Executive makeovers with Foresight

By SELWYN PARKER

Nobody's perfect, not even a chief executive. But for between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, Foresight will do its best.

The British company is exporting its executive coaching business to New Zealand. Its debut coaches will be Sir Roger Douglas, Australian Harvey Parker, who corporatised New Zealand Post in the 80s, and former Owens Group managing director Rodger Fisher.

Their job is to polish up a chief executive's skills in peer-to-peer sessions.

They do so by mentoring them privately and anonymously, away from the office, over a period of several months to a year, for between one and four hours at a time, and whenever the client calls.

"A coach must always be available," says Mr Parker.

That is one reason coaches should not have more than two or three clients at a time.

Coaches' roles are clearly defined. They can advise, warn, suggest, even admonish their clients but they cannot do the job or even suggest courses of action. They might be tempted to, especially if they are experienced business- people in their own right, as Foresight coaches are required to be, but that is taboo in the executive coaching industry.

"You've sometimes got to bite your tongue," says Mr Parker. "But it helps if you've been there."

Mr Parker, best known for restoring NZ Post to profitability partly by closing superfluous post offices, has had an active commercial life since leaving NZ Post. He is chairman or director of six companies in Australia and New Zealand.

The way executive coaches explain it, coaches have to be a combination of psychologist, businessperson, soothsayer, futurist, diplomat, schoolteacher, wailing wall and the soul of discretion. Wives and husbands aside, coaches are the only people to whom chief executives can unburden their soul and be confident that what they say will not end up on the canteen bulletin board next day.

Wives and husbands are not considered suitable coaches. They are generally biased and, if they are not, their knowledge of the commercial world is usually deficient.

The wisdom of the coaching fraternity is that chairmen do not make suitable coaches either, because they are too involved.

So it comes back to coaches who sometimes find, however, that some executives are coaching-proof - they know it all.

"You try and gently pull away some of the scales from their eyes," says Mr Parker.

But if a coach cannot do that, the board is told in the nicest possible way that their chief executive has an ego problem. The coach cannot do anything for him or her, and will go away.

But most chief executives do not think they are infallible and are only too pleased to be assisted in correcting their managerial flaws.

Usually, they try to do too much. "You try and get them to focus on six or eight issues, no more than that," says Mr Harvey.

Other common flaws in chief executives? They tend to be short on communication skills, especially with the media. They can be too impulsive.

Others have been promoted from a narrow functional background and have trouble seeing their new "360-degree role." And still others want to be administrators when they are paid to be leaders.

In coaching, it is horses for courses. Sir Roger specialises in helping executives who have to deal with government and state organisations. He is doing just that now in the higher echelons of the Australian Government.

Although executive coaching is in its infancy here, it is becoming quite popular overseas. The theory is that coaching is more effective because it deals with issues as and when they arise.

The other common argument for coaching is that because the commercial world is changing constantly, top managers need to be able to bounce ideas off impartial parties who have also, as the saying goes, "pushed into forests where there are no well-worn paths."

But perhaps the most compelling reason for hiring a coach is the high cost of a chief executive who does not do the job properly. Quite apart from the wasted fees for the recruitment consultant, there is the payoff unsuitable (or uncoached) chief executives can pull.

New Zealand's golden handshakes for sacked chief executives do not come anywhere near the standards set in the United States but one case shows how much money a coach might be able to save.

When insurance giant Aetna found it could not work with the chief executive of US Healthcare, a company it had bought, it made him redundant.

The chief executive got his severance pay. But that was not enough for the chief executive's lawyers, who got a further $US25 million ($50.8 million) out of Aetna. Then they got an executive jet, also worth $US25 million. And finally they got Aetna to pay the jet's operating costs for five years.

Against that, $50,000 seems quite cheap.