By Leslie Pratch
I offer one-on-one executive coaching services for:
- CXOs and their high-potential direct reports
- Senior investment professionals and their high-potential direct reports
I focus on enhancing the skills needed to thrive in complex, rapidly changing conditions. Areas I address often include blind-spots, decision-making, business development, developing subordinates, negotiating, and broader issues in leadership and management.
I assess coaching prospects prior to designing a coaching plan so that we have an understanding of the internal challenges the executive faces and a basis for exploring and overcoming them. The assessment also includes a structured analysis of the prospect’s job. As part of this analysis, together with the prospect, we identify key targets and metrics and document the relationships that will be crucial for success.
Coaching helps executives establish goals, meet developmental objectives, and realize their potential. Rather than give advice, I act as a sounding board and ask questions that help executives clarify and solve their own problems. I ask specific questions, listen empathically, and give directed feedback. At times, I will suggest visualization as a way of imagining being in a situation and acting differently than usual as a way to mentally rehearse a new behavior and attitude. I also develop scripts with the client for handling difficult conversations and proposals. I may point to resources the client can exploit to help solve problems more creatively and effectively.
The outcome of coaching is much greater credibility and effectiveness as a leader and manager, increased self-awareness, and greater capacity to cope creatively and constructively with complexity and change.
Often at the onset of coaching or several months into it, the executive will undergo a 360° assessment. I gather and interpret confidential feedback from his or her peers, subordinates, superiors, and external parties. This kind of feedback promotes self-awareness and clarifies development goals.
If coaching is part of a formal professional development program, I begin by talking to the executive’s superior. I want to understand the need as that superior sees it and to clarify the expectations and desired outcomes of the service.
I lay the ground rules for what information will be shared and what will not. I make sure that the executive’s superior(s) commit to support the process. If the executive comes to us privately, I skip these steps.
The next few months’ posts will provide a more detailed exposition of how and who I coach.
Much of my latest writing appears in The European Financial Review
About the Author
Leslie S. Pratch is the founder and CEO of Pratch & Company. A clinical psychologist and MBA, she advises private equity investors, management committees and Boards of Directors of public and privately held companies whether the executives being considered to lead companies possess the psychological resources and personality strengths needed to succeed. In her recently published book, Looks Good on Paper? (Columbia University Press, 2014), she shares insights from more than twenty years of executive evaluations and offers an empirically based approach to identify executives who will be effective within organizations – and to flag those who will ultimately very likely fail – by evaluating aspects of personality and character that are hidden beneath the surface.
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