Executive Coaching

Top executives are looking for a shoulder to cry on
These are stressful times for chief executives. When they are not being blamed for recording poor results, they are being blamed for not recording poor results. Branded failures or cheats, they are looking for a shoulder to cry on. If their spouses' sympathy is exhausted, they are turning to executive
coaching, a one-to-one, high-cost service (running to thousands of dollars a day) that companies increasingly offer their top-tier executives. Executive coaching is growing by about 40% a year, says Susan Bloch, head of coaching at the Hay Group, a human-resources consultancy. Its rapid growth has led some to worry that coaching is attracting the wrong sort--too many boffins from the classroom and hulks from the gym, says Steven Berglas, a psychotherapist whose website describes him as "the authority on narcissism and burnout among the highly successful".

In an article in the June issue of the HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW (HBR), Mr. Berglas writes that some of the "former athletes, lawyers, business academics and consultants" who have become executive coaches "do more harm than good". That is because, unlike Mr. Berglas, they cannot spot "the difference between a problem executive and an executive with a problem". The first needs training; the second needs help. Nigel Nicholson, professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School and author of "Managing the Human Animal", distinguishes between training, coaching and counseling, and says that executives need to think carefully about which they want before they start paying so richly for it. Coaching should be a matter largely of listening. "I'd rather coaches were too passive than too active," he says. Those executives who can't afford one should try keeping a diary, or a dog.

One of the biggest problems for top executives at the moment is the absence of mountains to climb. Mergers are out, the Internet is old hat, and risk-taking is off the agenda. "Successful people are conquerors," says Mr. Berglas. Take away the adrenalin of business conquest and bosses will seek it elsewhere. Why else, he asks, did Jack Welch, just retired from the top of General Electric, risk his marriage by launching into an affair with the then editor of the HBR, somebody from a profession not noted for its discretion? And why did Dennis Kozlowski, at the time the boss of Tyco and a man worth several hundred million dollars, allegedly risk a long prison sentence just to avoid a sales tax of $1m on his new art collection? Not for the money, surely? You can't train away that sort of behavior, says Mr. Berglas. It's psychotic. It needs a couch, not a coach. See related content at:

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