Executive Coaching
Being a senior leader, especially at the top of the organization, comes often with some amount of loneliness; no matter how prepared we feel we are for the job, we realise that the number of people we can truly confide in and discuss the challenges we face are limited.
As a leaders, you are supposed to lead the organization, establish a vision, rally people around it, make decisions along the way whilst a lot of what’s happening doesn’t seem easy to influence. A great executive coach is there to listen to what the leader wants and help him to reach absolute clarity on what is getting in his way. Then it’s all about defining a way to get to help the leader to get where he / she wants to go, mitigating any obstacle in the way.
As a leadership coach, I consider a coaching engagement to be a deeply serious one: mutual commitment, trust, and respect have to lie at the core of the relationship.
To be a truly effective professional coach, you need to be able to connect with the leader’s challenges, aspirations, fears, and concerns. You need to have “been there” to a large degree: led senior-level teams or teams that you might not have inspired or engaged enough to be able to rely on their own sense of commitment and accountability; managed significant businesses; felt the pressure from the top; struggled with deadlines; coped with highly demanding clients across various levels of the organisation; and dealt with corporate politics.
Before I decided to pivot to my new coaching career, I spent more than 20 years in the corporate world, doing exactly what I described above, in one of the most demanding and challenging sectors: management and strategy consulting.
Coming from a typical engineering + MBA type of background, an experience whereby every recommendation was challenged, every impact measured, and the pressure to deliver fast omnipresent, shifting to the coaching world has been transformative and challenged some of my core beliefs and principles.
For a start, becoming an independent coach comes with the privilege of working with various prestigious leadership and learning organisations like IMD Lausanne, Centre for Creative Leadership, Oxford Leadership, Asian Leadership Institute. These fantastic laboratories, where the best minds and coaches get together, have given me the opportunity to learn and contribute to their programmes, while also acquiring the various philosophies and approaches that have created the biggest impact for my clients.
In my initial foray into this field, I honed my skills
I started my coaching career delivering programs for three years to what is considered the most demanding strategic consulting house. I delivered week-long programs on three continents, coached hundreds of leaders and managers from some of the most renowned and best firms from industries, including strategy & management consulting, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, banking, bio-science, agri-products, industrial sector, along with family business or start-ups. The teams and coachees I worked with originated from a large number of countries, including the US, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region from Australia to India.
Leadership coaching, in my opinion, requires us to constantly upgrade our skills, learn new things, and deepen our capacity to practice
Since I started in this field, I have been learning non-stop, constantly engaging in new programmes to broaden my knowledge. My latest commitment to learn has led me to enrol in a two-year mindfulness meditation teacher certification programme with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. My aim is to develop through those two years with an enhanced capacity to engage with my clients with an even more powerful positive energy of compassion and the general ability to self-observe, react mindfully to triggers, and show the way to them.
Furthermore, to ensure that I remain vigilant about the quality of my work, I am supervised by a highly-experienced coach who looks at my coaching practice from a bird’s eye view. By asking me questions like — “hey, when you reflect back, what made you approach this client or situation is this way?” or “What alternative options would you have pursued?”; this has challenged me to be a reflective practitioner.
Does that mean that the coach has to or pretend to be better than you in the specific area you aspire to focus on? Absolutely not. Numerous coaches worked with either the best athletes in the world or the most renowned CEOs and never led such large teams, created such businesses, or played a rugby, swam better than their coachees. Look at someone like Here are the wise words of Bill Campbell, a famous Silicon Valley coach, who has coached the likes of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Sundar Pichai at Google, Steve Jobs at Apple, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook, etc.
[Leadership coaching is] about listening to what they want; then I try to get them a process to get to an outcome. I don’t want to get them answers; it is not what I should be doing; I think that they have in their minds the things that they need to do to make their company great; what we need to tell them is how to be a multiplier; how they can get the aggregate knowledge of the people around them around the table way better than you are going to get on your own.
That’s it.
In order to achieve the success of our relationship, we will have to become a trusted pair of partners. You can expect me to both support and challenge you to enable you to perform at your best.
HOW DO OUR COACHING PROGRAMMES WORK?
Limiting beliefs, concerns, and fears preventing you to reach your potential are seeds that have grown within you for decades. In other words, they have permeated through your entire being, which is why they condition the way you feel, behave, and think. It is not something that you can overcome overnight.
In order to really transform your behaviours, mindset, and beliefs, but also shift the perceptions around you, our recommendation is that you work with us for AT LEAST 6 months up to a year. The level of commitment needed would be the same for leadership teams or individual leaders
How does the typical coaching engagement work?
PHASE 1
Define your original state and your destination & identify your obstacles and barriers.
During the first 2-3 weeks, we will engage in conversations together and with your most important stakeholders in order to gather your perceptions and the perceptions around you.
With this information in hand, we will engage in a discussion to reconcile, challenge, explore, and derive a credible picture of your current impact within your ecosystem. We cover topics like:
What are your biggest strengths? Those will be your main pillars during the whole journey.
What do people appreciate most about you?
How much connection do they feel with you?
How much support can you expect from them during this journey? Those who are supporting you will become your secure bases for the whole duration of the work and we’ll be relying on them.
What do your stakeholders expect of you?
Which areas do you need to explore more, become better at, or excel at?
What do you aspire to? What kind of leader are you inspired to become?
Once we have satisfactory answers to all of the questions above, we have secured both an origin, your starting point, as well as an inspiring destination, which will make a significant impact on your ecosystem and yourself.
