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Success Stories

Role Transition / Career Growth

Anu Wakhlu - Coach

Role Transition / Career Growth

Client Context and Challenge

The coachee was at the CXO level of a leading organization. He was to transition to a CEO role in the next 1 year. The main challenge for the coaching was that the coachee was not putting his attention to the most important things that were required for business to grow. His attention would get diverted by fire-fighting and getting caught in a myriad of operational issues. This impacted the strategic growth of the organization since the CXO was involved more with operational matters.

Coaching Design and Execution

The coaching process involved working with the coachee over 14 sessions to firstly identify his life’s goals and vision for himself as a starting point. We then looked at his career goals –one of which was to be a successful CEO and take the company to new heights. The coachee then identified what he should be doing in order to be successful in his future role and where he is on those parameters as of now. The main causes for distraction and getting into operational matters was discussed. The reason was his expertise in the same.

The coachee was able to introspect and identify that unless he chooses to create a powerful pull for his new role and plan his time around key strategic matters –he would continue to get caught into operational matters. This was a big break-through for him. He created a not to do list and ensured that he plugged his calendar with key priorities and said no to distractions. This took about 5 sessions. The remaining sessions were on how the plan was working and surfacing what got in the way. The coachee was able to dispassionately assess his own progress and look at ways in which he could manage his big goals. A few practices that helped this were identified and built into his daily routine.

Outcomes

At the end of the coaching sessions, the person transitioned into the CEO role. His attention was now automatically more on the long term vision and goals of the organization. He saw himself as an enabler and not a doer. Due to this, he was able to delegate more and therefore also enhance the capability of his direct reports by giving them more empowerment and authority. The 360 degrees repeat assessment showed positive scores on his strategic ability from his internal stakeholders.

Coach

Anu Wakhlu

Influencing and political skills

Arun Wakhlu - Coach

Influencing and political skills

Client Context and Challenge

The main issue that the coachee was facing was inability to influence and create impact. This was significant since he was at a CXO level. He wanted to enhance his ability to handle political situations at the workplace.

Coaching Design and Execution

During the probing stage which is part of the coaching process, it appeared that the foundational issue was that the coachee had a distracted and unfocused mind. This led to his lack of presence, assertiveness, ownership, larger vision, weak capacity to influence, lack of capacity to be impactful in presenting, poor time management and poor listening.

All the above challenges were resolved through a basic practice of mindfulness and then building the requisite insights and skills to enhance influencing and stakeholder management.

Outcomes

There were significant breakthroughs in effectiveness and well-being of the coachee. The coachee got promoted and this resulted in positive impacts on the business front.

Coach

Arun Wakhlu

Business Coach For Top Corporate Talent - Preetha Subramanian- ICF ACC

Tough relationship with Manager

Preetha Subramanian - Coach

Tough relationship with Manager

Client Context and Challenge

The coachee was the COO of a manufacturing company. He was expected to manage pressure situations such as targets and delivery of customer requirement. Currently he would pass down the same words, emotions and stress which caused his team to have insecurities, unhappiness and create unnecessary fear in their minds. He was not supposed to pass the same pressure to employees down the line. His role was to buffer the pressures of the senior management and share what needs to be done rather than passing on his anxiety and pressure to other employees.

Coaching Design and Execution

Through questioning and reflection, the coachee realised that his emotional intelligence was getting disturbed in these stressful situations. He then came up with a strategy wherein he would take a pause. After the pause he would define what needs to stay with him and what he needs to pass down in appropriate words and emotions. The coachee thus created a ‘filtering mechanism’ to filter pressure created by the top Management. He was able to manage his stress and emotions in order to not impact others around him.

Outcomes

The coachee shared that from the last 3 months he has not raised his voice or lost his cool with juniors. Further the juniors shared that the COO has had considerable reduction in losing his cool and shouting at people. He was able to maintain his composure and deliver results more efficiently.

Coach

Preetha Subramanian

Build accountability in team

Shampi Venkatesh - Coach

Build Accountability in Team

Client Context and Challenge

The coachee was a CXO level leader. In order to deliver better results for her business unit, she wanted to ensure that she makes her team more accountable for results. She found that currently she was not able to pin accountability on the team. This was impacting the overall performance of the unit.

