CEOs and coaches

Did you know that only a minority of CEOs are coached?

As I was looking through my notes, I found an article about coaching for CEOs.

I figured this is something you might find interesting too.

The first surprising data is that only a third of the CEOs declared being coached. For the most part, it was their initiative, not following a recommendation from their chairpersons.

I guess that the other two-thirds have advisors to go to.
Still, I found this number surprisingly low.

My second takeaway was top skills CEOs actively work on:

Delegation and conflict management.

Conflict management particularly stands out because it's the number one skill CEOs believe they need to develop.

This leads us to my third takeaway:

Compassion, persuasion, and interpersonal skills all live at the bottom of these lists.

That raises two questions.

1) How can one get better at conflict management without heavily focusing on improving their compassion and persuasion skills?

2) Are these skills ranking so low because they sound weak, vague, or abilities a seasoned CEO should already possess?

This study's a couple of years old now.

Hopefully, more executives are open to coaching now, including so-called soft skills, which are indispensable to being a good leader.