11/22/2022

Ask the Right Questions to Coach Leaders

What's happening inside us paints our behaviors

Lucas B. is the CEO of a well-known multibillion-dollar company whose survival was at risk at the height of the pandemic. Many analysts had written it off. Lucas had a strategy for returning the company to profitability, which his board supported, but he was struggling to implement it. In Lucas’s view, he was up against an array of external obstacles. When we began working together, he resisted the idea that his own leadership was a central part of the problem.

But his own leadership was exactly the problem. And not for the typical reasons you might guess.

I have been coaching CEOs and other C-suite leaders for 20 years. In a fiercely complex and challenging world, I’ve found that leaders, more than ever, need to understand how what’s going on inside themselves is influencing their actions in the outside world. Instead, for most corporate leaders I’ve worked with – often doers more than deep thinkers – what’s going on internally is a vast unexplored territory that they haven’t valued much. That includes what they’re feeling, where they’re feeling triggered and how early experiences in their lives influence the choices they’re making in the present.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.