Executive coaching, Vietnam and APAC
At senior levels, leadership is a discipline of its own. In Vietnam and across APAC it carries a particular weight: organisations growing faster than their leadership benches, global expectations meeting local reality, careers built across cultures. I work confidentially with the executives carrying that weight, and with their leadership teams and cohorts.
Gary Malcolm. ICF Master Certified Coach. Leading a multinational business in Vietnam while coaching senior leaders across Vietnam and APAC.
Where the work begins
In a coaching practice built across many of the region’s leading organisations, and years of leading businesses alongside it, the same situations recur. These are the conversations leaders actually bring:
Restructuring, new ownership, a market that has moved: transformation that has to land while this year’s number is still delivered.
Decisions are made outside the market, and relationships matter as much as expertise. Influence has to be built across regional and global teams.
Moving from leading a function to leading the business: accountable to your own team and to the executive leadership team at the same time.
Shifting from operational execution to shaping direction: contributing ideas to the enterprise rather than simply delivering the regional plan.
Helping regional and global stakeholders square ambitious growth expectations with the commercial and organisational realities of the market.
A team of capable individuals that must become stronger than the sum of its members.
Preparing a successor, stepping into a role, or handing one over: consequential on either side of the handover.
Developing the judgement, communication and presence expected of senior leaders, without it becoming a performance.
The daily tension of growth markets: ambitious numbers and the people who deliver them, led well at the same time.
Relevance
That order has one practical consequence for you. We start where the work is, rather than after you have explained your world to me, and when we discuss a decision I have made the same kind of decision myself.
Gary Malcolm, ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC)
The Master Certified Coach credential is the highest level of individual coaching credential awarded by the International Coaching Federation.
Verify my MCC credential with the International Coaching FederationServices
As a business leader I bought coaching, training and consulting for years, and watched good budgets go to the wrong one. Part of my job now is telling you which approach fits, including when the answer is none of them.
One-to-one
Executive coaching is a confidential one-to-one working partnership between a senior leader and a coach. It creates room to think rigorously about matters that are hard to examine inside your own organisation: an expanded remit, a difficult stakeholder map, a performance expectation, a shift in what the role requires of you.
Intact leadership teams
Team coaching works with an intact leadership team, over time, on how it functions as one unit. The team examines how it aligns, decides, holds accountability and handles conflict, in service of the results it is collectively responsible for. The coach works with the team as a system, not as a set of individuals.
Cohorts and peer groups
Group coaching brings together leaders who share a developmental context but do not run one operation together: a high-potential cohort, a set of new managers, participants in a leadership programme. Each member works on their own leadership within a structured group process, and the group itself becomes part of the method.
Evidence
Most executive coaches study leadership and then coach leaders. I did it the other way round. I led people first, in environments where getting it wrong carried real consequences. The formal study came afterwards, the coaching qualifications later still, and I have gone on leading organisations throughout. That order is where the judgement comes from.
I established my first business in Vietnam in 2004 and lead a multinational business here today: clients, people, revenue and the decisions that come with running an organisation between global strategy and local reality. I understand senior leadership because I am still doing it.
I hold the Master Certified Coach credential, the highest awarded by the International Coaching Federation. It is granted on assessed coaching hours, accredited training and recorded sessions examined against the ICF Core Competencies.
I develop business and executive coaches across Vietnam and APAC and support them toward ICF accreditation. Other coaches learn the craft partly through my judgement of it.
Working together
Coaching, done properly, is disciplined. We contract explicitly: what we are working on, how confidentiality operates, what your organisation will and will not hear, and how we will judge whether the work is succeeding.
Inside that structure, the work is direct. My questions are shaped by two disciplines that rarely sit in one practitioner: years of running businesses, and years of teaching and assessing coaching itself. The standard I hold myself to in a session is the same one I hold other coaches to when I develop them. You will not get a framework lecture, and you will not get an echo chamber.
And it ends. Coaching should build your capability, not your dependence on a coach. We finish when the contracted work is done.
Questions
An introductory conversation is confidential and without obligation. Bring a real situation. You will leave with my honest read on whether coaching is the right approach for it, and whether I am the right coach. I have run businesses; I know the difference between a useful meeting and a sales pitch.