Executive and Performance Coaching Case Studies
Case Study 1
The situation
A software company had developed some groundbreaking technology. The Board, made up of highly capable technicians, were confident of the product but had spent some time discussing how to get the product to market. They were reluctant to take the marketing plunge and were more intent on improving the product further.
The Intervention
The Company Coach was originally employed by one of the directors initially to get some marketing advice but we soon became a coach not just to him but also to the other two Board members. We confronted them with the various alternatives of not going ahead and removed the barriers to the way forward. It became obvious that the Board members all shared a similar personality type. We recognised that they needed someone who was more proactive and who had an understanding of sales and marketing. We worked with them to recognise the value of getting more diversity of personality style and business knowledge into the team. Without this challenge, the team would have found it difficult to achieve their goal.
The result
The team accepted our challenge and began the search for someone who could provide the missing link. The result was the recruitment of an extrovert marketing expert with proven experience in the IT industry. Sales immediately increased and at the time of writing, negotiations are being conducted with a major computer manufacturer about bundling their product. Without our coaching, they confirmed, their excellent product would not have got off the ground.
Case Study 2
The Situation
Dave was the top performing sales person in the team in an IT leasing company. We had been asked to coach all six members of the team, so Dave’s manager believed it was only fair to coach Dave too even though he was doing so well. Dave’s attitude when first meeting us was that he didn’t need to be there. Dave felt he had nothing to learn about sales techniques and he felt that he was carrying other members of the team. He sat down with his arms folded.
The Intervention
Our approach was to develop Dave’s thoughts on his future. It emerged
that his ambition was to be a sales manager. Yet, there was a major obstacle to his achieving his ambition, unbeknown to him, the members of the sales team disliked him and would never accept him as their manager. His manager knew that any promotion would cause unrest and would not consider his promotion. His manager held the belief that Dave was too interested in himself to be a good sales manager.
Our approach was to get Dave to appreciate the realities of the sales manager role and the need to employ different techniques with different people. We designed a programme to help him develop better communication skills and to work more closely with other members of the team. We increased Dave’s motivation to work at his people management skills by posing it as a challenge. We knew he would take up that challenge.
The result
Dave has now been promoted to sales manager. Not only does he still achieve 100% on his own sales target but has now helped three other members of the team to get 100% of their targets. Later, when Dave was asked to complete a review of the coaching exercise, he said that he did not realise at the start how positive an influence coaching could be nor in such a short space of time.