3 Ways Executives Can Manage Challenging Moments in Their Careers
When executives hit career inflection points, it is common for them to feel inadequate. Coming up with the right answers to their problems becomes more challenging. As seasoned leaders, they use skills and strategies that yielded great results in the past, but that don’t solve the new problems of the present. To adapt to change, they need to stop investing so much energy in coming up with better answers and start asking better questions: Where should my focus be ? What does it mean to provide leadership in my organization? But people in positions of power often struggle with this because they’ve been encouraged to be fonts of accurate answers — not posers of catalytic questions. Seeking out an executive coach can be a tremendous help. Executives facing career inflection points should look for a coach who can help them do three things: Surface the questions that drive their day-to-day decisions, reframe their questions to make room for new solutions, and build their capacity to start asking better questions on your own.
An inflection point is often thought of as the biggest disruption an industry can face. One might occur, for example, when incumbents get rattled by competitors exploiting new technologies. Andy Grove first introduced the term to business strategy as “an event that changes the way we think and act.” But these intensely challenging moments not only happen in companies and industries, they happen in careers, as well. They are points when — for whatever reason — the conditions we work in or the expectations placed on us are so fundamentally altered that, if we don’t adapt, we will fail.
When executives hit career inflection points, it is common for them to feel inadequate. Coming up with the right answers to their problems becomes more challenging. As seasoned leaders, they use skills and strategies that yielded great results in the past — but those same skills and strategies don’t solve the new problems of the present.
To adapt to change, they need to stop investing so much energy in coming up with better answers and start asking better questions: Where should my focus be ? What does it mean to provide leadership in my organization? Do I apply old strategies to new initiatives? In other words, they cannot arrive at useful solutions unless they first diagnose the real problems that are holding them back. But people in positions of power often struggle with this. As they’ve risen through the ranks, they’ve been encouraged in every way to be fonts of accurate answers — not posers of catalytic questions.
Seeking out an executive coach can be a tremendous help.
The best coaches are masters of asking questions. On a basic level, they use them to gather information and understand what you’re grappling with. On a deeper level, they use them to help you see problems from different angles, and find better ways to solve them. Just like great therapists, effective coaches nudge you toward breakthroughs not by providing you with answers — in most cases, coaches don’t have all the facts — but by helping you see situations through new eyes.
Still, it can be hard to know if the investment you are making in a coach is worth the return. While coaching has come a long way in terms of professionalization, it remains a wild west in some respects, where anyone can claim expertise. That’s why it’s important to outline the benefits you want to take away from your interactions, and consciously track whether they are being delivered. Executives facing career inflection points should look for a coach who can help you do three things:
Surface the questions that drive your day-to-day decisions. Executive coach Tony Robbins told me his early work with a new client is very focused on surfacing the questions that are guiding them, and to what extent those questions might be holding them back. As a first step, he asks his clients, “What’s really lousy about your life?” He does this to demonstrate that questions have the ability to control your mindset. “Even though up to that point [my clients] might not have been bothered by much of anything,” he says, “their brains will focus on [the negative] and start generating answers.” Later, he asks his clients, “What are you grateful for?” or “What are you excited about?” Their focus then shifts to something more positive. The lesson, as he sums it up, is that whatever question you are habitually posing to yourself is the one you are generating the most answers to. If you need to make a mental shift, asking a different question works faster than anything else.’
Reframe your questions to make room for new solutions. Roger Lehman, an executive coach, therapist, and scholar I’ve known for many years uses this strategy to help his clients learn how to ask themselves better questions. He says that people who are experiencing a sudden shift — at work or in life — tend to ask themselves the same questions over and over again, even when their problems require new solutions. “There’s a benefit to asking the wrong question,” he says. “It enables us to avoid the issue, reality, challenge, confrontation.” Leaning on old, familiar behaviors often provides us with a sense of security during change. But the work of the coach is to help you break out of this habit, to find a way around any natural resistance you may have to questioning assumptions, and ideally, reduce that resistance.
Another coach I know asks clients quite directly:
Again, it isn’t the role of a coach to supply you with the right reframing. The role of the coach is to prod you to examine how you are approaching challenges today.
Build your capacity to start asking better questions on your own. Great coaches don’t only turn their clients’ lives around with better questions—they turn their clients into better questioners. This service is crucial, particularly because executives often rise in the ranks without having strongly developed their questioning capacity. What you take away from your coaching sessions should be more enduring than tactics to overcome today’s challenges. You should gain new skills that will help you overcome future challenges, too.
When you hit an inflection point in your career, keep this in mind. Whether by engaging a coach or not, find ways to spend more time in conditions where you think more fundamentally about what you need to accomplish to succeed, and how you are going about it. You’ll need to come up with better answers, and those will come much more easily if you’re inspired by better questions.
Hal Gregersen is Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center, a Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a Thinkers50 globally ranked management thinker, and the founder of the 4-24 Project. He is also the author of Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life and the coauthor of The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators.
3 Ways Executives Can Manage Challenging Moments in Their Careers
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