Transforming Leaders Through Executive Coaching
How can you become the leader (and person) you’ve always aspired to be?
Bernice Ang, executive coach and former Marketing and Brand Management executive, believes executive coaching provides an opportunity for senior leaders to reshape their mindset, zoom out from their role, and improve employee engagement by developing them personally and professionally.
Executives are often steeped in the intricacies of organizational issues which prevents them from driving their overall mission. Having dedicated time with a trusted partner gives leaders space to zoom out from constantly doing.
This space creates time to reflect on high-impact priorities and initiatives for the organization. Most importantly, these mindset shifts have an impact on who they are as a person and how they interact with family and friends.
Start with your Mindset
Effective executive coaching, according to Bernice, starts with your mindset. To become a highly effective executive, you need to become aware of your thought and behavior patterns.
Understanding the patterns that have shaped your automatic responses helps you shift your mindset and break unhelpful behaviors and responses. Bernice believes that a healthy mindset is characterized by curiosity, empathy, creativity, and action focus.
- Curiosity. Adopting a curious mindset helps you explore what’s really happening in your organization, campaign, or project without preconceived notions.
- Empathy. Bringing empathy into every conversation helps you connect with teams on a deeper level, fostering trust and collaboration. And helps you learn how to resolve barriers for your employees.
- Creativity. Once you have a formula for success, it’s difficult not to want to repeat it. But, thinking outside the box helps people think about initiatives in terms of their effectiveness, rather than their efficiency.
- Action Focus. Balancing strategic thinking with action allows you to meet your goals. Devote less time to thinking and theorizing and more time to taking action.
Zooming Out: Resolving Unconstructive Mindsets
At the highest level, every executive is great at their functional role. The benefit of hiring an executive career coach is to influence underlying behavior patterns. Bernice mentions three in particular:
- Inability to let go of control
- Inability to articulate a clear vision
- Misalignment of team roles with team skills & experience
For the first, Bernice notes, “Successful leaders are often high control people. They want to direct, they want to manage the outcome, and they hold on tight because underneath control is fear.” This need for control stifles innovation. Letting go and allowing employees to deliver improves buy-in and employee engagement.
The second challenge relates to leading with passion and communicating authentically. For leaders to inspire and mobilize their teams, they must create a vision that employees not only understand, but also feel passionate about. Employees should understand the importance of their work and feel like they are contributing to the organization’s success.
Third, the executive might not have the right team structure or team members to accomplish their mission. Bernice believes, “executives should aspire to be matchmakers rather than authoritarian figures.” Execs can begin by considering where employees’ interests and skills align, then assign them to roles that fit their passions and abilities.
Bernice’s Executive Coaching & Leadership Philosophy: It’s All About Transformation
Bernice Ang’s executive coaching philosophy is centered on the whole person across all dimensions. She adds, “I don’t do incremental change. I work on transforming people so that at the end of our coaching engagement, they don’t recognize themselves.”
She dives into the humanity and core essence of her clients, seeing what processes are automatic for them and what action is really a reaction. Illuminating clients’ automatic behaviors helps them to understand and shift their mindset.
Through this transformation, Bernice works to help her clients find their passionate purpose–the thing that fulfills them and makes them want to show up to work everyday. Then she encourages them to help their employees connect to their passion by delegating responsibility according to their skills and interests.
About Bernice Ang
Bernice Ang leverages her 25 years of executive and brand management experience to help senior leaders improve their brand and presence. In her professional career, she led Coca-Cola’s Diet Coke rebrand in the 90’s and has since worked with Procter & Gamble, Mars and Pepsico.
As an executive coach, she primarily works with C-suite, function heads, and VP-level leaders to help shift their mindset, create a purpose-centered personal brand, and influence with impact. Her clients include Amazon, Abbvie, Lego, Goldman-Sachs, Starbucks, Unilever, Wal-Mart, etc..