Coaching Design and Execution

During the coaching, the root cause that emerged was that the coachee was giving solutions to the team so that they were able to perform faster. This however led to a dependency factor on her. She was not familiar with the coaching style that a leader should have. During the coaching, the solution arrived at was learning to ask questions rather being a solution giver and looking at problems and challenges as opportunities.

Outcomes

The coachee learnt to drive accountability by resisting giving solutions, asking the right questions and enabling her team to work in their circles of influence and control.

Coach

Shampi Venkatesh

Business Coaching India For Enhancing Family Business - Vikas Bhatia

Dealing with resistance from seniors

Vikas Bhatia - Ex-Coach

Dealing with resistance from seniors

Client Context and Challenge

The coachee shared that he needed to develop an ability to face resistance or push back from seniors. If he had some ideas, he often would not be able to present the ideas convincingly to his seniors. He would get shot down by their views and this was impacting his morale and self confidence.

Coaching Design and Execution

During the coaching intervention it emerged that the person in his childhood and adult phase had not got opportunities to speak his mind or present his thoughts. Decisions were mainly taken by other people including parents. This childhood pattern was interfering with his ability to present convincing ideas and leading to frustration. Once this was identified and acknowledged by the coachee he was able to start empathising with himself as well as his seniors. After this he was able to speak up with more conviction and confidence to his seniors.

Outcomes

The coachee had shared that a lot of his time was spent on worrying about the reactions of the seniors which further reduced his energy levels. This was addressed and thus led to more productivity.

Also due to him being able to talk about his ideas in a clear and concrete manner it led his seniors to have higher engagement and confidence in him.

Ex-Coach

Vikas Bhatia

Leadership coach in India For Women Leadership - Dr. Niloufer Aga

Emotional control

Dr. Niloufer Aga - Coach

Emotional control

Client Context and Challenge

The coachee was a senior manager in a technology company. He had this strong value that company resources should not be wasted. But what currently was happening was that it was coming in the way of his functioning, he was spoiling working relationships with his colleagues and entering into areas that were not his to be looked into or managed. For example he felt that people should take the booking of their flights more seriously and not cancel them. He would then end up arguing with the ticketing team about the issue and escalating the matter unnecessarily. His behaviour was creating an uncomfortable atmosphere in the office.

Coaching Design and Execution

During the coaching process, by asking powerful questions and having conversations around effective interpersonal skills the coachee was able to understand the impact of his behaviours on others. This self awareness made him take accountability for his own actions, understanding others’ iceberg, become empathetic and build rapport with other people. He was able to build pleasant working relationships with colleagues.

Outcomes

The manager of the coachee expressed satisfaction on the improvement of the coachee’s behaviour. They were able to see shifts in his behaviour patterns.

He team reported that the frequency of losing temper had drastically reduced. He had also become a better listener in team meetings.

He was now considerate of others since he was able to understand their frame of reference and their mental models / conditioning. He was thus able to display more patience and was less reactive in trying times.

Coach

Dr. Niloufer Aga

Strategic Thinking and Executive Presence

Yoshita Swarup Sharma - Coach

Strategic Thinking and Executive Presence

Area of Issue

Ajay was a Vice President of Finance in a well-known multinational company. He had been in country finance roles for the last 15+ years and moved to a group corporate finance role for the first time. He identified strategic thinking and executive presence as areas of development.

Client Context and Challenge

The issue was that he looked at finance more as a management accounting function and did not understand how finance could be a strategic partner to business. He was focused on publishing accurate financial results and that was it.

He also did not have a very impactful style of communication, though his role needed him to present to the Board of Directors regularly. As a senior member of the leadership team, he needed to cultivate executive presence. He had created a perception of being a naysayer amongst his stakeholders.

Coaching Design and Execution

Ajay’s breakthrough came when he understood how Finance function can be an enabler to business. He had never thought of his function in that way. He was then keen to work on some strategic projects for his department to save hidden costs. He did some time keeping and identified areas which he was micro managing due to past habit, which he needed to delegate. He was encouraged to delegate work in order to create time for strategic projects.

