Industry Articles
Archive Articles
Client Testimonials
Client List

Executive Focus & Coaching Myths
By Paul Humphrey

An Interview with Jay Hurwitz,
Director of The Institute for Business Technology, UK.

Value Driver Coaching
How CEOs add the maximum possible value
The few extra percent that make the difference
Importing an instant menu of ideas

I understand you've coached hundreds of Chief Executives in this country, apart from execs in the US and Australia? 'Well, I've coached about twenty CEOs from the UK's top FTSE companies. If you include subsidiaries, COOs, CFOs and group board directors it does add up to some hundreds, over the years, yes’.

Probably before we get into more specific questions, it may be a good idea to clarify this word 'coaching'?
Yes it's a real catch-all term these days. It has nuances
of mentoring, counselling, advising and so on. Whilst we do have people in the organisation who do those kinds
of things, that's not what I do. What I do is very specific.
I supposeI'd call it value driver coaching. By far the biggest concern that gets expressed to me by people at senior levels is how do they add the maximum possible value. Just how do you do that, and more importantly, how do you do it in a way that plays to your particular strengths and your own specific style of working? Bearing in mind the rate of change currently, people take very little time to look at the absolute best way they can add value - value
to the business, to their teams, to their careers. And of course how do they do that and yet retain some semblance of balance in their lives and their family life whilst doing so? Most of them do a 50, 60, 70 or more, hour week. They could easily do 150 hours and still not cover all the things they think are really important.

This concept of 'value drivers' is not new, is it ? Not at all. What's new is to consider the concept in terms of one person. 'Value drivers' have come to the fore where there has been a requirement for drastic change in organisations. Some great breakthroughs have been made by outfits that ruthlessly

It sounds a bit scary to try to make such dramatic change? I would describe the results as dramatic, not the changes you need to make. It's what some call the 'winning edge'. If you're in a race with 50 horses and you win, you're not 50 times as good as the loser. You're probably a couple of seconds better, a few percent, that's all. But it's that few percent that make the difference. That's the winning edge. In the great scheme of things, given your personality, your strengths, the way you

Is that all it takes - a half day?
No, it takes me two or three sessions, spread over a few months, to test the changes and get the right result but I'm saying that if you did no more than deliberately take the time to sit down by yourself and think it through, you'd be better off. It's a myth that this type of coaching has to take long. Once you get the certainty that the new area of focus is correct, and fits your style, and will deliver the added value, that's it. I always check up six months or so later, but unless there's been a change of role, they normally don't need anything from me.

You deal with very successful people, don't they do those things intuitively anyway? Of course they do, we
all do. It's a question of to what degree, and when. We've never before had the pace of change that we have now. The way I am able to add value to any part of someone's 'intuitive' process is to bring a menu to the table of what several hundred other people in similar situations did. There are a lot of ideas and a lot more choices to consider than you would get sitting quietly by yourself.
It's hard work to make a personal change. What's interesting, too, is that Peter Drucker says that most people really don't know what their real strengths are, how they best perform. In fact, he recommends a process that will take a couple of years to really discover them. It's a great process but I find executives want an interim result a bit faster. Because Drucker's in his 90s, he probably doesn't think that two years is a long time for an executive to take, to properly find out.

I don't suppose you're going to give me the secrets of how you do all this? If there is a secret, it's how to listen carefully - and to look. In my very first job in the corporate world, I was a systems analyst at Bendix Aerospace, in New York. I had 400 executives I had to listen to, and it took me a while to get the hang of really listening. You realise assumptions lead to mistakes. Time and experience did the trick. You also have to bear in mind
that with every day that goes by, I witness another model of how to crack an executive work problem. I have a lot of first hand examination of work styles and work practices to refer to and what works for which personality type in such and such an environment and what doesn't. I'm very lucky in that way. The scenarios and the mental 'database' just keeps growing. It's the nature of the work itself, I guess.

You seem to maintain your enthusiasm for executive coaching, your 'value driver' coaching, despite having done it for some considerable time? Well, the work is broken up into other things, too. I do a reasonable
amount of facilitation, particularly vision workshops and exec team-interaction sessions, diagnostics and so on. It's pretty exciting stuff, to see these dynamics unfold. And in any case, every coaching circumstance is different with its own attendant hurdles and high points. Again, I've always been lucky in that I don't get bored.

Never? I can remember my school and university days didn't always set me on fire - but as soon as I hit grad school it all changed. Luck again, I suppose,

but my professor happened to also be the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It was whilst the devaluing of the pound was going on. He'd come to us awestruck MBAs with a daily briefing - the real inside track - way ahead of anything

you'd eventually see in the newspapers. And of course, my next five years at Bendix were the five years that led
up to the lunar landing.That takes some beating, but obviously it set up a pattern in me where I have intense interest in what I'm doing. If I'm mentally engaged with something, the rest of the world disappears until I disengage. In fact they used to play tricks on me in the
IBT office in the UK, by switching a desk around or moving a painting on the wall, or whatever, and take bets on how long it would take me to notice. It was always after I'd put an assignment to bed and 'surfaced' again.

What would you say are the major differences between executives here and in the US and Australia? At the top levels, very few differences. As an executive, the only things you have to invest are your time and attention.
You don't make the products or deliver the services.
There are cultural differences for sure, but the multi-national company goes a long way in transcending
those differences. Whatever your homeland, you have very, very similar choices as an executive. You can be a vision / strategy type exec and put most of your focus on the strategy, or you can be a people person and focus on developing your team and let them loose with the strategy and vision, or you can foster the expertise that gives your outfit its niche, or you can ensure that corporate controls are in place and the policy proliferates and cares for the whole, or you can be a radical and do nothing but stir the change pot continuously, but it's always what, where, when, and how you personally address these issues that gives you your payback - beyond the industry norm, or not. It's your time and attention. That is the spend-able,
invest-able commodity any executive has - wherever they're from.

You were mentioned indirectly in a major British newspaper a year or two ago for having turned a very high profile executive's career around, is that right? It was the exec who mentioned the coaching in an interview, but due to the amount of time the organisation had been sliding before he made the changes, it really only bought him six or nine months. So it wasn't as big a success story as the paper made out at the time.

I've also heard stories of executives throwing away their desks after sessions with you. If that were true I'd be in the furniture removal business. A couple have, in fact, got rid of their desks. One, who was more an accountant by profession, simply realised that a huge amount of his activity - sitting behind a desk reading reports - was no longer appropriate for the kind of business he found himself leading. He needed to get
out. Out with clients, with branches in the network, with
his management, with stakeholders of all kinds in fact. But 99.99% of the people I've worked with keep their desks. Those desks may witness an awful lot of change, of course, but they are safe - for the moment anyway.

Which chief executive, whom you've worked with, do you most admire? That would be unfair. There's a lot to admire in all of them. Someone does pop to mind. Someone I’ve worked with on and off for probably twelve years or more, in various capacities, who isn't a CEO. He's a senior executive in a UK bank and over the years he's consistently taken major, major projects and doggedly pulled them off and contributed enormously to the expansion. He's acknowledged for it, but when you add it all up, year after year, perhaps not enough. But I deal with a lot of unsung heroes in many industries who each do their part to keep the wheels turning.

Would you name a life changing experience? A recent one would be that I went back to my native New York, late last October. I went to 'ground zero' and saw the fires still burning and felt the ashes burn my eyes. They were still coming down. Whatever our challenges in the corporate business world, we have to remember we lead very lucky, very rewarding lives.