Adapting the Directive Approach for Executive Coaching

We define a problem as a repetitive sequence of behavior that fails to achieve a desired outcome. In the context of executive coaching, these sequences involve power, status, and the organization of the hierarchy. We do not look for the cause of a problem in the history of the individual. We look for the cause in the current interactions within the team. If a Chief Financial Officer fails to provide reports on time, we do not ask about his early life or his internal motivations. We examine who asks him for the reports, how they ask him, and what happens when he fails to deliver them. We see the problem as a cycle that involves at least two people.

I once worked with a Director of Operations who was constantly interrupted by his subordinates. These employees would enter his office without knocking to ask minor questions about scheduling and office supplies. He complained that he had no time for his own strategic planning. When I observed him in his office, I noticed that he smiled and offered his staff coffee every time they interrupted him. He was complaining about the intrusions while simultaneously rewarding them with his attention and hospitality. His behavior invited the very interruption he claimed to dislike.

You must identify the reward in the stuck pattern. Your client might not see that their politeness is a method of maintaining a chaotic environment. You will find that executives often use symptoms to avoid more difficult tasks. By allowing the interruptions, the Director of Operations stayed busy with small details and avoided the pressure of completing the large strategic plan. You must interrupt this loop by giving a directive that changes the social arrangement of the office.

We recognize that hierarchy is the backbone of any organization. When a client experiences a problem, the hierarchy is often confused. A boss acts like a peer, or a subordinate makes decisions that belong to the executive. Jay Haley emphasized that a confused hierarchy leads to symptoms in the system. In a company, this appears as missed deadlines, low morale, or constant conflict between departments.

I worked with a founder who could not bring himself to fire a childhood friend who served as the Head of Marketing. This friend was consistently failing to meet targets. By refusing to act as a boss, the founder caused the rest of the leadership team to lose respect for his authority. The problem was not the friend’s poor performance. The problem was the founder’s refusal to occupy his position at the top of the hierarchy. The leadership team became cynical because the rules of the organization did not apply to everyone.

You might tell this founder to spend one hour every Tuesday morning asking the friend for a detailed report on his recent failures. The founder must remain quiet while the friend speaks and must not offer any advice or comfort. This directive changes the hierarchy by placing the founder in the position of the one who judges performance rather than the one who avoids the truth. This creates a situation where the friend must either improve or find the scrutiny so uncomfortable that he chooses to leave.

We use the term directive to describe an instruction we give to a client to perform a specific action outside of our meetings. We do not suggest or recommend. We tell the client what to do. In coaching, you can frame these directives as leadership experiments to reduce resistance. An executive may reject a clinical suggestion, but they will rarely reject an experiment that produces data. You tell the client that you need more information about how the system reacts to a specific change in their behavior.

I once instructed a manager who struggled with a dominant employee to perform an experiment in their next staff meeting. I told her to agree with every single criticism the employee made, no matter how ridiculous it seemed. She had to say: You are right that we could improve that, and I want you to write a four page report on how to fix it by tomorrow morning. This directive changed the power dynamic. The employee, who enjoyed the act of complaining, did not enjoy the labor that resulted from the complaint. The employee stopped complaining once the cost of doing so became too high.

You must give the directive without apology. If you hesitate, the client will sense your uncertainty and will not follow through. We rely on the client’s desire to solve the problem, but we also anticipate their desire to keep things the same. This is why we often use indirect directives or ordeals. An ordeal is a task that is more difficult for the client to perform than it is for them to give up their problem behavior.

I had a client who spent four hours a day checking his email as a way to avoid making difficult phone calls to new prospects. I told him he could continue to check his email as often as he liked, but he had to do it while standing on one leg in the middle of the company break room. If he put his foot down, he had to close the laptop immediately. This made the act of avoiding his work physically uncomfortable and socially awkward. Within one week, he decided that making the phone calls was less painful than the exercise in the break room. He changed his behavior because the ordeal made his old pattern too expensive to maintain.

