PAUL SULLIVAN
The New York Times News Service
In 2005, Ali Riaz, then president of a search technology company that would eventually be sold to Microsoft Corp., was having dinner with one of his board members when he admitted that he was struggling with managing everything that running a fast-growing, cutting-edge company entailed.
“I said, ‘I feel like there must be a better way to deal with the inflow of pressure,’” Mr. Riaz said.
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The board member suggested he get a coach and offered to make an introduction. Mr. Riaz, a smart, driven entrepreneur, thought this was a horrible idea.
“I was a little like, ‘I don’t need a psychologist, buddy,’” he said. “We Type-A entrepreneurs don’t talk about this kind of stuff. We solve problems and push ahead.”
Yet the board member persisted and several months later, Mr. Riaz reluctantly met the coach, Denise Spatafora, who had built and run businesses herself.
Mr. Riaz quickly saw that she had some insight into how entrepreneurs think and how to help them.
The beginning of any year is ripe for self-assessment. It is when gyms fill with new members, for a few months anyway. When it comes to executive coaching, the impulse is not much different: How can I be better?
For entrepreneurs, executives and members of wealthy families who go the coaching route, the experience is expensive, time-consuming and filled with doubts about whether it will really work.
Such coaches, after all, represent a somewhat amorphous profession. They are not psychotherapists who will mine the past for solutions to the present, nor are they strictly business consultants tasked with, say, fixing part of a company. Rather, they are people without prescribed credentials, though often with experience in the client’s field, who have won trust through experience or reputation to guide a client to an agreed-upon life, career or business goal.
Ms. Spatafora charges individuals $5,000 (U.S.) to $12,000 a month. For her corporate clients, which have included Citibank NA, Google Inc. and the satirical website The Onion, the cost can go as high as $200,000.
Marshall Goldsmith, one of the best-known coaches in the field – his clients include Alan R. Mullaly, president and chief executive officer of Ford, and Frances Hesselbein, former CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA – charges up to $250,000 for an 18-month engagement but is paid only if all parties involved agree that the coaching worked.
Vistage International, a coaching network focused on CEOs, has a monthly membership fee of $1,250 after a $2,250 initiation fee.
While coaching is not cheap, another cost is the client’s time – particularly when not much of it is left over. A search for “executive coach” on LinkedIn yields thousands of people who claim to be qualified coaches. How would someone know which were worth the money and time?
This is why referrals play such a big role.
“My biggest concern about coaching is that, like self-help books and unlike psychotherapy, it is unregulated,” said Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, author of Promise Land: My Journey Through America’s Self-Help Culture. “While there are training programs, the programs themselves are largely without oversight, and there’s no guarantee that any one coach would subscribe to standard best practices, if such a thing even exists.”
Mr. Goldsmith said he suggests that people ask several different coaches what their specialties are. “If you go to a coach with a strategic question, the coach is going to say, ‘Yes, I can do that,’” he said. “I’d go to the coach and ask, ‘What do you do best?’ If what the coach says is not what you need, don’t hire that coach. If what the coach does best matches what you need, then say, ‘Great, can you give me some case studies or referrals?’”
Still, why would someone like Mr. Riaz, who was already wildly successful, married, with two children and two homes, seek out a coach?
“Anybody looking from the outside at me, they would say, ‘This guy has no pressure. He’s so happy,’” Mr. Riaz said. “Guys would say, ‘I want your life.’ I’d say: ‘No, bro, you don’t.’ Life was hard. It took all of my time to make it all work.”
Mr. Riaz, like many successful entrepreneurs who turn to coaches, wanted to do better. To some this means having more money; to others it means more family time. To still others, it could mean going to the next level in a career, starting a company or simply finding a way to be more present at work and at home. Mr. Goldsmith said that being coached has lost the stigma it had decades ago, of being for underperformers. Now it is seen as being for top performers who want to be better.
Ms. Spatafora said people who succeeded under a coach’s tutelage saw there was something holding them back and wanted to move past that.
“It’s about removing obstacles and how to be clear in our lives,” she said. “I develop leaders so they can see things about their own behaviour.”
With Mr. Riaz, she started by asking all the people around him, from employees and executives to his family, about his strengths and weaknesses, guaranteeing the interviewees anonymity. This is the classic 360-degree assessment that is standard in human resources and industrial psychology.
Then she held him accountable to change what people said made him difficult to work with.
For Ms. Spatafora, as for any coach, the challenge was to deliver the assessment in a way that would be productive and not cause the client to become defensive and reject it. Then she needed him to create a “game plan” to change.
“Every person has a way to practise this,” she said. “It takes courage and a willingness to be honest with people.”
The skeptics
There are plenty of skeptics who say the coaching industry overpromises, underdelivers and charges dearly for it. Some go so far as to call it a waste of time and money, and wonder whether the coach has any real qualifications.
Ryan Wibberley, co-chairman and CEO of CIC Wealth Management, said he worked for many years with a well-known coach for financial advisers but ultimately lost confidence in the company and his coach.
“My biggest issue with this program and most coaching programs is they try to make you something you’re not,” he said. “This program was led by a very successful financial adviser. It was all designed to make you turn into him.”
Re-evaluating one’s life
Like Mr. Riaz, Guy Nohra had been very successful. He was a venture capitalist in Palo Alto, Calif. He might have also been more skeptical than Mr. Riaz about coaching. He prided himself on employing the rigorous analytic skills he learned at Stanford and the University of Chicago’s graduate school of business.
But after his father, a mentor and a friend all died within six months of one another, he started re-evaluating what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. “It was a wake-up call that this could all end quickly,” said Mr. Nohra, now 53. “I wanted to know what I was going to do next, but I don’t like asking others for advice.”
What he thought he wanted was for a recruiting firm to come to him with an offer to run a life sciences company, where his expertise lay. But given the success he had, he found that people presumed he was happy with what he was doing.
His coach, Ms. Spatafora, got him thinking more broadly. She asked him what he was passionate about. At first his only answer was his job. But as she pushed him, he said he would like to be an owner of a professional sports team or put his skills to work in public service.
Two years later, he is still weighing his options.
What coaching did
Mr. Riaz is now running a new company, Attivio, whose search engine aggregates data that companies have from many sources. He credits his work with Ms. Spatafora for helping him create a company that “had transparency with all the stakeholders.” He has also lost 50 pounds.
Looking back, he said his greatest fear going into the process was that coaching would strip him of the personality traits that had made him successful.
“I was petrified,” he said. “I thought if I sit here and light candles and breathe deep, no one is going to respect me. I’m going to seem weak.”
Today, he has come to a different conclusion. “Vulnerability is powerful,” he said. “If I’m in a room and someone says, ‘Cloud computing has many different advantages, as you know.’ I used to say, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure.’ Now I say, ‘I know a few, but could you tell me a few more?’ It creates a different dynamic.”
And if someone calls him a jerk? “I’d say, ‘I apologize if I offended you,’” he said. “If I have more time, I’ll say, ‘Can you tell me why I’m a jerk, because I’d like to fix it.’”
To get to that level of self-awareness cost tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work. It is no wonder gyms are empty by April.
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