New Senior Executive Failures

Reduce 35-47% Attrition

Losing new SVP and c-suite appointees, within months of starting their new jobs, is a common and continuing problem globally.   The costs, inconvenience, work-culture impacts and embarrassment of having to dismiss them go beyond the direct financial costs.

It’s understood within leading HR and recruitment, that 1-2-1 coaching of these new senior staff can get them up and running faster. The right coach will help them be more flexible in their approach and quicker to gain followship, especially with hesitant staff and resistant work-cultures.

Here I offer tips for HR/Recruitment to make a winning case for external coaching[i] that is success-focused and does not display weakness of the HR/Recruitment function. Also, here are tips for engaging the best coaches; those who will deliver results leveraging very different individual needs, seamlessly.

There are those in HR/Recruitment who are afraid to support new senior staff; the request to fund coaching for new appointees may be perceived as a weakness in their own function. Let’s address these issues now.

Making a Positive Case

New senior staff failing to meet expectations and having to be dismissed is not new. Some years ago, one of my global blue-chip pharma clients was losing 20% of SVP appointees across the USA; whether recruited internally or externally, the loss rates were similar. Their Global HR approached me, knowing that coaching would reduce the attrition-rate considerably. These fall-out rates are not restricted to pharma. DDI in 2021 published data[1] indicating that internal senior appointments internally could be ‘considered failures’ in 35% of cases and for external appointments, 47%. These were all jobs with titles such as General Manager, Director, Vice-president etc. The costs of replacement varied between 2.5 and 10 times the actual salary. The same study avers that external-recruitment is often better than internal, where there is necessary change to be identified and implemented.

The above helps produce a brief that the HR/Recruiting person/team can use. You can make a case for external coaches for all appointments above a particular level, as my pharma client set out to do, for SVP appointments specifically.

Further, it makes sense if the proposal to coach new appointees is a general policy concept, rather than a specific one for one individual; this latter case creates doubt about the specific candidate and possibly, doubting due diligence by HR/Recruitment.

So, we want to make a general, policy case, positively stated and supported, that focusses on potential outcomes of coaching interventions. This case will be underpinned by the argument about costs: these costs are going to be so much less than the costs of failure (and that is just in financial terms, not including the indirect costs of destructive influences on peers and the appointee’s reporting team). The proposal may include a systemized work-culture support process for all senior appointees, to include checks and balances.

Why Senior Executives Fail

Stress-level is often the most important factor in new senior executive failure[2] and exacerbated often by poor sleep, anxiety, low self-confidence, low energy-levels and poor diet. Some of the coaching interventions that will be needed will likely require new thinking and behaviors and also, the confidence of the appointee to use these new skills.

Desired Positive Outcomes Expected from Coaching

With experienced and proven external coaches appointed for the task, we can expect a number of positive outcomes, some of which could be quantified by ROI considerations.

• Quicker settling-in, leading to faster down-stream outcomes during, and after, the first 4-5 months and onwards
• Faster agility of the appointee to work-culture needs
• Improved involvement of stakeholders
• Sophisticated (work-culture adapted) communication strategies to create ownership and followship among the key staff, who best characterize the desired work-culture behaviors
• Better upward-managing to check-in, adapt and partner with senior staff-members where the threats from proposed change are significant, and where the risks may also be significant.

The Coaching Period, Cost & Coach Quality

The coaching is likely to require a first session, typically of 90-120 minutes and further sessions of up to an hour, every two or three weeks. These sessions will normally continue for 4-5 months with a contingency for further sessions if desired. A 7-session time-line is typical. Even at top coaching rates, the cash outlay is likely to be just 15-25% of the appointee’s base salary (without applied overhead), so approval is a no-brainer if your attrition-rates are at 20-40% or more.

Which Coaches Will Save These Appointments

The appointee will need to develop soft-skills. These skills are best leveraged by a professional, (and former senior-executive) coach. The trust established with an external coach is essential for psychological and emotional growth in the appointee. Their growth will enable them to perform at the necessary level, in those specific areas where difference is needed. Internal coaches are rarely trusted, due to clear ties they have with other executives in the same organization[3].

