“Make Them Easy To Manage”
by John Spence | 1 comment
I was recently out in California having a conversation with one of my clients, the COO of a Fortune 500 firm that has engaged me to coach several of his senior leaders. Currently I am working with a handful of divisional CEOs, each running a 200 – 600 million dollar enterprise. During our talk the COO said something that really struck home for me and gave me a super idea of what he wanted me to do for him. “John, these are absolutely fantastic guys, but they can be tough to manage… please help make them easier to manage.”
Wow, that is a perfect statement because it gets right to the heart of why I am typically called in to coach someone. The executives I coach are bright, talented, bold, creative, entrepreneurial and driven… all truly valuable traits. But taken to the extreme, these same traits can make these sorts of folks very hard to manage and direct. What’s more, if they cannot learn how to control their behavior and fit in more comfortably in a senior role, the very things that made them successful up to this point in their career, can actually lead to their demise.
