John S. Blaine, vice president of Sun Microsystems Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif., was talking with his executive coach.
“All the things that get you here to the executive level are all the things that will derail you,” he said. `
`You do all these great things–you really pay attention to details or you build a series of capabilities in a certain area–and then you jump to this level which is hugely different. And then none of that stuff really matters anymore, it’s taken for granted and almost a weakness. I constantly wake up in the morning wondering if I’m qualified to do the next thing.”
Blaine made the move from East Coast operations director to a vice presidency at corporate headquarters four years ago. Considered a star at Sun, he still felt he needed help with the transition.
“I was pretty good at running a PT boat but you’re doing a much bigger role,” says Blaine.
Blaine called John Baird, a partner at ExecutivEdge of Silicon Valley, who coached him for more than six months, working on choosing priorities, managing the dynamics between different players and developing patience. Since then, Blaine has been promoted and now oversees 50 cents of every dollar of Sun’s expenditures as head of supply management.
Executive coaching has been around for several decades but mostly at the periphery of the business consulting world, which has looked askance at its behavioral orientation. In the high-tech industry, however, the practice of hiring a personal trainer to buff up executive muscles has moved firmly into the mainstream.
In this latest chapter of the Silicon-Valley-grows-up saga, techies and entrepreneurs are gearing up for the greatest challenge of all: transforming themselves from brainy, single-minded introverts into polished leaders capable of guiding complex organizations and eliciting top-notch performance from thousands of individuals.
They have taken on the task of working on themselves with characteristic problem-solving zeal–studying data from dozens of anonymous evaluations of their style, reading case studies of effective and ineffective leaders, perhaps reciting Marc Antony’s funeral oration from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” or watching Jimmy Stewart in “Flight of the Phoenix” for clues on how to lead. They huddle with their coaches periodically over several months. The coaches shadow them into meetings, rehearse presentations and deliver often hard-hitting critiques.
High-tech companies like Sun, Hewlett-Packard Co. and National Semiconductor Corp. typically spend $15,000 per executive for customized coaching in the belief that better senior staff are key to their competitive edge.
And this spending is fueling growth at executive-coaching firms. For example, Richard Hagberg, president of the Hagberg Consulting Group of Foster City, Calif., an executive coaching firm with a database of 3,000 executive profiles, has seen his revenues double in the last year.
While executives everywhere have some similar skills, those in high-tech often come with qualities that reflect their technical, engineering backgrounds, their coaches say. A typical weakness for geek executives is conflict-avoidance: the leader who visibly tightens up when the senior management team clashes.
“Silicon Valley worships rationality,” says Hagberg. “These are individuals who are uncomfortable with emotion and have more difficulty dealing with conflict than executives in other industries.”
That was the case for Steve Goldberg, an electrical engineer who was managing two people just five years ago and has now moved up to the post of chief executive of VertiCom Inc. in Santa Rosa, Calif.
“I was going out of my way to keep people from arguing and people didn’t want me to do that,” says Goldberg, who until recently was the vice president of Cylinks Corp.’s wireless division. “So I backed off and let people duke it out. “
Goldberg, who signed up with Hagberg’s firm last February when coaching was offered for the senior management team at Cylinks, went through an extensive testing and assessment process that included a 360-degree review–anonymous evaluations by his peers, his bosses and those reporting to him. Most of the feedback was extremely positive, Goldberg says, confirming his own sense of his leadership style, boosting his confidence and helping him come to terms with his own ambitions.
“One of the things that came out of (the) testing: I say I’m not competitive but the reality is I’m real competitive,” Goldberg says. “Only after the testing have I been willing to face that. “
Looking back on his career in Silicon Valley, Goldberg says he watched many techies promoted for their intellectual prowess–“raw horsepower,” as he puts it–while skills that make good managers were neglected, even criticized.
“I was told, I can’t tell you how many times, `Stop mentoring,’ ” he says. “The message was: Shut the door, shut up and do your work.”
Peter Howard, a managing consultant with CSC Index, says one clear sign of conflict-avoidance at the top is the fragmentation of an organization into politicized fiefdoms, as he found in one large company.
“Since the leader did not deal with conflict, it went underground and he was sheltered from it,” Howard says. “When he was made aware of the costs of his behavior, he made a commitment to change.”
To some extent, coaches simply use different approaches to the same end. One talks about three paradigmatic conflicts, another describes four classic categories of executive. One uses sports metaphors, another, ballet.
Michele Kremen Bolton, Baird’s partner at ExecutivEdge, gave one of her clients an assignment to coach his daughter’s Little League team.
“That forced him to behave differently,” Bolton says. “You have to build informal relationships where the team follows you because they like you and not because you have the authority.”
