- 19 - How have your previous roles and experiences, particularly in HR, informed your current work? The remit of a Head of HR can be broad, so one starts to develop different muscles throughout the years. Personally, I have been fascinated by impactful leadership interventions. So, it is no surprise that the transition topic – which is one of my key focus areas as an executive coach – started to emerge early on. Having lived and successfully worked in five countries across six sectors and working with C-level leaders throughout, has helped me to walk the walk for many of my clients as an executive coach. When did you decide it was time to branch into executive coaching, and why? After spending 26 years in large MNCs and having had the privilege to coach many senior leaders and CEOs in various regional and global organisations, I felt ready to transition into full-time coaching. My ‘why’ is simple: there are simply too many executives failing during their career transition, although there are proven ways to de-risk and accelerate those transitions. So my key focus as a coach is to help executives and their leadership teams accelerate and successfully transition into new roles and maximise their leadership impact. My passion lies in supporting executives during critical transitions. I am inspired by their courage to deliver value to their organisation whilst staying true to their authentic selves. Next to being a successful corporate leader and an executive coach, you are also an international bestselling author. Tell us more about that and how the idea of writing a book came about. The idea of writing a book came to me about ten years ago, at the same time when I started to work as a professional coach next to my HR role. I thought it would be a year-long project, at maximum. Little did I know that it would take me seven years from start to finish to publish my book. In between, there were three jobs with two organisations in three countries, and about a year after starting to write my book, our son was born. As you can see, life can get in the way – and thoroughly researching, writing and publishing a book on thought leadership can take much longer than initially expected. Please tell us more about your book and what it covers. My book is titled ‘Mastering Executive Transitions - The Definitive Guide’ and it is published by New Degree Press in New York City. My publisher and I were both surprised when the book was immediately a #1 new release on Amazon, before becoming a national and then international bestseller. Next to publishing the actual book, I also published the digital companion, which is the accompanying workbook. The workbook helps executives in transition, and coaches who work with executives in transition, to utilise the proven Double Diamond Framework© of Executive Transitions in a very practical and guided way. Our magazine has a deep focus on CEOs. How would a CEO benefit from transition coaching? First off, allow me to start with a recent study by Egon Zehnder that found that 70% of CEOs are either underwhelmed by their onboarding process or have had no structured onboarding process at all – so what would probably please about 99% of the employee population in a company is nowhere nearly sufficient for CEO-level onboarding. A study from the Aberdeen Group looked into the onboarding processes of 282 organisations. They found that the difference between organisations that get onboarding right and the laggard companies (bottom 30%) is significant. Best-in-class companies (top 20%) were able to distinguish themselves across key performance criteria: THE CEO INTERVIEW
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