Executive Coaching for Directors

A director leads leaders, so the old habits stop working

The habits that earned you the role usually belong to the level below it. Being the person with the answer, checking the detail and stepping in when something slips all made you a reliable manager. At director level they quietly cap your team and fill your diary.

Directors who come to me tend to describe one or more of these situations.

• ✦Your managers bring you problems you know they could solve, and you solve them anyway.
• ✦You spend executive committee meetings defending your department rather than shaping company decisions.
• ✦A peer director competes with you for budget, people or the CEO’s attention, and the tension is starting to show.
• ✦You were promoted from within and some of your managers were once your peers.
• ✦You have been told you need to be “more strategic” and nobody has said what that looks like on a Tuesday morning.
• ✦You are being considered for a C-suite role and want to be ready before the conversation happens.

What shifts between head of department and enterprise leader

Most of the work in executive coaching for directors sits in a handful of shifts. Naming them makes the coaching specific, so you can see progress rather than just feel busy.

Influence with the C-suite is usually the first priority

For most directors, the relationship with the executive above them shapes everything else. Your budget, your team’s reputation and your own next step all run through it. Yet many directors were never coached on how to manage that relationship deliberately.

We look at how you prepare for senior meetings, how you disagree with someone more senior while keeping the relationship, and how to bring a problem upward early instead of late. My guide on how to influence senior stakeholders covers the practical side. In coaching we work on what gets in the way for you specifically: the hesitation, the over-preparation or the urge to prove yourself.

How I coach directors: personalised, practical and confidential

The decisions stay yours. I ask questions until your own thinking becomes clear, and then we turn it into something you will try before the next session. Sessions are usually weekly or every two weeks, in person in Manama or online, and every engagement is designed around your goals rather than a package.

Depending on what you want to change, I draw on executive coaching, systemic coaching to see the wider organisation you sit in, NLP and mental fitness work for the moments when pressure narrows your thinking. If influence across the executive team is the core issue, stakeholder management coaching focuses on it directly.

In our first session we map your role as it really is

1. 01

   Your role on paper and in practice

   You describe what you are formally accountable for, and then where your time actually goes. The gap is usually revealing.

2. 02

   The relationships that carry the most weight

   We sketch the people who most affect your success: your boss, your peer directors and your direct reports.

3. 03

   One situation that is live now

   We take a current decision, conflict or meeting and work on it, so you leave with something useful this week.

4. 04

   What success would look like

   We agree two or three goals, in your words, that tell us whether the coaching is working.

Directors heading for the C-suite need a different conversation

If a C-suite role is on the horizon, the coaching also looks forward. We test how you would lead the whole business rather than your part of it, and how others currently perceive your readiness. Promotion readiness coaching goes deeper on that preparation, and the guide to moving from manager to senior leader sets out the shift in plain terms.

If you are already a chief executive, executive coaching for CEOs addresses the different pressures of the top job. If you lead managers who lead frontline teams, coaching for middle managers may be the closer fit.

My HR career sat right beside the director’s chair

I spent more than 26 years in leadership, HR and talent development, in financial services, FMCG, entrepreneurship and government. Much of that time I worked alongside heads of department: in talent reviews, restructures and succession discussions. I saw which directors moved up and why, and how often the deciding factor was something nobody had told them.

I am an ICF Professional Certified Coach with more than 4,500 coaching hours. That combination lets me understand your organisation’s politics without becoming part of them.