Executive and Board Coaching

Coaching was one of the smaller strands of Banff Executive Leadership Inc., and one of the most particular. This page records how the practice approached it. It describes past work and is not an offer of coaching to anyone.

The problem coaching was meant to solve

The practice's starting observation was plain enough that it rarely gets said. Senior roles are lonely and, at intervals, genuinely confusing. A chief executive cannot always raise a concern with peers inside the organization, because those peers report to them and will act on what they hear. They cannot always raise it upward either, because the board is the body that evaluates them. And when they recognize that they could use development, they usually cannot disappear for a fortnight to get it.

Coaching answered a narrow version of that problem: a trusted outside party with no stake in the internal politics, available for thinking aloud, for testing an argument before it is made in public, and for tuning up personal performance without the whole organization watching it happen.

There was a second use, put more bluntly in the archive. Finding and retaining a fully formed executive is difficult. Far more common is a person with several excellent attributes and one or two that are threatening their success or their advancement. Targeted, sustained development assistance is often the proportionate response to that, and a good deal cheaper than a replacement.

Short bursts, long commitment

The shape of the engagement mattered more than the technique. The practice worked in short, intensive bursts of contact aimed at an extended commitment to improvement, rather than in open-ended retainers with a standing monthly slot.

The reasoning is worth stating because it cuts against the commercial grain. An open-ended retainer rewards continuation. It fills its own time, it makes the coach a fixture in the executive's working week, and over a long enough period it can quietly become a substitute for the relationships the executive should be repairing inside their own organization. A short burst does the opposite. It forces both parties to name what is actually being worked on, it puts the real work in the months between sessions where it belongs, and it makes the value of the arrangement testable. The commitment is long. The contact is deliberately not.

Coaching the board chair

The practice treated coaching a board chair as a separate discipline from coaching an individual director, and the distinction rests on a structural fact: the chair, like every other director, has no authority as an individual except what fellow directors confer. The chair sets the agenda, manages the meeting, speaks for the board, ensures directors receive clear and timely information, and holds whatever discipline the board can exercise over its own members. None of that is command. All of it is influence exercised over people who are the chair's legal equals and who each carry the same fiduciary duty.

So the chair's work is a balancing act, and it is the one role that can make or break a board as a governing body. A chair is usually better prepared than the rest of the board, through longer service, more time, or better access to management. The temptation that follows is to use that advantage to move business efficiently, which in practice means moving it past directors who have not yet caught up. Coaching a chair therefore concentrates on restraint as much as on skill: on framing agenda items so the board thinks at a strategic and network level rather than descending into analysis, on asking questions that open a system rather than close an issue, on ensuring every director can satisfy themselves that due diligence has been done before the board reaches consensus, and on the patience to hear a new director ask a question the board settled two years ago.

Coaching an executive team as a unit

The third form was coaching a team rather than a person: an executive group, or occasionally a board, worked with as a single unit. Its logic is that many problems presented as individual performance issues are properties of the group. A team that cannot disagree in the room will disagree afterwards. A team whose accountabilities overlap will produce conflict that looks personal and is structural. A team that has never agreed how it makes decisions will relitigate every one of them. None of that is reachable by coaching the members separately, because each of them is behaving rationally given what the others do.

The written record of the practice's thinking on board chairs, board dynamics, decision-making and collaboration is preserved in the Leadership Acumen archive. The governance material that coaching drew on is on the board governance page, and the executive material on the executive leadership page. Directors seeking current guidance on the chair's role will find it published by bodies such as the Institute of Directors.