Anu Wakhlu
Role Transition / Career Growth
The coachee was at the CXO level of a leading organization. He was to transition to a CEO role in the next 1 year. The main challenge for the coaching was that the coachee was not putting his attention to the most important things that were required for business to grow. His attention would get diverted by fire-fighting and getting caught in a myriad of operational issues. This impacted the strategic growth of the organization since the CXO was involved more with operational matters.
The coaching process involved working with the coachee over 14 sessions to firstly identify his life’s goals and vision for himself as a starting point. We then looked at his career goals –one of which was to be a successful CEO and take the company to new heights. The coachee then identified what he should be doing in order to be successful in his future role and where he is on those parameters as of now. The main causes for distraction and getting into operational matters was discussed. The reason was his expertise in the same.
The coachee was able to introspect and identify that unless he chooses to create a powerful pull for his new role and plan his time around key strategic matters –he would continue to get caught into operational matters. This was a big break-through for him. He created a not to do list and ensured that he plugged his calendar with key priorities and said no to distractions. This took about 5 sessions. The remaining sessions were on how the plan was working and surfacing what got in the way. The coachee was able to dispassionately assess his own progress and look at ways in which he could manage his big goals. A few practices that helped this were identified and built into his daily routine.
At the end of the coaching sessions, the person transitioned into the CEO role. His attention was now automatically more on the long term vision and goals of the organization. He saw himself as an enabler and not a doer. Due to this, he was able to delegate more and therefore also enhance the capability of his direct reports by giving them more empowerment and authority. The 360 degrees repeat assessment showed positive scores on his strategic ability from his internal stakeholders.
Vivek Yatnalkar
Managing work pressure
The coachee was the COO of a manufacturing company. He was expected to manage pressure situations such as targets and delivery of customer requirement. Currently he would pass down the same words, emotions and stress which caused his team to have insecurities, unhappiness and create unnecessary fear in their minds. He was not supposed to pass the same pressure to employees down the line. His role was to buffer the pressures of the senior management and share what needs to be done rather than passing on his anxiety and pressure to other employees.
Through questioning and reflection, the coachee realised that his emotional intelligence was getting disturbed in these stressful situations. He then came up with a strategy wherein he would take a pause. After the pause he would define what needs to stay with him and what he needs to pass down in appropriate words and emotions. The coachee thus created a ‘filtering mechanism’ to filter pressure created by the top Management. He was able to manage his stress and emotions in order to not impact others around him.
The coachee shared that from the last 3 months he has not raised his voice or lost his cool with juniors. Further the juniors shared that the COO has had considerable reduction in losing his cool and shouting at people. He was able to maintain his composure and deliver results more efficiently.
Preetha
Tough relationship with Manager
The coachee was the COO of a manufacturing company. He was expected to manage pressure situations such as targets and delivery of customer requirement. Currently he would pass down the same words, emotions and stress which caused his team to have insecurities, unhappiness and create unnecessary fear in their minds. He was not supposed to pass the same pressure to employees down the line. His role was to buffer the pressures of the senior management and share what needs to be done rather than passing on his anxiety and pressure to other employees.
Through questioning and reflection, the coachee realised that his emotional intelligence was getting disturbed in these stressful situations. He then came up with a strategy wherein he would take a pause. After the pause he would define what needs to stay with him and what he needs to pass down in appropriate words and emotions. The coachee thus created a ‘filtering mechanism’ to filter pressure created by the top Management. He was able to manage his stress and emotions in order to not impact others around him.
The coachee shared that from the last 3 months he has not raised his voice or lost his cool with juniors. Further the juniors shared that the COO has had considerable reduction in losing his cool and shouting at people. He was able to maintain his composure and deliver results more efficiently.
Arun Wakhlu
Influencing and political skills
The main issue that the coachee was facing was inability to influence and create impact. This was significant since he was at a CXO level. He wanted to enhance his ability to handle political situations at the workplace.
During the probing stage which is part of the coaching process, it appeared that the foundational issue was that the coachee had a distracted and unfocused mind. This led to his lack of presence, assertiveness, ownership, larger vision, weak capacity to influence, lack of capacity to be impactful in presenting, poor time management and poor listening.
All the above challenges were resolved through a basic practice of mindfulness and then building the requisite insights and skills to enhance influencing and stakeholder management.
There were significant breakthroughs in effectiveness and well-being of the coachee. The coachee got promoted and this resulted in positive impacts on the business front.
Shampi Venkatesh
Build accountability in team
The coachee was a CXO level leader. In order to deliver better results for her business unit, she wanted to ensure that she makes her team more accountable for results. She found that currently she was not able to pin accountability on the team. This was impacting the overall performance of the unit.
During the coaching, the root cause that emerged was that the coachee was giving solutions to the team so that they were able to perform faster. This however led to a dependency factor on her. She was not familiar with the coaching style that a leader should have. During the coaching, the solution arrived at was learning to ask questions rather being a solution giver and looking at problems and challenges as opportunities.
The coachee learnt to drive accountability by resisting giving solutions, asking the right questions and enabling her team to work in their circles of influence and control.
Vikas Bhatia
Dealing with resistance from seniors
The coachee shared that he needed to develop an ability to face resistance or push back from seniors. If he had some ideas, he often would not be able to present the ideas convincingly to his seniors. He would get shot down by their views and this was impacting his morale and self confidence.
During the coaching intervention it emerged that the person in his childhood and adult phase had not got opportunities to speak his mind or present his thoughts. Decisions were mainly taken by other people including parents. This childhood pattern was interfering with his ability to present convincing ideas and leading to frustration. Once this was identified and acknowledged by the coachee he was able to start empathising with himself as well as his seniors. After this he was able to speak up with more conviction and confidence to his seniors.
