The Zero-Defect CEO

If the encroachment of coaches into the entrepreneurial community seems inevitable, it's not just because various species of nonathletic coaches --focusing on financial or executive or career issues--have grown to number around 1,500 over the past decade. Nor are CEOs hiring coaches simply because the word itself sparks such warm associations: that whistle-bearing blowhard of yore whose habit of screeching "drop-and-give-me-50" now looks like the selfless, if deafening, expression of a drive to excel. Having a coach licenses even the most anemic entrepreneurs to begin drawing parallels between themselves and those other rich and famous business tycoons, professional athletes.

Suspicion about coaching runs deep. The trend exists, some will claim, only because a crafty group of opportunists--consultants desperate to deflect the bad karma of reengineering, perhaps, or psychotherapists seeking a Trojan horse that could deliver them inside the brains, and bank accounts, of hard-to-attract clientele--pounced on an appealing word. Ask around, and you'll hear coaches likened to hot-line psychics, teddy bears, and radio shrinks. They don't always come out ahead.

Taking pride, as they do, in being wide-eared helpmates who don't begin to think about their responses while others are talking, business coaches have fashioned a stance aimed at vaporizing any doubt about their bottom-line orientation. If you brand them "New Age" or "touchy-feely"--or any phrase equating their curative properties with those of oat bran--coaches can end up touting concrete payoffs with all the understatement of an infomercial: a 40% increase in business in six months, boosted morale, an improved relationship with a spouse. Such outcomes, as spectacular as they are, aren't that different from the promises held out by every management fad in its heyday.

Where coaching does differ is in its radical formula for confronting issues ranging from a CEO's destructive temper to a company's desperate need for a long-term strategy: whatever way works best. By phone or in person? One-on-one or with a team? At set times or as needed? Paid by monthly retainer or on a session-by-session basis? In an era when "mass customization is reaching organizations," as Coleman says, the best coaches mold their involvement around the needs they see.

Among Stepp's clients, it's hard to find anyone who hasn't felt scarred by some faddish cure-all. Joseph Howell, chief financial officer at Merix, recalls how his former employer mistakenly submitted to reengineering. "The consultants solved the problem they understood, but it wasn't our problem," he says. He's not the only one ready to take a buzz saw to the next buzzword. "Every year there's a new book that everybody says has the answers," grumbles Adolph J. Ferro, the CEO of Epitope Inc., a Beaverton, Oreg., company that makes a saliva-based test for detecting HIV antibodies. "I've read them, and I just don't think there's one that applies to my company. I think every company has to write its own book."

If that's so, then CEOs need to bring new discipline to their own analysis: looking hard at the assumptions underlying their decisions, taking responsibility for the priorities they set, recognizing the distortions caused by their own biases. That's where coaches come in. "There's the insight they offer, the prodding that can get you to look at something differently," says Coleman. "This is not the easy stuff. It gets to how you think of yourself as a person, who you are, what you believe. There are ruts you get yourself into, just through lack of awareness."

Coleman began formally categorizing her own ruts more than a decade ago, when Apple deployed executive coaches to burnish its rising stars. Coleman's coach there, Isabella Conti, devised the flash cards as a way to isolate issues that kept surfacing. "When making a decision," reads one, "announce what kind of decision it's going to be." Coleman reports she's "definitely better" at that. "In a discussion where everybody's input is expected," reads another, "listen to everybody else before saying anything." That behavior "is the hardest one for me to change," Coleman concedes.

Stepp helps make Coleman aware of other areas that need shoring up. "Kay is very good at bringing you to the point of asking yourself questions that you probably should have been asking yourself before," says Ferro.

After that, you're on your own. "It's not my job to know what to do," says Stepp. "That's their job."

By calling in a coach, entrepreneurs are already admitting they suspect the source of their problems. Maybe they've been mellowed by age or battered by competition, or like Ferro they've grown bone-tired from "making a list of things I need to do, then feeling lucky if I even have time to look at the list." Whatever the reason, the same folks who not long ago were cribbing cues from Attila the Hun have now taken Oprah as their role model, reaching out to coaches to make their confession: My biggest problem is...me.

"The era of the CEO as Zeus on high has really been broken down," says Coleman. "When I'm at a meeting with a bunch of bright, energized people, I really don't think of myself in that way."

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