Developing leaders requires support and guidance. In the face of constant change, our coaches help leaders accelerate their path to higher levels of performance. Each coaching engagement is highly individualized and also designed to equip leaders to apply their full capabilities to promote organizational change and solve organizational challenges.

Our coaching philosophy is grounded in five principles that help your leaders to develop and achieve their potential.

Coaching is an investment based on a positive belief in human potential – it is not a tool for fixing people. Coaching works only when the person being coached is willing and able to be in a coaching relationship. If needed, PFC can work with you to create the right conditions necessary to begin a productive coaching engagement.

PFC’s coaches help leaders increase self-awareness and insight by collecting objective feedback from others, asking powerful questions and providing different perspectives for leaders to consider.

It is critical to have alignment on three levels. The first is personal alignment between a leader’s own values, strengths and goals. This type of heart-and-mind alignment is key to personalizing a development journey that leads to lasting behavioral change. Second, success often depends on well-aligned expectations between an organization and leader about the outputs from the coaching engagement. The third level of alignment is between a leader and her own team.

While coaching is a partnership – most commonly between the coach, coaching client, the coaching client's manager and HR – it is essential for the coaching client to own and drive the coaching process.

Finding the right fit between a leader and her coach is critical. Through our diverse cohort of executive coaches, PFC can match you with a coach who can earn your leader’s trust and offer relevant expertise for helping them achieve their goals.

As a result of acquisitions of overseas local companies and steadily expanding the scope of local business, half of the group's total employees today are non-Japanese based outside of Japan. This drives the need for a larger cohort of Japanese expatriates who can lead local teams effectively and contribute to the business while also maintaining alignment with the global strategy.

While some Japanese companies separate their domestic and overseas operations and staff completely, Tokio Marine’s management saw an opportunity to create a strategic advantage for their business by committing to selecting and training the right person for the right job, regardless of nationality, gender, culture, or other factors – and with no distinction made between domestic and overseas operations.

Tokio Marine engaged us to provide executive coaching during Japanese expats’ first six months abroad to ensure expats established themselves as effective leaders from the start of their overseas assignments. Our coaches helped them adapt to their local teams and business environments without losing sight of their own authentic leadership styles and identities. Through the coaching engagements, Tokio Marine executives developed awareness and insights about how their local teams perceived them, learned how to think about where and why to adapt their leadership styles to fit local culture, built rapport with local team members, and adapted a wider range inclusive leadership strategies.

Japanese expats successfully adapted to their local business environments. In particular, executives reported that coaching helped them avoid the common pitfall of pressuring the local teams to adapt a Japanese approach to doing business. Instead, they now extract the essential elements of the Japanese headquarters' way of doing things, think about how to adapt it for the local businesses they run, and lead accordingly.​

Our client, a Japanese general manager at a European company in Japan, had a style of leadership that enabled him to deliver outstanding performance, create a sterling reputation and solid track record in Japan. The same style, however, led his colleagues abroad to view him as a weak leader with limited influence to execute the global strategy in Japan. This affected the efficiency of the Japanese business and also posed a risk to the general manager’s global career ambitions.

Through his work with a PFC executive coach, the general manager developed insights about what led to his global colleagues’ unfavorable perceptions of his leadership effectiveness. Recognizing his communication style during global leadership meetings was a factor, he and his coach developed strategies for building his own authentic Western-style executive presence and ability to style switch when communicating with stakeholders at the company’s global headquarters.

After six months of work, our client regained the confidence of his global counterparts and established a new reputation as a savvy and influential member of the global leadership team. He was later promoted to the company’s board of directors.

Our client’s long-time CEO had chosen the COO as his successor. The decision was based on the COO’s impeccable track record of achievements and the deep loyalty he inspired from employees. Many employees believed that the COO was the only sensible candidate for the job. However, shortly after the COO was formally named as the successor, the CEO began to express doubts about his decision because the COO’s leadership style differed greatly from his own. As concerns festered, the relationship between the two executives deteriorated.

Our executive coach worked together as well as one-on-one with both executives to discover the root causes of their conflict and help them find their own path forward to a successful leadership transition. In parallel, our coach also worked directly with other members of our client’s leadership team to ensure the quality of the relationships across the C-suite would contribute to a smooth succession.

The outgoing CEO recognized that his successor’s leadership style, while different from his own, would give the organization the leadership needed to sustain its strong business results. And the COO learned how to develop aspects of his leadership style in preparation for taking on his new role. The transition went smoothly, and employees viewed the new CEO’s leadership style to be a natural fit for the new company vision.