The coachee had shared that a lot of his time was spent on worrying about the reactions of the seniors which further reduced his energy levels. This was addressed and thus led to more productivity.
Also due to him being able to talk about his ideas in a clear and concrete manner it led his seniors to have higher engagement and confidence in him.
Dr. Niloufer Aga
Emotional control
The coachee was a senior manager in a technology company. He had this strong value that company resources should not be wasted. But what currently was happening was that it was coming in the way of his functioning, he was spoiling working relationships with his colleagues and entering into areas that were not his to be looked into or managed. For example he felt that people should take the booking of their flights more seriously and not cancel them. He would then end up arguing with the ticketing team about the issue and escalating the matter unnecessarily. His behaviour was creating an uncomfortable atmosphere in the office.
During the coaching process, by asking powerful questions and having conversations around effective interpersonal skills the coachee was able to understand the impact of his behaviours on others. This self awareness made him take accountability for his own actions, understanding others’ iceberg, become empathetic and build rapport with other people. He was able to build pleasant working relationships with colleagues.
The manager of the coachee expressed satisfaction on the improvement of the coachee’s behaviour. They were able to see shifts in his behaviour patterns.
he team reported that the frequency of losing temper had drastically reduced. He had also become a better listener in team meetings.
He was now considerate of others since he was able to understand their frame of reference and their mental models / conditioning. He was thus able to display more patience and was less reactive in trying times.
Yoshita Swarup Sharma
Role Transition / Career Growth
The coachee was transitioning into a more senior- top management role and had issues with his peers accepting him as an equal. The coaching objective was to enable him to develop acceptability with his peer community and also make a successful transition to his new role.
Coachee underwent a strengthscope 360 assessment to arrive at his strengths and gain feedback from his stakeholders. He also requested some stakeholders to provide him a regular feedback. As a coach I shadowed him in team meetings and helped build awareness around mannerisms that were creating a perception of arrogance/ rude behaviour which were creating a dissonance with his peers. The coaching helped him to be self aware and to bring about a change in his behaviour and actions. E.g. the language, tone and body language.
Though he had attended many leadership workshops he wanted a specific list of observable behaviours that he could start/ stop. This worked really well for him and over a period of 8 to 9 months he made a lot of progress in peer relationships.
Manish Gupta
Projecting confidence and competence
The coachee did not sufficiently highlight/ project his work, or display sufficient energy and passion, and he was a poor listener.
The coachee understood the need for change and through a process of questioning was able to arrive at the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of change. The coachee was able to understand the importance of making his work visible and went through a number of sessions to practice his skills. He also understood the need to project passion and confidence and understood the source of the same. All this emerged through the multiple coaching sessions.
The coachee was able to make considerable progress within 3 coaching sessions and we did not need to extend the coaching engagement.
Pragnya Wakhlu
Leveraging social media
The cochee was an ex Managing Director of a company. He was now transitioning from this role into being an independent consultant. He was unsure of how to leverage social media for brand visibility and business development.
During the coaching process the client got familiar with the various social media platforms available and built his skills and awareness of how to leverage them. He designed smart measurable and time bound goals with respect to numbers and engagement and deployed on diverse social media platforms.
Social media followers increased 6 fold in a span of a year by organic marketing and no paid means of marketing.
Anitha Balaraj
Diversity / relationships
Working with people from different culture, made the coachee very timid. Coachee was hesitant before going in for a specific meeting and lacked some confidence. Coachee wanted to develop confidence in dealing with people from multi cultural backgrounds and prepare for one critical meeting that was coming up which had multi cultural delegates.
The coachee understood the reasons for the diffidence; what were the reasons for diffidence explored creative solutions what was the solution evolved for understanding the person from a cultural context and became absolutely ready for the meeting.
The meeting that he was preparing for progressed very well and the candidate has gained more confidence did anything change in his role, did he get more opportunities to present after this for handling future important business meetings, which is very necessary for his role.
Mrunal Lamge
Improving competence
The broad issues / area of change needed by the Coachee were-
Improving their competence [various aspects like- being more assertive, increasing their influencing skills, increasing team work, etc.]
Career Growth
Developing better relationship at work
Changing Habits
developing effective leadership skills,etc
The solution was personal what suited them the most. What does this mean? The cause was psychological or personal issues
In other words, it was identifying the deeper cause, noticing its impact & making a new choice that could enable them to be more successful – making a career path for the next 5 years, did he prioritise, were all these things impacting his professional growth –
The coachee worked on the foundational attitudes and behaviour that was impacting his competence building at work.
Examples- Change in the Mind-set, Change in their behaviours, Change in Habits. These were quantified in terms of their own feedback and feedback from identified stakeholders in regards to the evidence of change.
Self feedback on how their feelings in regards to certain situations have changed for the better.
Hemant Deshpande
How to build interpersonal relationships to create a favourable perception
The coachee was the Senior Leader of a leading Fragrance & Packaging Organisation. His role demanded him to interact with multiple stakeholders across various geographies and work in an ambiguous and uncertain environment.
It was identified that he needed to learn better ways to handle difficult conversations and communicate his ideas and messages more effectively. He was also required to master the art of creating win-win situations. In addition to this, he wanted to work on time management and stakeholder management in his role.
At the end of the coaching sessions, the coachee benefitted in many ways. He experienced major shifts in his thinking and beliefs such as, he stopped judging people with his expertise levels and stopped reacting to other people’s behaviour. His stress levels reduced and he started noticing ‘Speed of Trust’. He became more assertive and less aggressive. He started focusing on important issues which improved his productivity. He also saw openness in his relationship with co-workers. He became more consultative and compassionate to customers. All this lead to his seamless transition to a higher role at a global level.