Executive Coaching with
Backbone and Heart
A Systems Approach to Engaging Leaders with Their Challenges

Excerpt from
THE PREFACE

Executive coaches have the privilege of working with the men and women who lead and influence the direction of today's organizations. With this privilege comes a responsibility to partner with leaders in significant ways in order to contribute to successful change efforts. The work of executive coaches deserves its own literature in the field.

Unlike coaching methodologies that use techniques to leverage change in the client, Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart focuses on the need for coaches to use their own presence with the client. Executive coaching is not about imposing skill training onto leaders. Fundamentally, it is about learning to be with leaders as they navigate through their world, finding key moments when they are most open to learning.

Now let me be clear about being, learning, and doing. I do not mean that business outcomes should be ignored. There must be business results tied to coaching executives, and coaches should be business partners with leaders (Chapter Five). That can include helping develop necessary skills. But the key difference in a change effort occurs when leaders face their own challenges in pulling off the business results, and see how they get in their own way. In those pivotal moments, how a coach manages herself in the relationship to an executive facing those challenges can make the critical difference in the coaching outcome, and therefore, the business outcome.