. However, it often does not work in the long run. Leading change requires long-run results. Leading change requires that we access our full range of resources, including both our rational problem-solving skills and our emotion-based relationship skills. Successful change leadership demands that we be fully functioning, 3-dimensional, real people - even under the pressure of change. This may make us feel odd, even vulnerable, but being able to do it will reap great rewards.