He was very keen to work on his communication impact- He learned how to reframe his communication to be more direct, hard-hitting and engaging. The coach also shared personalized video-based feedback, which helped him to see himself differently. He was able to move his communication style from problem focused to solution focused.

Outcomes

Going forward in the executive coaching, he was able to identify a few strategic projects for his function ie. people development, IT-enablement etc. During the coaching he made significant progress on these projects.

His stakeholders agreed that they had seen a remarkable difference in the way he was conducting himself in the office.

Coach

Yoshita Swarup Sharma

Business coach For Coaching Top Corporate Talent - Manish Gupta

Projecting confidence and competence

Manish Gupta - Coach

Projecting confidence and competence

Client Context and Challenge

The coachee did not sufficiently highlight/ project his work, or display sufficient energy and passion, and he was a poor listener.

Coaching Design and Execution

The coachee understood the need for change and through a process of questioning was able to arrive at the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of change. The coachee was able to understand the importance of making his work visible and went through a number of sessions to practice his skills. He also understood the need to project passion and confidence and understood the source of the same. All this emerged through the multiple coaching sessions.

Outcomes

The coachee was able to make considerable progress within 3 coaching sessions and we did not need to extend the coaching engagement.

Coach

Manish Gupta

Leveraging social media

Pragnya Wakhlu - Coach

Leveraging social media

Client Context and Challenge

The cochee was an ex Managing Director of a company. He was now transitioning from this role into being an independent consultant. He was unsure of how to leverage social media for brand visibility and business development.

Coaching Design and Execution

During the coaching process the client got familiar with the various social media platforms available and built his skills and awareness of how to leverage them. He designed smart measurable and time bound goals with respect to numbers and engagement and deployed on diverse social media platforms.

Outcomes

Social media followers increased 6 fold in a span of a year by organic marketing and no paid means of marketing.

Coach

Pragnya Wakhlu

Diversity / relationships

Anitha Balaraj - Coach

Diversity / relationships

Client Context and Challenge

Working with people from different culture, made the coachee very timid. Coachee was hesitant before going in for a specific meeting and lacked some confidence. Coachee wanted to develop confidence in dealing with people from multi cultural backgrounds and prepare for one critical meeting that was coming up which had multi cultural delegates.

Coaching Design and Execution

The coachee understood the reasons for the diffidence; what were the reasons for diffidence explored creative solutions what was the solution evolved for understanding the person from a cultural context and became absolutely ready for the meeting.

Outcomes

The meeting that he was preparing for progressed very well and the candidate has gained more confidence did anything change in his role, did he get more opportunities to present after this for handling future important business meetings, which is very necessary for his role.

Coach

Anitha Balaraj

Improving competence

Mrunal Lamge - Coach

Improving competence

Client Context and Challenge

The broad issues/area of change needed by the Coachee were –

  • Improving their competence [various aspects like- being more assertive, increasing their influencing skills, increasing teamwork, etc.]
  • Career Growth
  • Developing better relationships at work
  • Changing Habits
  • Developing effective leadership skills, etc
Coaching Design and Execution

The solution was personal what suited them the most. What does this mean? The cause was psychological or personal issues.

In other words, it was identifying the deeper cause, noticing its impact & making a new choice that could enable them to be more successful – making a career path for the next 5 years, did he prioritise, were all these things impacting his professional growth.

Outcomes

The coachee worked on the foundational attitudes and behaviour that was impacting his competence building at work.

Examples- Change in the Mind-set, Change in their behaviours, Change in Habits. These were quantified in terms of their own feedback and feedback from identified stakeholders in regards to the evidence of change.

Self-feedback on how their feelings in regard to certain situations have changed for the better.

Coach

Mrunal Lamge

Role Transition / Career Growth

Yoshita Swarup Sharma - Coach

Dealing with resistance from seniors

Client Context and Challenge

The coachee was transitioning into a more senior- top management role and had issues with his peers accepting him as an equal. The coaching objective was to enable him to develop acceptability with his peer community and also make a successful transition to his new role.

