Ten reasons CEOs need help

As any professional athlete knows, a coach helps you achieve peak performance. Their role is to guide, advise and motivate the athlete to do their personal best.

Yet in the business world, many CEOs fly solo, relying on friends, family and trusted colleagues for guidance.

I spoke with an ex-CEO recently who reflected that this didn't always produce the best result. He said:

"When I was a CEO, I would turn to my head of human resources, my wife, occasionally my Chairman and/or friends that were or had been CEO's and who I trusted, when I needed advice and counsel.

"In retrospect, I think an external coach may have provided more objective counsel.

"Some of the people I consulted were too close, others not close enough; some you couldn't get to when you wanted them; and some provided the solution before all the options were out on the table.”

Life is not all beer and skittles for CEOs in the limelight – at times it can be lonely at the top and in today's ever more stressful environment, it's becoming lonelier.

In my work I often speak with CEOs who are experiencing anxiety about the public persona they are expected to portray, not to mention sleepless nights brought about by being the ultimate decision maker with whom the buck stops.

CEOs need to constantly ask themselves:

- What habitual coping mechanisms do I use and are they adequate to assist me through the role?

- How can I express my emotions appropriately to situations?

- How do I see myself and how honest and accurate is that perception?

As an executive coach, you have to be part business and career coach and part sounding board to support and challenge a CEO's self-perception.

A good executive coach is objective, confidential, has no vested interests and as such, has only the client CEO's interests in mind and can tell it like it is. Good coaches are solutions-focused and work from a strengths rather than deficits basis, building upon the positives as a path to ameliorate the potential derailers. A good coach also has relevant business and commercial experience to draw upon so that they speak the same language as the CEO.

After 12 years as an executive coach and mentor, here are my top 10 reasons why CEOs should get a coach:

1. Interpersonal conflict - this occurs not only with work colleagues but often also with friends and family. In addition, being answerable to the board and leader of the senior executive team, means relationships are not simple and often involve high levels of ambiguity. Conversing with a coach can result in conflict being avoided in the first place.

2. Stress – this can be anything from insomnia to highly specific phobias as a result of long term work-life imbalance. Without a way of staying balanced, CEOs and top executives can become increasingly disconnected from their spouses, children and wider family and community and only identify the long term damage well after the event.

3. Leadership and culture – while often set in tandem with the Board, the CEO is ultimately the driver of culture, with the need for a continuing push to create a better workplace environment a constant. The coach can assist the CEO to link the business strategy with the behavioural change required to drive an aligned culture from a values base. CEOs can often sell the vision, however, are lower on execution and self awareness of the impact of their behaviour on culture.

4. Role model - the CEO is the ultimate role model in an organisation. No matter how competent a CEO, they will always be disappointing to their organisation and people unless they can be self-aware and secure enough to open up about their strengths and weaknesses. Surrounding themselves with management and executives who have the skills and personality traits they don't possess will ensure a balance in the top team. The coach provides an objective and independent mirror for self reflection.

5. Time to think and reflect - the view from the top of the CEO's world is all about managing key stakeholder groups which can sometimes become a 24-7 equation. A quieter period of reflection in conversation with a coach allows a degree of perspective to be developed, which would otherwise be difficult or non-existent.

6. The new CEO – with average CEO tenure time in Australia at less than five years, there are always going to be a good number of new CEOs around. Most first time CEOs are not initially comfortable in this role, yet performance is expected quick smart.

7. Challenges – increased complexity requires CEOs to think at a significantly broader and higher level, meaning the agenda of challenges increases daily.

8. A dispassionate ear – a coach assists CEO's to remain, objective, rational and neutral in their feedback because their own observations don't carry a weighted objective.

9. Part of the solution, not the problem - The Board and individual directors will be concerned with how the CEO performs as they participated in the selection process and will want the CEO to succeed to endorse their own positions and agendas. The coach can assist both the CEO and the Board on expectations management and communication of a 90 and 180 day plan. As alignment with the Board is critical for success, so the CEO also needs strategies and techniques to manage the Chairman and NED roles in order to achieve the outcomes required.

10. Structure and focus – a typical CEO on a normal day probably wrestles with hundreds of issues, a plethora of emails and phone calls, never ending meetings, sensitive HR matters and all the rest that goes with being a CEO. Sometimes it's difficult to see either the forest or the trees. A coach will stand back and help the CEO to put some frameworks around what's important and what isn't.

It's hard to stop at just ten reasons; others such as broadening the scope of available information, ideas and solutions, could easily justify inclusion.

But perhaps the best reason for a CEO to use a coach is to ask one who has successfully used one; as always, the proof is usually in the pudding.

Virginia Mansell is managing director of the Stephenson Mansell Group, Australia's leading executive coaching, mentoring and leadership development organisation. She holds a BA in Psychology and Statistics, a Postgraduate Degree in Counselling Psychology, and has been a registered psychologist for 18 years. In 2009 Virginia published her first book, The Focused Executive: Leadership & Management Skills in Challenging Times.