Why Executive Coaching Fails

As we’ve discussed in a recent post, executive coaching can produce an amazing return on investment (10x-49x the outlay). But there are plenty of examples where executive coaching returned no results at all. When the average coaching engagement yields a 7 times return on investment, why do some coaching arrangements fail so miserably? Below we’ll discuss the five primary reasons executive coaching fails and how you can avoid these traps to get the returns you deserve.

  1. Lack of executive commitment – Alcoholics Anonymous only allows people to participate who are willing to state “I am an alcoholic”. They’ve learned through the years that the only people who are going to make such a significant change in their life must freely admit that they need to change. The same goes for executives. If an executive is unwilling to admit that they need to change, they will not. These are the executives that, as a coach, you must fire or never engage with.
  2. Executive unwilling to leave – Sometimes the best coaching you can give an executive is that it is time to leave the organization. It could be politics, culture, or too many burned bridges, but sometimes the difficulties facing an executive are too great to overcome. When an executive has put his heart and soul into a job and an organization, it is very hard for them to act on this advice. When an executive refuses to recognize the signs and make the difficult decision to leave, the situation most often turns out very bad for the executive and the organization. Hard decisions are never easy to make, but the sooner they are made, the better it is for everyone involved.
  3. No stated goal – Executive coaching is often seen as a soft skill used to “smooth out” an executives rough edges; smoothing out is not a measurable goal. No coaching engagement should ever be started without a measurable goal which the executive is willing to strive for and that the executives’ higher ups believe is worth achieving.
  4. Lack of support from higher ups – Far too often coaching is used by boards once the executive has already been written off. It is just a set up to fire the executive. Regardless of the change that the executive achieves, it is highly unlikely that she will regain favor with the board. Eventually, they will leave the organization. The ending of the story could never be changed by coaching.
  5. A bad coach – What makes a bad coach? Here are a few things to look out for:
    1. A coach that talks more than he or she listens.
    2. A coach determined to use their solution, rather than creating a solution with the executive.
    3. A coach that doesn’t measure his success by the success of the executive.

There are plenty of other reasons that coaching and executives fail, but if you avoid these top 5 traps you will be that much closer to getting the return on investment you desire from the coaching engagement.

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Photo courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Hargreaves.

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