THE NEED
Executive Coaching Network^® (EXCN) was approached by a telecommunications company based outside the U.S. (“TeleCorp”) to coach the top 7 executives in the company.  The company was enjoying impressive success and aimed to become one of the top 20 telecommunications company in the world. As such, their goal was to become an employer of choice, to attract, develop and retain the best talent, and to maintain aggressive productivity goals. The TeleCorp leadership understood that to realize their aggressive growth goals they had to transfer more ownership to executives for developing their people in order to grow and develop people quickly, to ensure that development interventions would have lasting effects and show tangible results, and to promote a self-learning environment.
To accomplish these objectives, they decided to engage EXCN

• to provide coaching to their senior executives regarding current roles and/or future roles;
• to provide Leader as Coach training to the leaders; and
• to start a cascading culture of coaching within the organization.

THE RESULTS
As a result of EXCN’s coaching intervention, TeleCorp’s executives dramatically improved their leadership and coaching skills according to their colleagues and subordinates.  Interviews about changes in the executives’ leadership subsequent to the completion of coaching revealed a litany of praise for the improvements of various leaders:

• “He wants us all to be ready to meet the deadlines and handle the customers to ensure our success.”
• “He became transparent, sharing thoughts, and taking advice.”
• “He is a high-level coach now, leaving the implementation of ideas to his direct reports; this induces a spirit of motivation and creativity in his direct reports.”
• “He is involved and shows a real interest in my personal development.  Whenever we have discussions he has my best interest in mind even if it is stuff I don’t want to hear.  He wants me to be the best I can be.”

Quantitative data also illustrate the executives’ improvement in leadership and coaching ability.  Overall satisfaction with executives as leaders improved from 3.87 to 4.35 and satisfaction with leaders as coaches improved from 3.30 to 4.05 on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 being highly satisfied).

THE PROCESS
With this group of senior executives, we followed our rigorous process of Strategic Executive Coaching^®.  Together with the client, we established objectives and agreed on the process, assessed perceptions about the executives’ leadership, and analyzed the data to create a confidential feedback report for each executive.  Each executive then created an action plan, shared with direct reports what he had learned, and modified the action plan based on the feedback received.  We then provided talking points to each executive to ensure they were clear about how to discuss their plans, follow-up and progress with direct reports and peers.  We concluded with in-depth individual sessions to ensure sustained success.

IMPROVEMENTS
At TeleCorp, performance has been facilitated by the great improvements executives made mainly in these areas:  spending significant and effective time with direct reports, genuinely listening to others, seeking feedback and input from others, and proactively addressing performance issues.

RESULTS MATTER; LEADERSHIP COUNTS®
In our work with this company, as well as with our other clients, coaching is about getting results: Learning practical capabilities that actually produce better results in the real world is our priority.