Clay Kirkland has been consulting and coaching for fifteen years. He is certified both as a Gallup StrengthsFinder Coach and an Emotional Intelligence Coach. In the past decade, he has worked with over three thousand individuals and hundreds of corporations and businesses including, Salesforce, BMW, Sherwin Williams, Valspar, Novarits, Merial, and Elanco Pharmaceuticals, Chick Fila, University of Georgia, and Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta. He resides near Athens, Georgia, with his wife and six children.

Who do you find most rewarding to coach, in terms of their personality or goals?

I like working with high performers who want to maintain their excellence and push themselves beyond where they are. I’m also especially suited to working with executives in need of a “rescue”— maybe they’ve lost the trust of team, or had some moral missteps, or they’re feeling the strain from board members pressuring them out. I also enjoy working with anyone who wants to know more about their potential and learn about their strengths, in general.

What is it your able to do for each of these types?

For the high performers, I aim to provide more efficient and effective ways for them to leverage their influence and maximize their abilities.

For the rescues, I seek to give them the tools to achieve the self-awareness necessary to understand the source of their issues, and then to enable them to formulate a path forward.

For the potential seekers, my goal is to provide them with a framework to know their strengths and then use them to serve others.

At what point do these high performers find themselves when they realize, or maybe not realize, they need some help and find their way to you?

Two primary ways.

One way would be externally-directed. That is, the people above this person—the board, or the president, or some other executive-level person—they might say, “Hey, there’s this V.P. We hired him and he’s really underperforming,” or “He’s lost his team,” or whatever. They’ll come to me knowing my track record. I’m often their last line of defense before they let the person go.

The other is self-directed. That is, the person says, “I got hired for this position,” and “I thought I was ready,” or, “I thought I knew what I was doing,” or, “I thought I could handle the pressure.” They’re feeling internally that they're not performing like they should, or not carrying it like they should, or it’s affecting their life at home. They're feeling it at home. So maybe their work's great, but at home is not.

At this level, companies have invested a ton of money into that person. Contractually, they’re going to have to give them a ton of money from a severance standpoint. I typically find that people on both sides of that fence are willing and ready to do some work to try to help.

And the “rescues”?

Generally, there’s some sort of crisis… and, again, this can be externally or self-directed. Maybe there's a significant disconnect between leadership and team. This can happen because of a clash in styles, personality conflicts, or even a perceived betrayal of trust. Or maybe there’s been an ethical lapse, or reputational damage, or behavior outside the office that affects performance inside the office.

For example, it’s not uncommon for someone to lose the trust of their team, or to see a clash between leadership style and team, to the point where it becomes a crisis. And at this kind of level, a CEO might know this person can’t just be removed, so they have to do something. Often, it’s a matter of teaching that person how to lead differently. I help figure out what that is, and how to go about doing it.

It comes down to change management. You're part of a change. You come in from the outside or you get brought in, and just that integration into company creates crisis for some teams and for some individuals. And so that, that's a pretty common environment where you would need some type of intense, again, crisis coaching, rescue coaching, turnaround coaching, leadership intervention, or whatever.

You’re also a Strengths coach.

I've been a Gallup-Certified Coach for a while now. I’ve actually been strengths coaching since 2007.

How often do people think they have clarity or understanding of their strengths only to find out they don’t? Is that pretty common?

Yeah, super common. The great thing about it is it gives you language for the things that you are probably already doing, maybe subconsciously though, because it’s really about the habits of your brain. There are these deep neurological pathways that we're using over and over and over again that we default to. Your brain's lazy. It wants to default, so it doesn't have to work very hard. This is a matter of being intentional those defaults, which isn’t necessarily the best thing to do in those moments. So, it's an optimization.

The assessment pulls that out. Then we work to see how they can then be applied into other areas of your life.

What kind of things have you seen people achieve once they’ve really gotten this kind of clarity or understanding on their strengths?

They achieve more of their goals in a quicker amount of time. Their leadership skills increase. Their ability to influence others increases. They enjoy their job more. They realize personal satisfaction.

A typical coaching session would start by having them looking at themselves, learning about themselves. Those talents or those strengths might be in conflict with self or others. People have different strengths; they’re are not necessarily “wrong,” just different. It’s about moving from “right vs. wrong” to “different.” People who are leading teams get much better at the understanding of, and the ability to maximize, their team and how to get the best out of them.

Often, these folks are “seekers,” someone who's in a job already, but there's some dissatisfaction or disillusionment and they're seeking something better. Or they're on the front end of their career and they're trying to figure it out. For example, I’m working with someone right now. He’s in an internship in the financial district, but has no idea which direction he wants to go. I'm helping him discover that right now, and helping him go into things with eyes wide open, instead of with his eyes you shut and just hoping he lands something good.

What are some of the biggest challenges that your clients seem to face during the coaching process, and what is it you do to help them sort of get through that?

Some people struggle with the time in between the sessions, meaning they want a little bit more help or they want a little bit more validation, those kinds of things. Maybe they’ve been overdependent in their lives, and now they're having to learn how to, you know, do it on their own. I don't want to create dependent people or clients. My goal is to get them to being independent. I do my job well, they don't need me anymore for their specific issue now. Other issues can come up, but the point is to move them somewhere.

Another challenge that people face is the draw or the pull of what's always been normal for them. Typically, in coaching, you're redefining what's normal and you're basically breaking habits and trying to change them, or create new ones. That’s a lot what a lot of coaching is. Or you're trying to provide an alternate perspective on people or things or self. Again, it's going contrary to what's normal because the brain pulls so far back into normal. It takes a lot of intentional work to break those ritual habits.

And we create metrics or we create experiences for them to actually be reflected back to them, so they can see how things are actually changing.

So how do you track this?

The platform itself—ProAdvisorDrivers—provides an easy way for clients to see their growth. It’s really good for people who need to see and want to see metrics based performance, in the sense of, “Hey, I'm starting with this,” and then, “I want to get to here.”

They actual metrics vary. Like if someone's like trying to find out what they want to do with their life and we figure it out and great. Then are things more like, “I want to hit this goal at work.”

Sometimes, they’re bit more on that leadership front. For example, I worked with a person in a leadership role in a crisis scenario. In that case, we took a 360° approach. He, and every direct report on his team, filled out this 360° evaluation, and did it again and again, so he got to see those changes. You can work on yourself as much as you want to, but you don't always know if it's being reflected or how it's being perceived.

It really depends on which situations that we're in.

What experiences have you had that have shaped your philosophy or approach as a coach, in terms of personal experiences that come back to helping you help other people?

I had a really bad coaching experience in high school sports. It didn't make me want to never be coached. It just made me want to be coached by someone who was actually for me and not for some other agenda. And so that it was kind of one of those boomerangs that really sticks out.

But it was marriage that slung me into Strengths Coaching. I was married in 2001, and then in 2007 I went to Omaha, Nebraska to visit a friend and he asked me and my wife to do this StrengthsFinder assessment. And I had already done it a couple years ago, but I dug it out of my desk and found it and I had my wife take it. It moved our marriage from good to great. And to this day, we still do use strengths in our marriage all the time. And just the light bulbs that we experienced as a couple. Six weeks later. I was getting trained to be a strengths finder assessment coach and I've been doing it ever since.

How has being part of PAC made this possible?

ProAdvisorCoach has also provided me with opportunities to accomplish these goals for other clients who have been passed along to me from another coach, knowing I might be the better fit.