The CEO, the board meeting & the coach

Board meetings - the most stressful recurring event on a CEO’s calendar, am I right? I have lost count of the number of times clients have shared how much time and energy goes into preparing, delivering and following up on board meetings. 

My clients of colour report a particular desire to over-prepare as a way of 'armouring up' in the face of power - they are often up late into the night tweaking slide decks and planning an answer for any question that might come their way. They arrive at coaching sessions understandably apprehensive and distracted, often intending to cut our session short so they can get back to their preparation. 

My coaching approach is typically the same.

I invite the client to join me in a couple of minutes of breath work, reconnecting with the stability of the floor beneath their feet and the support of the chair on their back. 

I acknowledge the topic (the board meeting), their current perspective about the topic (stressful) and ask, “Who do you want to be in tomorrow’s board meeting?” (In the language of the Co-Active model of coaching in which I am trained, we focus on the ‘Co’ or ‘being’ part of the framework.) 

This powerful question immediately changes the frame of the conversation and asks the client to consider a different perspective. It might be a question that they have never been asked before.

Within minutes, they are lifted out of the detail of charts, spreadsheets, data and facts and invited to focus on their values, presence and who they are as a human being. They are reminded of why they took the top job in the first place.

Clients express a desire to be powerful, confident, honest, practical, ambitious, fair, forward-thinking, fearless and so on.

I ask clients to embody these characteristics. “If you were powerful, how would you stand?” “Show me what fairness looks like.” 

(Embodiment - the process of connecting with your body and the emotions and sensations within - can be done in different ways to make it accessible for clients with a range of physical capacities.) 

I might also ask, “How do you want to be in connection with your board members in the meeting?” In doing so, I’m inviting the client to shift their perspective from a ‘me vs them’ mindset to an ‘us’ mindset. 

Clients often imagine themselves in dialogue with their board members, collaborating on understanding challenges and co-creating solutions. They express a desire for partnership, for power to be re-balanced and - dare they say it - to be able to look forward to board meetings because they are a place for strategic, productive, people-centred conversations. 

Some of this is an invitation for board members to show up in a different way (the subject of a future blog). But much of this is in the CEO’s control. More than they might have allowed themselves to believe. 

Having built resonance with the new perspective on the board meeting, I typically end with an action for the client to complete between sessions. I don’t need to request that the client spend more time preparing their presentation. I know that they have got this firmly under control. 

So I challenge the client to push on the boundaries of who they will be in the board meeting. To lean into what they’ve expressed about themselves, push past the internalised limits of what they think they can do and deepen their impact. To reclaim the power that they might have ceded to others.

“Will you say no to board members’ requests at least five times?” (because this tends to generate a lot of work for staff and may not necessarily align with organisational priorities). “Will you say, ‘that’s a great question, can you co-lead a project to look into that further?’, at least three times?” (because board members often have under-utilised capacity and this avoids adding to staff workload). 

Clients get to say ‘yes’, ‘no’ or give me a counter offer but this process tends to result in them taking on challenges that are greater than they would have done outside of coaching.

As we close out the session, I always ask the client what they are taking away. Clients share that they feel lighter, ready and with a renewed awareness that they already have everything they need inside of themselves. They just need to tap into it. Turns out it was worth not cancelling their coaching session.