Situation: John, a former Director of R&D for his organization’s China operations, was only in his new role as head of the customer service center servicing Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa for three months. His team had expanded from 15 local direct reports to 60 team members hailing from different countries and levels in the organization. Innovation had been instrumental to his success as a leader in the organization thus far, but he needed to expand his managerial, leadership and communication skill sets in order to accomplish the new job requirements and accelerate his ability to perform at the necessary caliber.
New Challenges:
- Shift from a ‘product--oriented mindset’ to a ‘service-oriented mindset’
- Engage cross-boundary stakeholders in better delivering customer related indicatives and problems
- Anticipate customer issues to facilitate his team’s preparedness and strengthen the team's “customer focus”
- Gain trust and credibility with the team members from diverse cultural and technical backgrounds, many of whom were more seasoned than he is
- Manage resource allocation across locations
Coaching Approach: After a thorough chemistry check, the appropriate Executive Coach helped John engage in self reflection around both objective assessment results and stakeholder feedback to help him understand his general leadership style/preferences in the context of the new role. The Coach worked with him to identify potential gaps and together discovered how best to leverage his strengths and values in order to facilitate sustainable development. This process uncovered issues of being overly self-critical and a stress-related tendency to micromanage others—issues that were seriously affecting his ability to manage his team and his utilization of others’ potential. These issues ended up rooted in a tendency to consistently prioritize his agenda above those of others.
Over the course of the six month coaching engagement, he started to be more aware of the importance of getting to know his core team members through systematic one-on-one meetings as well informal communications while letting them better understand him. The coach also worked with him on building a mechanism to periodically gather feedback from and facilitate dialogue with other key stakeholders and customers proactively. These initiatives were only one part of his development plan, but it helped to shift his focus toward others and to adopt more of a service-oriented approach all around. During the process, he also started to better understand his team's capability and their interest and thus was able to better delegate tasks and identify opportunities for others to grow.
Outcome: Over the course of the six month coaching assignment, the expectations of his role and how his approach was impacting his success became clearer. He was able to move away from a more reactive ‘troubleshooting’ style to more prepared ‘anticipatory’ style. Accordingly, he experienced a reduction in experienced stress and increase in satisfaction. Team members began sharing concerns and issues more proactively, illustrating increased levels of trust improved team dynamics. Consistent positive feedback from customers and team members confirmed his renewed success. His change was visible not only to his direct managers, but also to other key account managers across the region. MGP was invited back to the organization to coach other senior executives.
