What is Executive Coaching?
Executive coaching provides one-on-one support, which is especially relevant when the leadership role is expanding through company growth, promotion or reorganization. Executive coaching also supports entrepreneurs, who are typically juggling product or service development, along with sales and staffing and general management.
Frequently when leaders are promoted, their manager is a champion, but may not have the skills or the time to provide leadership development support. After all, the promotion often happened due to expanding business growth, so it’s natural that the manager would have other priorities, yet be invested in the growth and success of leaders who work for them.
At its core, executive coaching is a structured yet flexible forum for a leader to be reflective about past successes, strengths and qualities that have resulted in their success to date. Very often that success has come from an internal drive and motivation, as well as an achievement drive, resulting in numerous promotions.
At some point, the past skills form a foundation from which to expand and experiment with the development of new skills. Leadership requires focus, decisiveness and vision yet paradoxically in today’s business climate, also calls for inclusion and collaboration and curiosity. That curiosity, which can reasonably called “not knowing,” is a surprising source of innovation and new perspective. Because of a strong work ethic and sense of accountability, many leaders are challenged by how to share authority while retaining accountability. Coaching helps with that as well.
The Process of Working with an Executive Coach
The process of working with a coach begins with clear goals and outcomes. Leaders may already know the growth edge that they want to work on, or may request that their own manager participate in highlighting those skills most appropriate for the company context and strategy and to advance the client’s competence. Some leaders find a set of questions about outcomes to be helpful in articulating the general desire for a new level of responsibility or level of leadership learning.
Assessments
Executive coaching also may involve the use of assessments, to help leaders see themselves as if from a balcony, with some distance and objectivity, before exploring the impact of their style on others. Some executives regard this clear articulation as a helpful branding metaphor, for others it is a question of articulating values, and for others, it is a yearning to explore parts of themselves that may have been fallow due to circumstances or previous constraints imposed on a prior job.
Some engagements involve a 360, that is, feedback from managers, peers, staff members and even clients, to help the executive have data about their impact on others, and how they are seen. This data may be collected by individual interviews, or through a questionnaire, or both.
Some of the assessments may include a personality inventory such as Myers-Briggs, a Team assessment to ensure leaders are optimizing their teams and their team meetings.
Executive Coaching vs. Mentoring or Consulting
Executive coaching is different from mentoring or consulting. Mentoring often implies a functional expertise, say finance, which is being shared with another finance leader or even with a department head who wants to deepen that skill. This is different from the reflective element of coaching, which is more about impact, values and leadership style than functional skill.
Consulting is also different from coaching, often involving an assessment of the business, market, industry or financial future or investor appeal, along with recommendations for implementing suggested next steps. By contrast, in a coaching engagement, executives are drawing on their own past experience, education, wisdom, available resources, and values, and being prompted to synthesize disparate perspectives to create next steps.
What you get out of Executive Coaching
Executive coaching is an opportunity to be bold, to push out of known patterns and discover new approaches to decision making, influence, and managing. It is a forum for leaders to discover meaningful work, and bring a spotlight to those aspects which are more fulfilling, make more of a difference in the world.
When we are aligned with values and in a corporate culture which fosters optimizing contribution, then everybody wins: the leader, the department, the employees and the company. And employees bring that sense of fulfilment home with them. Bringing this lens of contribution to coaching enhances job satisfaction as well as productive outcomes.
Coaching Structure
Typically the structure of the engagement is to identify outcomes and evidence of those outcomes, and then schedule regular meetings every other week for six months. At that time, and often midway through that time, a review is held to determine which goals had been reached, which are still in development, and what new demands the business climate may have created which altered priorities. Coaching may then continue at that pace, may be established as a monthly session, or may conclude until the next promotion.