Coaching Design and Execution

Coachee underwent a strengthscope 360 assessment to arrive at his strengths and gain feedback from his stakeholders. He also requested some stakeholders to provide him a regular feedback. As a coach I shadowed him in team meetings and helped build awareness around mannerisms that were creating a perception of arrogance/ rude behaviour which were creating a dissonance with his peers. The coaching helped him to be self aware and to bring about a change in his behaviour and actions. E.g. the language, tone and body language.

Outcomes

Though he had attended many leadership workshops he wanted a specific list of observable behaviours that he could start/ stop. This worked really well for him and over a period of 8 to 9 months he made a lot of progress in peer relationships.

Coach

Yoshita Swarup Sharma

Influencing / Lack of Self Confidence / Assertiveness / Anxiety

Sabyasachi Patnaik - Coach

Influencing / Lack of Self Confidence / Assertiveness / Anxiety

Client Context and Challenge

The coachee, a functional head, shared that he found it difficult to express himself and articulate his thoughts in various situations. This showed up during group meetings, at times when he had to stand up for his team member, people not meeting their commitments etc.

He realised that his current behaviour was resulting in him being less effective at work.

Coaching Design and Execution

During the initial couple of sessions, the coachee would give many examples of such situations, since they happened regularly and he was aware of it. Over the next few conversations, we moved from the current problem mindset to a solution mindset that could manifest in the future.

With a possibility of a positive future, he was fmore focussed on what he really wanted and less on his current limitations. He felt energised to explore what was holding him back. In the conversations that followed, he shared his fears and doubts. The assumptions and beliefs behind these were challenged and he realised many of these were unfounded.

With this understanding, he was motivated to take a few actions initially and validate his new insights. Seeing positive outcomes, he expanded his circle of influence and soon was applying it in all situations. In the final few sessions, he consolidated his experiential learnings and it remained a part of him.

Outcomes

The coachee and the people around him found a significant transformation.

In group meetings he spoke up and he was being listened to; he was no longer judgmental and biased with certain people, because he had started to listen better; he sensed being valued by others, he started giving respect to other’s ideas and developed healthy relationships.

Overall, the coachee moved from being a person focused only on self, with low self esteem to one who was more expressive, confident and comfortable with different people and perspectives.

Apart from his professional life, he was able to see a positive impact with his family, friends circle, and housing society.

Coach

Sabyasachi Patnaik

Lack of alignment / Loss of control / Accepting change

Sabyasachi Patnaik - Coach

Lack of alignment / Loss of control / Accepting change

Client Context and Challenge

The coachee, a functional head, shared that due to an organisational change there would be matrix reporting relationships. He wanted to be coached on managing in a matrix reporting environment.

Coaching Design and Execution

In the course of the session, the coachee shared multiple situations where he expected difficulties to occur in matrix reporting. He was seeing only impediments and no solutions to these issues.

Around midway through the session, as a coach, I sensed that the coachee was not convinced on the change of matrix reporting structure, in the first place. I shared my observation with him. He admitted that he felt the change was thrust on him although he was not in agreement.

We explored deeper during the session and he acknowledged that he was anxious that he would lose control over his function/team in the new structure and become ineffective.

We reframed the issue and he looked at it with the lens of a business head. Now, no longer wearing the hat of a function head, his perspective expanded. He could now visualise that both, the function and the organisation would actually benefit from the new structure. He listed out the pros of the change which outnumbered the cons. By the end of the session, he viewed the change as favourable and necessary for his function and organisation.

Outcomes

During the session, a shift occurred for the coachee. He realised that he was seeing the organisation change only from the eyes of a function head. The paradigm shifted when he viewed it as a business head.

With this insight, he was excited on the greater results that he could bring to his function and organisation and grow as a business leader. The impediments he initially saw of a matrix organisation now seemed trivial and he was confident that he would be able to deal with it effectively.

In the months post the coaching session, he kept the big picture in mind, communicated the larger objectives to his team, and put in systems and processes to make the structure change successful.

Coach

Sabyasachi Patnaik

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