During this process, we will also start uncovering some of your ways of functioning that probably made you who you are today, meaning a successful manager or leader. However, oftentimes, some of those qualities may have turned into your liabilities as you progress. Those ways of functioning, combined with limiting beliefs, concerns, and possibly, fears are usually preventing you from moving up to the next levels in your professional life and also as a human being. You will come to realise that something has to change, or you will not succeed in advancing in your career or develop the well-being and balance you need in your life.
PHASE 2
Doing the work: Overcoming your obstacles and barriers
Once we have identified the original point and the destination, the real change process starts.
Through honest, sincere, and regular conversations, roughly every 2–4 weeks, depending on the needs and phases of the programme, we will explore your limiting beliefs, fears, and concerns, as well as start opening new possibilities to replace them and enable you to consider different ways and approaches. Relying on facts matters; exploring the impact you have on your surroundings, but also on yourself, matters equally. What actions you engage in, as well as how you deliver those actions, will become our topics of conversation.
Slowly, we will test and adjust, initially, in reasonably safe environments, and then increase the amount of challenge. We will reinforce the new patterns that will progressively replace the old ones.
PHASE 3
Create impact, measure the shift, and sustain the change
As you embrace new ways of thinking, behaving, and being with your surroundings, you will quickly start seeing the different impact you are having around you.
Then the goal becomes to embed your new patterns, sustain them, and ensure you develop a new habits based on those new ways of functioning.
The other focus is measuring the shift in your ecosystem’s perception: the extent to which you have shifted will eventually be measured and judged by your stakeholders who are part of your reality. Our responsibility is also to ensure that we put in place mechanisms, structures, and habits so that eventually your stakeholders fully acknowledge, support, and feel the change in you.
During this phase, my intention as a coach is to render myself irrelevant because you will have developed the means and habits to continue on your personal development journey on your own. You will no longer be relying on an external coach, but rather, leveraging upon your peers, direct reports, and bosses to support you on your future journey.
Eventually, your intention, as well as mine, is to increase your capacity to inspire people around you through your capacity and determination to change your way of being. The impact we’ll have will extend well beyond yourself.
Our clear ambition from the start is to impact not only your direct reports and peers, but also their own surroundings, as they will eventually adopt your approach and make a shift themselves, which will, in turn, impact people around them.
Executive Coaching Readiness
Executive Coaching journey
What a few clients said about their experience
I feel more confident in myself, which helps me to do my jobs more effectively and, importantly, I feel less stressed and happier.
When I decided to take up the executive coach session with you, I had expected that you would provide me with the tools to be a good and inspiring leader. I very soon realised (and was a bit disappointed) that there are no such magic tools. I had to find my own ways and my own leadership style. The most valuable aspect that I gained from the coaching session with you is: I feel more confident in myself, which helps me to do my jobs more effectively and, importantly, I feel less stressed and happier. I have learned to accept imperfection.
Chris, the journey with you has been enlightening as I discovered more about myself. With you I have experienced non-judgmental & compassionate discussions, thank you for being there & for your professionalism !!
Chris, the journey with you has been enlightening as I discovered more about myself & it gave an opportunity to evolve my perspectives as well as awareness about conscious / sub-conscious behaviors . The association has also supported to work on my areas of improvement in a directional manner to emerge as a better person & leader.
With you I have experienced non-judgmental & compassionate discussions, thank you for being there & for your professionalism !!
Christophe is patient, listens far more than he tells, and holds me accountable to what I said I’d do in a way that feels collaborative and encouraging. I can see the impact of the new behaviors by hearing from others, and seeing what new things our team has been able to do.
Over a yearlong engagement with Christophe, I went through a journey with a start, middle and resolution. The start was understanding – based on interviews with stakeholders — what it was that I could do differently
That turned into specific outcomes that I learned my stakeholders wished I could reach. The middle involved unpacking and confronting why those different behaviors didn’t come naturally, and how to do it anyway. This was partly through Christophe helping me reflect and understand myself, and partly with specific techniques that he introduced me to.
The resolution comes gradually, after several months of practice and getting comfortable with the new mindsets and behaviors. And I can see the impact of the new behaviors by hearing from others, and seeing what new things our team has been able to do.
Christophe is patient, listens far more than he tells, and holds me accountable to what I said I’d do in a way that feels collaborative and encouraging…
Christophe has great listening skills and showed lot of generosity. Exchanging with him allowed me multiple times to find solutions to a challenge I was facing.
The coaching journey together with Christophe was extremely insightful and deep. Trust was a key factor in building the relation and allowing the transformation to take place.
Regular interactions with Christophe allowed me to gain in self-awareness : being more in the present moment and not only reacting after the fact, day after day.
Christophe has great listening skills and showed lot of generosity : exchanging with him allowed me multiple times to find solutions to a challenge I was facing. He equipped me with tools so that I can be more autonomous in solving my future challenges and was encouraging me building my own approach.
Kindness and gratitude is at the heart of Christophe approach, constantly encouraging to show high level of empathy not only towards direct reports but as well to the overall organization.
I’m now pursuing my leadership journey, being more aware of the leader I am and the leadership vision I want to spread !.
His experience reflects on a unique concoction of corporate principles, along with human psychology and philosophy of mind and matter.
I found the process of opening myself up to Christophe to be a very natural and smooth experience. A large part of that comfort stems from his humility and an open ended approach towards the engagement. I found my sessions with Christophe to be logical and structured, while giving plenty of room to get to the heart of the developmental goals.
His experience reflects on a unique concoction of corporate principles, along with human psychology and philosophy of mind & matter. Another aspect he does well is to balance the pace of progress through the assignment goals. Never felt like a rusher or a dragger (traits of a drummer on a perfect tempo!)
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Singapore office:
Three Coleman Street, Unit 03-24, Singapore 179804
Vietnam office:
The Hive, 94 Xuan Thuy, Thao Dien Ward, D2, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