To give comfort to the c-suite board and to give confidence to the appointee, it is est to hire directly or through a specialist agency; you need and deserve a coach, or coaches, who has/have held multiple c-suite jobs. Your author’s presence in this area of work is in part due to having held thirteen main-board directorships in UK and US companies, with multiple top-job roles including one as Executive Chairman. Any, and all coaches assigned will need to have coached multiple executives and the fit will normally include sector experience, whether directly equitable or, within the supply-chain for that sector.

Do not specify a requirement for a coaching certification body (or level); these bodies qualify on knowledge of certain coaching skills but, they do not ensure or measure the impacts on the receiving coachee. Because we are hiring to facilitate operational, behavioral change in the appointee, a calibration of ability to create coachee-change could be considered absolutely essential, but regrettably, is rarely available. Hence my emphasis on the coach(es) having had several c-suite jobs and having coached at this level of executive seniority, successfully, on many occasions!

During wide experiences of training and developing coaches[4], we found[5] that some of the most certificated coaches delivered poor results with their coachees and, conversely, some of the least certificated (but experienced) coaches, excelled in leveraging productive change in their coachees.  Here is more evidence then, that we need to track the actual effect of coaches on their coachees (working at this senior level), not on certificates which are often worthless[6]. As Phaekwamdee et al state[7], ‘there are many people who call themselves coaches, with various professional organizational training and development backgrounds, whose coaching ability is doubtful’. Readers may be interested to learn what type of coach interventions create actual learning and ‘aha moments’ in coachees;  two highly-cited, peer-reviewed papers, document a selection of these for you[8].

Structuring the Coaching Engagement

Different businesses have various approaches and concerns. I include some of these approach options given below. The point is, what you choose must fit your existing (or desired) work-culture, so most engagement approaches will need tailoring by you, your colleagues and other change-agents.

• Set-up an HR-friendly c-suite mentor/sounding-board person for the appointee, to help with their cultural understanding about ‘how we do things around here’
• Establish an initial virtual meeting with the hired appointee, internal-mentor and external-coach
• Produce an outcome-based ‘coaching agreement’, signed, between coach and the new employee (and copied to those who will support the employee as intended)
• Consider a success-based coaching structure (fees and bonus) measured against specific, time-framed targets
• Provide coaching breadth to exclude or include, work-life balance, stress, decision-making, team-working, diplomacy, influence, emotional intelligence, communications strategies and overt (and covert) relationship/trust-building skills.

Conclusion

HR and internal recruitment need confidence in order to propose that new senior executives should all be coached and, must have confidence in the coaches provided. The financial case is ‘a given’ if the risks of senior-executive failure (in their new roles) are near or above 20%. A general program for coaching all appointments, at or above that grade, makes a solid case for the c-suite and avoids Director-level criticism of poor due diligence in the HR function.

Internal coaches cannot typically support the change needed, because the trust necessary to drive change in the executive(s) is invariably low, compared to external coaches. When selecting coaches, do not be over-confident about coach certifications; however, seek coaches who have held appointments at and above the intervention grade and who have experience that illustrates their experience of your sector needs, including strategic change experience that may be on-the-table in your organization.

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[1] https://www.ddiworld.com/blog/executive-transitions

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6196623/

[3] It is almost universally accepted that internal coaching does not give results. Knowledge and corporate-systems based mentoring can be beneficial but the soft-skills sharing by the appointee (of both strengths and lesser-strengths) prohibits an open and trusting change-space. Actual growth takes place when using confidential coaches from outside the organization.

[4] Much of this is, but not confined to, ‘The Coaching Foundation’ during some ten years or so

[5] Coachee-learning – A Results-based Method for Assessing Coaches, Acuity, 6,1, pp 43-66, 2017.

[6] I have to admit to having multiple certifications, in spite of the arguments above. I also designed European coach-trainings for one of the organizations that I had become certified by.  https://angusmcleod.com/angus-mcleod/

[7] Phaekwamdee, M., Darakorn Na Ayuthaya, S. and Kiattsin, S.  ‘The Effects of Coaching Techniques on Well-Being of Digital-Technology Users’, J. Open Innovation Technology Market and Complexity, 8,4, December 2022 (Publ. Elsevier).

[8] ‘Coaching underpinned by neuro-science’ – A Humanistic, Facilitative Approach to ‘Aha!’ Experiences, Acuity, 5,1, pp29-45. May 2016. and, then see reference 4.  

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