Coach's MO: A Lone Ranger-style coach who rides in, troubleshoots, and gets out of town fast. Otazo uses tools like 360-degree feedback as well as personal observation of your management style to help you make small changes that get big results.

"It's not a performance issue," says Padmasree Warrior. "I know that's why coaches are often used. I'm already considered to have very high potential. To me, that's all the more reason to get a coach."

The Challenge: Warrior needs to sharpen her communication skills. On this particular afternoon, she's meeting behind closed doors with Karen Otazo. Otazo has brought in Burt Goodman, an acting coach, to help with today's lesson: how to act like a senior executive. They take turns drilling Warrior.

"Now say it again," says Goodman, as he patiently directs Warrior on how to bark an order. "Try making it sound angry this time."

She clears her throat and looks straight ahead:

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall ... "

The Game Plan: Otazo often employs 360-degree feedback, where she interviews everyone -- boss, subordinates, colleagues, and customers -- on your performance. She then paints a complete picture of how you're perceived in your organization, so that you can decide together on where you need to improve.

Agreeing to submit to an unvarnished 360-degree review requires a level of humility that's not always easy to swallow. How many of us relish knowing exactly what everyone else thinks of us? But such a method can bring to light some powerful insights.

One of the surprises for Warrior was the general perception that she lacked the authority to perform in an executive role. Otazo believes that this perception was based on superficial but significant personality traits: Warrior was soft-spoken; she suppressed her natural enthusiasm; she avoided the spotlight.

"Padmasree's voice had precision, but not power," says Otazo. "She's tough, but she didn't appear tough enough for an executive role."

The Postmortem: Otazo encouraged Warrior to seek out opportunities to interact with senior executives, and to role play her conversations with them in advance. She drilled Warrior endlessly, coaching her to speak with authority at meetings and articulate her views concisely. "For Padmasree, it was an issue of turning up the energy," Otazo says. "For many others, it may be turning it down."

Once you've hired a coach, how long does it take before you see real change? Otazo doesn't fool around: if you hire her, you'll become a better manager within a couple of days or she'll say good-bye. She suggests the same rule of thumb for any manager, working with any coach. "There has to be movement," she says. "Otherwise, we're both wasting our time."

Coordinates: Karen Otazo, klotazo@aol.com

Sidebar: My Enemy, My Coach

A senior manager at a lumber company had an experience last year that's not uncommon: he walked into his office one morning and found a coach waiting for him -- without his knowledge or consent. As soon as The Coach left for the day, the manager called a headhunter and started looking for a new job.

If you show up for work one day and find that a coach has crashed your office, you may have just gotten the not-so-subtle signal that it's time to start polishing your résumé. Here are three ways to protect yourself, direct from coaches we trust:

Try for complete confidentiality between The Coach and yourself. That means all conversations, all counseling, are private and inviolate. Your boss should be able to evaluate your progress based on external results, not on a report card from your coach.

If you can't get complete confidentiality, ask for permission to review The Coach 's reports on your progress. "Written documentation has a great deal of power," warns executive coach Karen Otazo. "Personality profiles are especially dangerous. They're often used to assess a manager's promotability, when really they're just a one-time snapshot." Otazo won't work with a company unless the manager has the right to review and edit, within reason, her written assessments.

Insist on measurable goals. To ensure that your work with a coach doesn't become an exercise in out-coaching, tie everything to a business benefit. By itself, "improve time-management skills" has no measurable benefit. But it's a legitimate way to achieve a critical goal: "meet project deadlines."