Ed Sims was your typical stressed-out, hard-nosed boss before he discovered executive coaching. Air New Zealand’s international airlines group general manager says his natural style was quite driven and demanding.

“I was the archetypal senior manager who was probably at risk of either burning people out around me or falling over myself.”

When Sims heard an executive coach speak at a leadership course a couple of years ago he decided to give it a go. He has been seeing business psychologist and executive coach Jasbindar Singh on a regular basis for two years and says he’ll do so indefinitely.

Sims is one of a number of high-flying executives who have turned to executive coaching because it provides them with an independent and confidential sounding board to explore issues with. Executive coaching costs on average between $100 and $400 per hour.

The money and effort has been worth it, according to Sims, who says coaching has helped moderate his management style and he’s learnt to treat people more personably. At the airline, he is in charge of 1,400 cabin crew, 600 pilots and revenue of around $1.2 billion. Coaching has taught him to let employees set their own goals and determine the pace at which they want to work.

“Being coached to stand back and mentor and advise rather than directly navigate has probably been the single gross attribute to my management style in the past two years.”

Learning not to make snap judgements at work means he spends less time recovering from mistakes made in haste. And it’s had an impact at home. “My wife probably finds me a bit calmer at home as well.”

Singh says top performers who find themselves promoted to management must focus on harnessing the energy of the people around them rather than just trying to look good themselves. “I ask questions which take them into viewing things in a different way with a different perspective. When that happens it’s like the light goes on.”

In some cases it’s identifying the things which stand in the way of success. An inability to handle confrontation is a classic New Zealand management problem which hurts productivity.

Singh coached Phil Holden, CEO of Burton Hollis Coffee, through that issue to the point where he no longer shies away from difficult situations. Holden was first drawn to coaching three years ago after going through a bout of bad luck, which began in 1999. “I’d been made redundant from a couple of roles and I wanted to understand why that was. I’d had three turns at bat and had three strikeouts for all different reasons.”

Holden had been in a senior marketing position but took on a small brand manager’s role during coaching in order to regroup. He still sees Singh and is committed to long-term coaching.

But not all executive coaching scenarios have a happy ending. The qualifications, background and experience of executive coaches vary widely and no licensing authority governs them. Anyone considering coaching should first check out the coach’s qualifications, reputation and client list. It is a good idea to sit down with a couple of coaches and see if you like them or not. Their philosophies will vary greatly. And results should be quantifiable. Evaluate a coaching programme by asking:

• Did the coach deliver something to you?
• What did you learn?
• Did you use that knowledge in the workplace?
• Has your own or your company’s productivity changed?

For more-senior executives, it pays to seek out a coach with significant business experience. Christine Scott recalls needing a sounding board when she was managing director of Royal & Sun Alliance (now the Promina group). The company was doing multiple acquisitions and Scott wanted a non-judgemental business executive to bounce ideas off. She talked to Dr Iain McCormick, the Executive Coaching Centre’s managing director and executive coach. He was formerly a partner with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and is a clinical psychologist with a PhD in work stress.

When you’re a CEO you have no peers within the company, Scott says. And with an overseas board there was no one else to discuss serious business issues with face to face. “Just having a sounding board helped me deal with the stress of all those responsibilities being on my shoulders.”

She has now become an executive coach herself and says any coach should have expertise in the areas they are coaching in. For instance, when Cory Williams became the new head of The Optima Corporation in early 2005, he wanted a new vision and mission for the company. But he didn’t want everything to be seen as coming from him as the new CEO, who was still viewed as something of an outsider. He called on McCormick to act as an external facilitator to implement the new vision and work with certain staff on time-management issues.

Coaching sometimes comes into play when there is an obvious need — stress, change management, mergers and acquisitions. But other executives use it regularly to improve their performance rather than waiting until they’re under stress.

Craig Steel coaches athletes such as Commonwealth Games gold medallist swimmer Moss Burmester, and says business executives need the same type of regular coaching to perform ‘in the zone’ all the time.

Steel calls himself a performance specialist rather than a business coach and runs an eight-week performance improvement programme, which he claims teaches attendees how to perform at an “optimum” level. New Zealand managers are simply ineffective at developing people, Steel claims, and he also reckons their leadership communication means staff focus on the wrong things.

“New Zealand management, for many years, has focused on the systems or the processes rather than really thinking about their role as to increase the performance capability of the organisation, which essentially means developing people.”

Steel helped Daniel Love, general manager of human resources at Fonterra Brands’ Tip Top, to improve his state of mind through various exercises. Love wanted to improve his self-worth, security and confidence so that he would have the courage to take risks and perform better. He uses a mantra: “I’ll repeat to myself before I go into a team meeting that I’m a visionary, clear, responsive leader.” Love says his thought processes have changed and he is more confident and secure about what he’s doing.

Phill Dagger, general manager of Maven Wines, decided to give coaching a go to help grow his export business. His biggest problem now, he says, is managing growth. “You get to a point where you realise that all the business training and experience and theory in the world only takes you so far. The top level of performance really only comes from extracting the best level of performance out of yourself.”