MANILA, Philippines—If you’re an executive of the company and suddenly your HR head calls to tell you that you will be undergoing coaching from someone from a management consulting firm, don’t fret.
It’s not that you’re not doing your job well or you’re missing your targets. It would most probably be the other way around.
“It’s being given to executives who are on the rise or those who are about to become superstars in their respective companies,” Romy Serrano, senior consultant and executive coach of Management Strategies, says about executive coaching.
Management Strategies is an Asian-based management consulting company that provides solutions to maximize individual and organizational performance through strategic alignment, competency building and team engagement.
“Executive coaches are brought in to work with the executive so that small issues could be addressed and once these issues are tackled head on, the executive is expected to move to a high level of performance,” Serrano, himself an executive coach, explains.
Serrano’s expertise lies in strategic and performance management, marketing and business development. His professional career spans 36 years with three multinational companies, the last as president and CEO of Fuji Xerox Philippines from 2001-08.
Earlier, he was executive for Kodak in Taiwan, New York and Hong Kong and in 1997, he became the country manager of Motorola Philippines.
His academic background includes executive programs in the Asian Institute of Management and Harvard Business School.
For her part, Joi Natividad, country manager of Management Strategies, says that people sometimes misconstrue that if an executive coach is hired, the executive or the coachee is problematic.
“A lot of people don’t realize that the executives are high-potential people, and that is why the company is investing in them. They just need a little tweaking so they will perform much, much better,” she shares.
Natividad adds that executives who know about executive coaching are proud because they understand that they are on the rise, they are on the way up, and his company is spending huge money on him.
Serrano, meanwhile, explains that executive coaching is an engagement between a certified professional executive coach and a high-level executive who has big responsibilities in the organization.
“It’s an engagement that would address very defined issues which are sometimes broken down into performance and developmental or behavioral,” he says.
Serrano adds that the executive coach does not tell or teach the coachee what he has to do but is only there for the coachee to realize or come up with solutions to his problems.
“The executive coach works like a sports coach,” he emphasizes as he expounds on the similarities between the two. “Just like the sports coach, the executive coach mentors and provides the coachee the power to perform but it’s still the executive who does the job.”
Serrano, who has coached executives from the country’s top 100 corporations as well as from multinational companies, shares that usually the ones being coached are executives from upper management level and higher, normally execom levels, department or division heads, direct reports of the CEO, and even the CEO himself.
He shares executive coaches have their own distinct styles in doing their jobs. As for him, he usually meets the coachee in the latter’s company premises but not in his own office. “Sometimes, it’s in the board room or in a meeting room, or maybe in another executive’s office. This is to avoid disruption and for the executive to be still connected to his company in a way since he’s in its premises.”
Right questions
In executive coaching, Serrano adds, the executive coach is working with a very talented, highly educated, and wide experienced individual. This means that the engagement is not about teaching or giving the executive the solutions to his problems but asking him the right questions for him to come up with a realization of his problems. The coachee then is expected to provide solutions to these problems.
With regards to the process of executive coaching, he says that the executive coach usually sets a goal with the coachee and they would work on achieving that goal.
“For example, there’s lack of assertiveness on the part of the coachee so his higher-ups decide that this executive needs more assertiveness for him to move up to the next level. That could be a goal. The executive coach then will work in developing the assertiveness of the coachee,” Serrano explains.
This goal-setting and its eventual accomplishment usually undergo a process of validating and revalidating, says Serrano.
“There’s a need to verify if that goal is really the correct goal, if that goal is realistic, or if it does not have any hidden agenda. The coach and the coachee then are expected to arrive at options and once they have decided which way to go, they would then develop an action plan that would work toward the achievement of that goal,” he explains.
Serrano adds that a coaching engagement usually runs for 10 sessions at about an hour each. At the end of a session, they are expected to come up with action items which the coachee will work on. They will meet again in one to two weeks to check the status of these action items. This would conclude the first session and the next sessions usually undergo the same process.
Developmental or behavioral
As far as the issues that are addressed in executive coaching, Serrano shares that these are both performance and developmental or behavioral.
“Let’s say the executive is not good at controlling his temper, that’s behavioral, so the coach and the coachee will work on developing the attitude of the executive, that is, how to control his temper especially that he’s now handling a lot of people and he’s dealing with fellow executives,” he says.
As to performance, Serrano says, what the executive usually just needs is a little tweaking for him to improve certain areas of his management style.
“We have to note the fact that these are very talented individuals, they just need a little squeeze so that they would perform much better than how they are now,” Serrano explains.
Infancy in PH
Natividad says that executive coaching is still at its infancy in the Philippines especially when compared with the United States, Europe, Australia, even Singapore and Hong Kong where it is already at advanced stages.
“But it’s been getting around already here. People, especially in the HR industry, talk about it,” she says.
Compared to training, or those usually conducted in companies by HR to the staff, MBA programs and other short-term courses, executive coaching first and foremost is automatic one-on-one mentoring between the executive coach and the coachee. It is also tailor-fit to the needs of the specific executive as compared to MBAs and short-term courses which are more on learning things in the general sense of the business.
“Training is a program given to a large number of people, say a department or a division, or a group of people belonging to the same level, say managers or supervisors. But training doesn’t address the specific needs of the individual,” Serrano explains.
He adds that in coaching the coachee is expected to retain most of what he has learned in the process because essentially he was the one who came up or discovered the answers to the issues or the problems that the coach and the coachee have set as goals in the beginning.
“Coaching is obviously not cheap but its benefits, both to the executive as well as to the company, are enormous. The financial return that the organization would get from its spruced up executive is expected to be much higher than the investment it spent for him,” Serrano concludes.