And you — Mr. or Ms. newly hired or newly promoted senior executive — you've just taken the big leap to a key role in a new organization. You've left the O.K. Corral and are heading into the Wild West. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a dedicated expert help you hit the ground running?
Research from The Center for Creative Leadership shows that a full 40% of new leaders fail in their first 18 months on the job.
Remember when that new senior manager came on board in your division? How long did your team give him to "show his stuff"? Informal, word of mouth statistics give him 90 days, on average, and then it's thumbs up — or down.
Enter assimilation coaching — an intervention by an external, highly seasoned executive coach to help a just-hired or just-promoted leader succeed in those high-risk first few months on the job.
If you are reading this article and are in a senior hiring capacity at your company, this section is for you. Would you, for example, buy a million dollar-plus house and not insure it? Of course you wouldn't. How horrifying to see a major real estate investment go up in flames! How equally horrifying to see a corporate investment be decimated.
This "performance insurance" — as it can be looked at — helps protect the company's sizable financial outlay in acquiring its new leader. It helps minimize the chance of leadership failure, and the resulting "gap at the top." And finally, the bundling in of assimilation coaching acts as a powerful attraction tool in a War for Talent market.
What does an executive coach do, exactly, to help a new leader succeed? Joan Caruso, the Ayers Group's managing director of organizational effectiveness consulting, lays it out for us, speaking directly to the new leader in question in the following statement.
"One objective is to help align your strengths with the needs of your new role. If you are taking a leap of scope, the coach can help you understand how the barriers to success in your new position differ from those in your former assignment. Traits that served you well in rising through the ranks may no longer be appropriate. The coach can assess the gap between what you bring to the job and what you need to succeed in it and can help make a plan for bridging that gap quickly. If you're coming in from the outside, the coach can assess the new organization and its culture against your former environment and can help you understand how to adjust ... into the new environment."
As an outsider, the coach provides an objective set of eyes to help you identify the different stakeholders and to determine how to approach them and in what order. The tendency in coming to a new organization or assignment is to look up but not down and around. Not everyone making a leap of scope has learned the nuances of relating to different groups of stakeholders. You need to remember that the receptionist can have an impact on your career!
There's another area where a coach can help. You have a short window of time in a new job to ask "dumb" questions, but most people are afraid to use it. By bouncing your questions around with an objective outsider, you can figure out how to ask them in a way that sounds smarter and reduces your feeling of vulnerability. And, very important, the coach can help you set short-term priorities and take action to establish credibility and effectiveness from the start.
Client companies of ours routinely request "fast track" coaching for emerging leaders and remedial coaching for valuable leaders they want to retain who have some self-limiting performance issues. As Joan Caruso astutely points out, these coaching assignments support new executives only after they've proved themselves. "This strikes me as backward thinking. Assimilation coaching offers insurance, risk management, and investment optimization. Why wait?"
About the Author
Sally Haver is the senior vice president of business development with The Ayers Group/Career Partners International, a division of Kelly Services. She has been with the firm for 15 years, 12 of them delivering career management services to the key executive population. She has been the director of alumni placement at the New School; president of Monterey Music Inc. (commercial music production); an account executive at an advertising agency; and had an early career in show business (on-camera principal in an NBC children's series).