We observe that when an executive changes their behavior, everyone around them must also change. You are not just coaching one person. You are intervening in a network of people. When you give a directive to a CEO, you are also giving a directive to the Vice Presidents, the managers, and the administrative staff. The CEO is the lever you use to move the entire organization.

I once consulted for a Chief Executive who felt his board of directors was micromanaging his daily decisions. He would send them long, defensive emails explaining every move he made. The board responded by asking more questions. I told the executive to stop sending the emails entirely for two weeks. When a board member called him, he was to say: I am working on a comprehensive report that will answer all your questions, and I will have it for you at the end of the month. Until then, I cannot discuss the details. By withholding the information, he forced the board to wait for his lead. He reclaimed his position as the leader of the company by refusing to be a subordinate to their curiosity.

You will encounter resistance when you give these directives. The client will tell you why the task will not work or why they cannot do it. We do not argue with the client. We accept the resistance and incorporate it into the next directive. If the client says they are too busy to perform a task, you tell them they must be even busier. You tell them that because they are so busy, they must spend ten minutes every morning doing nothing but thinking about how busy they are. This uses the resistance to move the client toward the goal.

We use follow up meetings to check the results of the experiment. If the client followed the directive, you ask what happened in the system. If they did not follow the directive, you treat that as an important piece of information about their readiness to change. You do not scold the client. You simply observe that the problem must still be useful to them in some way.

I once told a Sales Manager to praise his most difficult employee three times a day. He came back and said he could not do it because the employee did nothing worth praising. I told him that his failure to follow the instruction showed that he preferred his resentment to a functioning department. This observation was not a judgment. It was a statement of fact that forced the manager to choose between his pride and his professional success.

You must be prepared to be the one who takes the blame for a directive that seems odd or difficult. The client can tell their team that their coach made them do it. This allows the client to save face while they test new behaviors. We are not there to be liked by the client. We are there to be effective. We measure our success by the change in the client’s organization, not by the client’s comfort during the process.

We recognize that the most effective interventions are often the ones that seem the simplest. A change in where a person sits during a meeting or a change in who speaks first during a briefing can reorganize a whole team. You look for the smallest move that will create the largest disturbance in the old, failing pattern. You give the directive, you observe the result, and you adjust your next move based on what the system tells you.

Your client’s posture will often signal the state of the hierarchy before they say a single word. When you see an executive slouching while their assistant stands over them, you are looking at a confused power structure. You do not need to discuss the assistant’s ambition or the executive’s lack of confidence. You simply tell the executive to sit in a higher chair and to require the assistant to sit down before a single word is exchanged. The change in physical position creates a change in the social reality of the office. We change the behavior first, and the new professional identity follows. Every directive you issue is a brick in the new structure of the organization.

You build this structure by redefining the meaning of your client’s current actions. We call this reframing. You do not change the facts of the situation, but you change the category into which the client places the behavior. If a Chief Executive Officer is obsessively checking every email sent by the marketing team, you do not label this as a lack of trust. You label it as a high level of dedication to the company brand. You explain to the executive that this level of surveillance is a form of protective vigilance that has served the company well during its early growth. By framing the problem as a strength that is now being over-applied, you reduce the client’s defensiveness. You also gain the authority to regulate that strength. Once you have defined the micromanagement as a specific tool for quality assurance, you can issue a directive that limits its use to specific hours of the day. You tell the executive that a high-intensity tool wears out if it is used for every task. You instruct the executive to only apply this vigilance between the hours of ten in the morning and eleven in the morning. For the rest of the day, the executive must practice a different form of leadership called observation without interference.

I once worked with a Vice President of Operations named Arthur who could not stop correcting his subordinates during meetings. Every time a manager presented a report, Arthur would interrupt to point out a minor clerical error or a slight deviation from his preferred font. This behavior demoralized the staff and caused meetings to run two hours over the scheduled time. I did not ask Arthur about his childhood or his need for control. I told him that his eye for detail was the reason the company was profitable, but that he was spending his most valuable asset on small problems. We agreed that his expertise was too expensive to be used on every slide of a presentation. I gave him a directive. For the next three meetings, Arthur was required to find exactly three errors and point them out. He was forbidden from pointing out a fourth. If he saw a fourth error, he had to write it down on a piece of paper and keep it in his pocket until the meeting ended. By limiting the behavior, I was actually prescribing it. Arthur became so focused on choosing which three errors were worth his time that he stopped the impulsive interruptions. He regained his status as a strategic leader rather than a nuisance.

