12 Sep 2019 Leadership Qualities – Controlling Your Urges
Leadership Qualities – Controlling Your Urges
Insights from my experience as an Executive Coach
In this series of posts, I will share real-life cases from my experience as an Executive Coach and how I worked with my clients to build their leadership skills and behaviors.
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The Case Story
Dave was a brilliant professional. He knew his industry like no other, he consistently met his sales numbers, he was creative, charismatic, and his clients loved him.
But his behavior in the office was intolerable. So much so that his boss, the CEO, called him in one say and said: “Dave, we respect your hard work and your sales performance, but your behavior towards your peers is absolutely inconsistent with the values and culture of our company. So, I am assigning you an Executive Coach to help you change it. I hope that you can do so within the next six months.”
As soon as I started interviewing Dave’s colleagues a disturbing picture started to emerge. They all recounted story after story of how Dave would lose his self-control and become abusive towards his peers and team members. They spoke of how arrogant he was, and how intolerable working with him was. So much so that his peers turned their back on him and refused to work with him.”
It took a few meetings for Dave and me to get to know each other and for me to earn his trust. Once he became comfortable working with me started digging into his behavior. We tried to understand what is causing it, and how to change it. Dave knew that he comes across as arrogant and abusive and that if he does not change, he will not achieve his goal of being assigned to a leadership role in Europe, and perhaps even lose his job altogether.
“I understand all of this,” he said. “But when these people (his peers) refuse to see how mediocre their ideas are, I snap, and I react in ways that are offensive and cause my peers to detest me.”
How We Addressed The Challenge
Once Dave admitted that his behavior will result in missing his desired career outcome, and perhaps even losing his job, he was open to doing whatever was necessary to control his outbursts.
Step 1 – Recognizing the trigger
The first step was to help Dave recognize, at the moment, the situations that are causing him to lose control. I asked Dave to reflect on the last two weeks and make a list of all these situations. There were 10 of them.
“What would help you recognize that the trigger is about to “go off”? I asked.
After some brain-storming, we concluded that if Dave were to learn how to monitor in real-time his state of mind during each of these situations, he will be able to recognize ahead of time that a flash-point is about to occur and that, that he is about to lose control.
Step 2 – Defusing the tension
Next, we worked on what Dave could do to defuse his tension as soon as he recognized that a flash-point is imminent.
We landed on a few strategies that Dave was comfortable trying and ultimately turn into habits. These included:
- Taking a deep breath, as soon as he recognized the flash-point is coming
- Activate a defusing self-talk narrative (which he authored and rehearsed in advance)
- In extreme cases, excusing himself and leaving the room
- The taking a 5-minute walk, cooling down and returning to the meeting
- Sharing with his peers that he is working on getting better, and asking for their support.
How It Turned Out
Admittedly, it was not easy for Dave to habitualize these new routines. But he definitely tried his best. And after a few failures, he was scoring some wins, and a positive trend started to emerge.
At our regular coaching meetings, we discussed what transpired in the past week and what could Dave do better or differently next time.
Six months later, when I met with the CEO he was happy to report that he was seeing a noticeable improvement in Dave’s behavior.
About a year after I ended my work with Dave, I received an email from him saying that an opportunity came up, that the company was looking for someone to lead the London, UK practice, and that Dave’s name came up as one of the candidates. Three months later Dave was on his way to the UK.
