Christian Business Coaching For Change

The following short story regarding business coaching is true and it's mine.

I walked out of my client's office one evening shaking my head. A full year before, I had laid out their need to completely redo their sales channel. The VP of sales was a mismatch for the role, their value proposition was tired and out of step with the needs of a changing market. The team in place was out of ideas and out of gas. I spent three months proving the point, but here we were a full year later and the situation was worse. Completely predictable, but worse all the same.

The CEO hired me because I had most recently run a successful company that came to be a world leader in its market. They had paid me a lot of money for my advice. I had run a good project for them and the conclusions were their own and hard to deny. But nothing happened! Except, of course, that a bad situation had deteriorated further.

In that second, I realized consulting often turned out like this. Many of my consulting friends said their clients paid dearly for advice they ignored. Money changed hands, there was a lot of noise, but the power of inertia won out.

One of the reasons was that the fundamental issues of the company normally reside between the ears of the CEO.

In some ways, I stopped being a consultant that night.

Over the next few months, we began a search into my own life purposes, my skills and talents, and into how I might be of value to God's kingdom on earth. I'd like to share with you what I learned:

Questions Unleash Power

No matter how much you know, or how right you are, people learn when they're ready. Giving them answers doesn't provoke the right kind of change. Questions provoke our thinking. Questions engage and penetrate the hardened places in our life. Questions disrupt. And disruption is a prerequisite to real change. When confronted with a question we can ultimately answer but don't have the quick answer, our brain goes to work and focuses its considerable energy on working out the answer. This is part of why questions unleash power.

Jesus led his disciples with questions and rebuked the Pharisees with questions, too. If we're to be most effective in helping executives change, we have to ask the right questions.

As executives, we make decisions. When our goal is to serve another executive in his business and personal development, we have to acquire or hone our questioning skills. Along with these skills of crafting penetrating and disruptive questions, we have to learn to listen. Listening is hard work, because we have to push conclusions out of our mind, so we can keep uncovering and keep asking.

A consultant is an "answer man," but a coach provokes and serves by prompting and discovering. As a coach, we ask questions.

Coaching helps the leader uncover root causes, discover options, confess his own contribution to the problem, choose priorities and commit to actions. Through all these steps, the coach is using questions to unleash power, not to provide answers.

If I was going to be a good coach, and be really effective in seeing executives engage with the hard work of business and life change, I had to learn to ask questions and suspend some of my own drive to judge, to conclude and to provide answers.

Over and over again, we find that leaders don't change until they're ready. There's a moment, like what the Bible calls the "fullness of time," when the leader is ready to hear, ready to answer questions honestly, and ready to embrace change. It's in those moments that we must be ready with the right questions.

Our task is to be patient, persistent and sensitive to what the Holy Spirit is up to in the leader's life and in ours. That's right. Coaching is a process that involves change and development for you, and for the leader you're coaching as well.

Patience Is Required

We change with time. If it were as simple as reading a book, getting an insight and being different, all of us would be nearly perfect. Fortunately, God is patient with us and works with us over time. As a coach, I realized I'd have to learn to be patient with people, to wait till they're ready, and to be more willing to serve, rather than to give the "right" answers.

One of the key lessons is that I was often wrong about what someone really needed in his life. God had a different and better plan. Without patience, I'd never see what God was up to. My role shifted from the answer man to the one who helped the leader discover what was needed, and uncover the barriers to moving in that direction.

People Change in Community

Sometimes we're able to change in the quiet of our own room. Most often, we need to be in a community of people who face similar challenges and who lead similar lives, in order to find the courage and the encouragement to engage and sustain change. People who can find that collection of other people who will both love and correct them are far more able to change than the lone ranger.

Change is a process and we need continuing engagement. This is part of why change happens from book learning only some of the time.

God ordained the body of Christ to be our community, which loves and accepts us and which calls us upward to be more like Christ. That group is for some reason the place where the Holy Spirit does his forming and conforming work.

As a coach, I would have to learn to create community and to trust its members to engage, create and sustain the most important changes needed in a leader's life and business.

God Calls Us to People, Not Just to Organizations

I love business and I love the people who lead businesses. Having been a CEO, I understand the pressures they face. I know the identity risks of success and failure. I know the temptations to compromise. I've experienced the terrors of worry in the middle of the night over the families in my charge and the customers we weren't serving well enough. I know business reveals my heart toward God and toward my family. I love those leaders. God has made my history my ministry. He has called me to serve these leaders and to love them, too.

My background as a business executive and CEO meant I understood the people God was calling me to serve. It also meant I had the credibility to engage with their lives and their business.

Helping People Isn't Always the Comfortable Choice

Many of us begin life in the zone of pressure. The goal of our hard work is independence, and the currency is money. We work hard, maybe enjoy success. Then one day, we find ourselves in the zone of comfort. Our goal is leisure, and the currency is time. We're out from under the pressure and don't want to return to that zone.

There is a third way. It's the zone of stewardship, the currency is people, the goal is obedience, and the return on investment is both in this life and eternity.

I could have chosen what was more comfortable for me. It would have required little change and development in my skills. I would probably have made more money, maybe a lot more. But instead, I chose to invest my time in leaders who matter, in a cause that's bigger than us all.

A Fulfilling Journey

Coaching Christian CEOs and business owners one-on-one, and facilitating a group environment that both challenges and encourages them is demanding and requires me to keep growing. It's also a very fulfilling way to serve God and the people He cares so much about; the rewards are many and the best ones come from leaders functioning as God intended - leading their families and their businesses well in parallel priorities, while honoring God in the process.

John Richie is a Convene Chair at Convene. Throughout his career, John has held the titles of CEO, COO, CFO and SVP of several esteemed companies in the U.S. His deep interest in the intersection of faith, life and business and a passion for coaching led him to invest his life into CEOs and business owners who share his commitment to stewardship, business excellence and family. John has been a Convene Chair since 2006.