We often find that the most effective way to handle a resistant executive is to prescribe the symptom. If a leader says they cannot stop worrying about a specific competitor, you do not tell them to relax. You tell them to worry more. You instruct the client to set aside exactly thirty minutes every morning at six o’clock to sit in a hard wooden chair and think only about the ways the competitor might win. They must have a notebook and write down every possible disaster. If they think of a worry at two o’clock in the afternoon, they must tell themselves to wait until the next morning at six o’clock because that is the designated time for professional worrying. This directive moves the behavior from the realm of the involuntary to the realm of the voluntary. Once a client can perform a symptom on command, they can also stop performing it on command. You are taking the power away from the symptom and placing it back in the hands of the executive.

You must pay close attention to the hierarchy of the organization when you issue these directives. Many problems in a corporate setting arise because the lines of authority are blurred. I recall a case where a Senior Director had become too friendly with her direct reports. They were going to lunch together every day and sharing personal secrets. When the Senior Director needed to enforce a deadline, her subordinates ignored her because they saw her as an equal. The hierarchy had collapsed. To fix this, I used a directive involving physical space and secrecy. I told the Senior Director that she must stop eating lunch in the common breakroom immediately. She was to eat alone in her office or go to a restaurant where her staff did not congregate. I also gave her a secret task. She was to choose one person each week and give them a small, positive piece of feedback that no one else was allowed to hear. This created a sense of mystery and re-established her as the person who distributed rewards. The physical separation and the control of information restored her position at the top of the local hierarchy.

We use the pretend technique when an executive feels paralyzed by a new responsibility. Jay Haley noted that if someone can pretend to have a problem, they can also pretend to have the solution. If a newly promoted manager feels like an imposter, you do not offer reassurance. You tell the manager to pretend to be a manager who is not afraid. You give them a specific script for their next board meeting. You tell them to sit with their hands flat on the table and to wait three seconds before answering any question. You are not asking them to feel confident. You are asking them to act as if they are confident. The board reacts to the behavior, not the internal feeling. When the board treats the manager with respect, the manager begins to behave with more authority. The pretense becomes the reality through the feedback loop of the organizational hierarchy.

You must also consider the use of the ordeal. An ordeal is a task that is more of a nuisance than the symptom it is designed to cure. If a client complains of chronic procrastination on a specific project, you tie the procrastination to a tedious activity. You tell the client that they are allowed to procrastinate, but every time they delay working on the project, they must perform a task they dislike. For one executive, this meant cleaning the office kitchen or filing a pile of old receipts by hand. The executive must do the ordeal immediately after the procrastinating behavior occurs. We find that the client soon discovers that completing the original project is less painful than the ordeal you have prescribed. The symptom becomes too expensive to maintain.

Secrecy is a powerful tool in strategic interventions. We often tell the client not to tell anyone else in the company about the directives we are using. If the board or the subordinates know that the executive is following a script, the intervention loses its power. I once had a client who was being bullied by a more senior partner. I told the client to perform a very specific, slightly odd gesture every time the partner raised their voice. The client was to simply adjust their glasses or touch their tie in a rhythmic way. I told the client to never explain why they were doing it. This small, unexplained action shifted the power dynamic. The bullying partner became confused and distracted by the gesture, which broke the pattern of the verbal attack. The client felt a sense of secret power because they were the only one who knew the rules of the game.

You are always looking for the smallest change that will produce the largest result. We do not try to change the entire personality of the leader. We change the sequence of interactions. When you change how a leader greets their assistant or how they open a meeting, you are changing the social arrangement of the office. Every interaction is a move in a game of chess. Your job is to suggest the move that disrupts the opponent’s strategy. In the context of executive coaching, the opponent is not a person, but the stuck pattern of behavior that prevents the organization from functioning. You must remain the expert who directs the action. We do not ask the client what they think they should do. We tell the client what to do based on our observation of the system. The authority of the coach is the lever that moves the executive.

