The Accidental Coach: Barbara Burgess on Real-World Leadership Development

Barbara Burgess will be the first to tell you she never planned on becoming a coach. “If you told me I was going to be a coach 10 years ago, I would have told you no way, I’m not interested.” And yet, here she is: decades of executive experience behind her, with a coaching practice rooted in executive experience, empowerment, and practicality.

There are few areas of business that Barbara’s career hasn’t touched. She started in sales at Nestle Foods, moved into marketing, and eventually landed in operations as a COO, a position where both finance and HR both reported to her.

Today, that breadth of experience serves as the foundation of her practice. Coaching emerged naturally from her tenure in the C-suite, driven by a desire for contribution. “Coaching, for me, is about contributing to humans,” she explains. Her work focuses on the intersection of performance and fulfillment: helping leaders enjoy their work while becoming better at it, and the results show up across the entire organization.

Empowered leaders bring out the best in their teams. As she puts it, “to be a really great leader, you have to be able to have people under you that are better than you.”

The Life Story Exercise: Understanding through Storytelling

Ask Barbara about her coaching approach and she gives you a metaphor.

She explains, “I almost want to imagine that I’m living in a 3D movie that is their life. I want to be able to picture what their life is like – see, taste, touch, smell, what’s hard, what’s easy, who’s problematic, where their gifts are.”

Before she starts solving anything, she needs to understand the person she’s sitting across from as a full human being. To do that, she uses a life story exercise, a structured way of inviting clients to share the experiences, challenges, and turning points that shaped who they are today. Barbara had been using this exercise prior to joining Ariel, but it’s also a key component of how we coach.

The exercise does two things at once:

• It builds trust and safety. Some clients arrive ready to be vulnerable. For others, it takes multiple sessions to get to a place where they’re “truly acknowledging their weak spots.” Barbara lets people come at it in whatever way they need to. Her job is to “shift around them.”
• It informs their coaching relationship. Once themes emerge from the life story, the tactical work “is informed by the core issues.”

She describes digging through questions “until I feel like I have a good sense of it, because I don’t want to walk into a coaching session and be helping them come to solutions that don’t actually solve the core issues.”

From Difficult Executive to Legacy Builder

One example of using this life story exercise while coaching was with a senior sales executive. This particular client was high up in the organization, carried a lot of power, and had a reputation for “bad behavior.” 

The leader was widely perceived as arrogant. But, in their coaching sessions, Barbara describes him as honest, vulnerable, and deeply self-reflective. “He ended up being one of the more coachable people I’ve worked with.” She recalls. Her initial goal was modest, as she recalls, “I just hoped we could stop the bad behavior.”

The leader was a strong driver of revenue, which was how he had ascended in the organization. But, he had extremely underdeveloped people’s skills. He didn’t know how to empower or motivate his team. During his executive coaching engagement with Barbara, he began to change how he showed up with his peers, with his team, and with the organization at large.

Over time, he evolved from an isolated problem at the senior level into someone who created legacy by developing the people beneath him. The organization benefited not just because the bad behavior stopped, but because he began to nurture new leaders and teammates.

About Barbara Burgess

Barbara Burgess is a corporate consultant, executive coach, program developer, trainer, and specialist in the areas of transformational leadership, transformative education, social intelligence, emotional intelligence, and employee empowerment. She describes herself as, “a funny combination of super visionary and really darn practical.”

In her 25+ year career, she has worked in industries including non-profit, healthcare, industrial supplies, association management, technology, financial services, and consumer goods.