EXECUTIVE COACHING
Enhancing capability and impact in a new role at the top
Situation
Andrea had been appointed the Human Resources Senior Vice-President for a well-known pharmaceutical company. Her dedication, diligence and good relationships with the company’s top executives had gotten her promoted very fast along her career, all the way to this new position.
The CEO offered Andrea the chance to be coached, so she could soar faster in her role and enjoy it sooner.
Excerpts from our coaching work
I asked Andrea to list positive and negative traits she believed she had, and I interviewed her colleagues about her traits. Here are our findings, side-by-side in the table on the right →
Six of Andrea’s traits were confirmed by everyone: creativity, generosity, impatience, ‘too direct’, ‘not strategic enough’ and ‘sometimes too eager to please’.
As I asked Andrea to try and connect the dots, she reflected that all of those traits – except ‘not strategic enough’ – had actually helped her progress quickly in her career. People had appreciated her creativity, her inclination to ‘tell it like it is’ and even her impatience, in an environment where HR were perceived as overly conservative, slow, cautious and political. Her generous personality and her eagerness to please had endeared her to many, and led them to forgive her for her flaws.
As Andrea had interviewed people, she had gotten to realize that her weakness at long-term and strategic thinking had become critical in her new position at the head of the HR function. From that realization, she had decided to protect time in her agenda to work on important, longer-term goals and issues.
We then reflected about the traits where her opinion of herself and others did not match. Andrea shared that she was initially startled that others considered her insecure, whilst she thought she was rather a confident lady. But they convinced her with some examples of her attitude in her new role. She had appeared to them as less assertive than before, second-guessing herself sometimes, or not supporting her proposal with strong enough rationale and then backing down quickly – occasionally even agreeing with an opposite view-point -. Andrea was also surprised that what she was fond of – her ‘perfectionism’ – was perceived by others as ‘too detail-focused’. Yet she was quick to recognize the thread between insecurity, ‘too detail focused’ and ‘not strategic enough’. That confirmed she needed to step back, stop intervening in all topics, and focus more on the big picture. Andrea also understood that her real challenge was not at personal organization level (she thought she was disorganized), but with her too narrow functional orientation.
At first, she was in denial about being deemed a ‘poor listener’. I invited her to look at the overall pattern from others’ insights. And she came to realize that her impatience, her insecurity and her directness combined backed the probability that she may not always listen well enough.
Outcome
After such an exploration, it was easy for Andrea to select what behaviors she wanted to leverage further or improve. She decided she would start with consciously building-up genuine confidence in her job, and we designed a comprehensive action plan on this.
Andrea’s decision was a great one, as her case is typical of what is called ‘the impostor syndrome’ where someone deep down is doubting that s/he deserves the position s/he has been offered. And the first thing to do then, is to develop oneself as a “work-in-progress” and grow the right skills and behaviors for the job.
A year into the job, a 360-feedback survey was launched for Andrea. Her boss, peers and subordinates all endorsed her strong capability and impact in the role. The report contained several mentions of significant shared-wins between HR and other functions. One comment particularly delighted Andrea: “under Andrea’s HR leadership, our Company is evolving towards a talent-factory, and the benefits are already visible in employees’ engagement and retention.”