Your observations must be grounded in what you see and hear in the room. If a client says they are frustrated, you look for the physical evidence. You watch for the tightening of the jaw or the tapping of a pen. You then use that physical evidence in your directive. You tell the client to tap the pen even faster when they speak to the person who frustrates them. You turn the involuntary tic into a deliberate action. By the time the session ends, the client is no longer a victim of their frustration. They are a person who is choosing how to move their hands. The change is not in the mind, but in the body and its relationship to the environment. The executive who masters their own physical responses is ready to master the complexities of the boardroom. You provide the instructions, and the client provides the action. The result is a restructured organization that functions with the precision of a well-oiled machine. Your focus remains on the next move.

We define the end of our involvement by the absence of the symptom and the stabilization of the new hierarchy. You do not wait for the client to feel confident or for the organization to offer praise. You look for the moment when the problematic sequence fails to repeat even when the environment triggers it. I once worked with a senior partner in a law firm who could not stop checking the work of his junior associates at two in the morning. After six weeks of the directive to only check their work while sitting on a hard wooden stool in his kitchen, he stopped the behavior. I did not ask him how he felt about his new habit. I waited until he reported that his associates had completed three major filings without his midnight interference. Once that sequence of independence was established, I told him our work was finished. We recognize that any further conversation risks returning the client to a state of dependency on our direction. You must exit the system as soon as the functional change occurs to prevent the executive from using you as a permanent crutch for their authority.

Experienced practitioners understand that an executive who has gained power through our directives will often face a counter-reaction from the board of directors or their peers. The organization attempts to return to the previous state of equilibrium. We prepare the client for this by using multilevel communication. You provide the executive with a story that contains a hidden instruction for handling dissent. I once sat with a chief executive officer who feared a coup from his chief financial officer. I told him a story about a gardener who noticed a specific tree was growing too fast and stealing the light from the rest of the orchard. The gardener did not chop the tree down. He simply trimmed the roots on one side so the tree had to focus its energy on staying upright rather than growing taller. The chief executive officer understood this without me having to explain the metaphor. He reassigned the chief financial officer to a complex international expansion project that required every bit of the man’s attention. This moved the threat away from the central power structure while appearing to give the man a promotion.

You use indirect suggestion when the executive faces a peer who possesses equal structural power. Instead of a directive, you provide a narrative that contains a hidden instruction. We do not use these stories to be poetic. We use them to bypass the conscious resistance of a high-achieving professional. I once worked with a vice president who was paralyzed by a peer who constantly undermined her in meetings. I told her about a training method for guard dogs where the trainer wears a heavy padded suit. The dog bites the suit and thinks it is winning, while the trainer remains completely unharmed and in control of the exercise. I instructed the vice president to wear a specific piece of jewelry that represented the padded suit to her. Every time her peer attacked her in a meeting, she was to touch the jewelry and remind herself that the peer was merely biting the padding. This changed her physical posture from one of defense to one of amused observation. The peer eventually stopped the attacks because the emotional reaction he sought was no longer available.

We observe the organization for signs of systemic pushback during the final weeks of an intervention. When a leader changes their behavior, the subordinates often escalate the old problem to force a return to the familiar sequence. You must warn your client that this escalation is a sign of success. I worked with a director who started leaving the office at five o’clock to reestablish his authority over his own time. His assistant suddenly began bringing him urgent, non-essential crises at four fifty-five. I instructed the director to thank the assistant for the information and then file it in a locked drawer without reading it until the next morning at nine o’clock. By refusing to engage in the crisis, he forced the assistant to either solve the problem or wait. Within two weeks, the assistant stopped presenting crises at the end of the day. You must be specific about the physical actions the client takes during these moments of pressure.

