When performance is not enough to influence decisions
When I met Laura (first name changed), there was more at stake than just career development. Her company had a high-performing executive, but her contribution and participation were not yet being taken into account in the decisions of the Management Committee.
This European ETI in the transport sector is facing major changes: increased demands in terms of safety and regularity, regulatory pressure in Europe, energy transition, intensification of international competition, etc. In this context, the Management Committee needs to integrate profiles capable of contributing to decisions with sometimes diverging interests, in a multicultural environment.
Laura, an American director, has solid commercial and strategic expertise. Her professional skills and results are recognised. But she sees a gap :
- A European culture that is more collegial than the one it has experienced in the course of its international career
- Still limited influence in other Business Units
- Its difficulty in making its positions heard at Committee level
Without adjustment, the risk is that of a high-performing executive who is underused in strategic decision-making. Laura's objective is simple: to join the Executive Committee within two years.
The challenges of coaching: transforming operational legitimacy into decision-making influence
The stakes went beyond Laura's individual trajectory. They were personal, organisational and strategic.
For Laura :
- To be recognised as a credible interlocutor at Committee level, particularly for her analytical and decision-making skills
- Adapting its operating methods to European governance codes
- Moving from a focus on operational performance linked to responsibilities to one of strategic influence
From the outset, she made her expectations very clear: “I want to be seen as a manager who contributes to the company's decisions, not just the results of my BU”.”
For the company :
- Integrating an international profile into an international leadership team involved in structuring decisions
- Improving the quality of decisions on key issues (logistics, digitalisation, artificial intelligence, technological transformation, energy transition)
- Avoiding a mismatch between available expertise and real influence, particularly with a view to internal mobility
The challenge is simple: to align individual contribution and collective impact.
A tailor-made approach designed to intervene at moments when decisions need to be made
I have designed a programme of 12 individual coaching sessions, spread over six months, with three areas to guide the work:
- Clarify your contribution to the Committee, by identifying what «sitting on it» actually means and transforming your desire for promotion into a project with strategic impact.
- Adjust the way you intervene at key moments, by preparing for specific situations (committee meetings, sensitive arbitrations, disagreements between BUs), to help you formulate positions that are useful for decision-making, intervene at the right time and influence without overplaying the balance of power.
- Making the most of intercultural complexity by sharpening your understanding of the implicit expectations of a European Management Committee and adjusting your communication style to reinforce your credibility.
Laura's journey: from a useful contribution to a decisive one
Right from the start, a point of tension emerged. She tells me: “I'm getting good results but I don't feel that my voice is being heard at the right level”. Her contributions are seen as useful but not decisive.
Her first change of direction came when she was preparing an arbitration on a digitalisation issue, at a crossroads in the Group's decision-making process. Instead of defending her own project, she repositioned herself by broadening her perspective to include the Group as a whole and the sector's global challenges. Gradually, her speeches gave more structure to the debates, she was integrated into the upstream discussions and her legitimacy evolved within the Committee.
This enabled her to have two of her strategic initiatives approved by the Committee. A few months later, her appointment to the Executive Committee was confirmed.
Key success factors for individual coaching
There are two reasons for Laura's success.
- A direct link between coaching and real decision-making issues. Each session connected personal development and skills development to the sector's priorities: safety, logistics efficiency, automation, energy transition.
- Targeted learning of intercultural levers of influence. Coaching does not aim to change your personality, but to make your interventions audible in a European context, to adjust your levers of influence and to find your place in a management team.
Coaching helped to align expertise, influence and governance. This is what made Laura's appointment possible - and useful.