The use of secrecy remains a primary tool for maintaining the new organizational structure. We instruct the executive to keep the details of our work private from their subordinates and even their spouses. If the subordinates know the change is the result of a directive, they will view the executive as a puppet. I once had an executive who wanted to tell his team that he was working with a coach to improve his communication. I forbade him from doing so. I told him that his change in behavior must appear as a natural evolution of his own character. If he confessed the source of his new strategies, he would lose the mystery that is essential to authority. You ensure the client understands that power is often maintained through what is not said.

You will encounter clients who attempt to turn the final session into a theoretical discussion about their growth. We redirect these attempts back to the concrete results. If the executive says they feel more confident, you ask them to describe the specific actions they took this week that they could not have taken three months ago. I once worked with a manager who spent ten minutes praising my approach during our last meeting. I interrupted him and asked if his department had met its production goals. When he confirmed they had exceeded them by fifteen percent, I told him that the production numbers were the only evidence of his improvement that mattered. We do not seek the client’s gratitude. We seek the client’s functional success within the hierarchy.

The final directive you give an executive often involves a task they must perform alone, without reporting back to you. This marks the transition from directed action to independent leadership. I told a managing director to take one hour every Friday morning to sit in a public park and observe how people move through the space. He was not allowed to take a phone or a notepad. He was simply to watch the way groups form and dissolve. This task was designed to reinforce his role as an observer of systems rather than a participant in every conflict. Because he knew he would never have to report his observations to me, the task belonged entirely to him. You use these final, unmonitored tasks to seal the new behavior patterns.

We recognize that the most effective interventions are those that the client eventually believes were their own idea. You do not claim credit for the change. You remain the anonymous architect of the new sequence. I once saw an executive two years after our work had concluded. He told me that he had realized the solutions to his problems on his own during a long flight. I agreed with him and did not mention the six months of specific directives I had issued to him. This is the strategic position. You allow the client to own the victory because that ownership ensures they will maintain the behavior.

A leader who has mastered the directive approach knows that every interaction is a move in a larger game of organizational chess. You have taught them to see the sequences, the hierarchies, and the costs of their symptoms. We leave the executive with the understanding that their primary job is the management of these social arrangements. I once instructed a chief technology officer to stop explaining the technical details of his work to the board of directors. I told him to speak only in terms of risk and resource allocation. This forced the board to treat him as a peer in leadership rather than a technical subordinate. The change in his vocabulary led to a change in his compensation and his influence within the firm. You focus on the words and the timing because those are the levers of power.

The practitioner who follows the strategic tradition knows that change is a matter of action rather than insight. You do not need the client to understand why they have a problem. You only need them to follow a directive that makes the problem impossible to continue. I once worked with a plant manager who was being bullied by a union representative. I told the manager to invite the representative to a meeting and then spend the entire time asking the representative for advice on a trivial matter, such as the best brand of floor wax. This moved the representative into the role of a helpful consultant on an unimportant topic, which broke his aggressive stance on more serious issues. The manager regained control of the relationship by changing the nature of the interaction.

We conclude an intervention by reminding the client that the organization is a living structure that requires constant adjustment of its hierarchy. You ensure the executive is prepared to issue their own directives to their staff. I told a department head that her role was not to be the most talented person in the room, but the person who ensured the most talented people were doing their jobs. This simple definition of her position allowed her to stop competing with her subordinates and start directing them. We observe that when the hierarchy is clear, the work becomes efficient. You look for the clarity of the lines of command as the final indicator of a successful intervention. The professional who understands these principles can enter any organization and identify the missing link in the chain of authority within thirty minutes of observation. Your task is to provide the directive that restores that link.

The final measure of our work is the permanence of the new behavioral sequence. We do not measure success by the client’s mood or their stated intentions. I once followed up with a company a year after I had worked with their leadership team. The chief operating officer reported that the secret meetings and back-channel complaints that had plagued the office had not returned. He did not know why the culture had changed, but he knew that the new rules for communication were still being followed. You have succeeded when the client no longer remembers that a different way of working ever existed. The strategic practitioner provides the structure, and the organization eventually forgets that the structure was ever missing. Control of the organizational sequence belongs to the person who is most willing to define the rules of engagement.