Benefits of Executive Coaching
Alignment
Executive coaching provides leaders with an opportunity to reflect on professional and company goals, and make sure they align with personal values. This alignment provides the executive with the core clarity and strength to be both confident and humble.
Experimentation
Executive coaching is an opportunity for experimentation, thinking through options, risks, and the odds of certain outcomes. Whether the leader is innately an optimist or pessimist, both sides of a decision deserve an opportunity to be expressed. Coaching allows an executive to explore the tension of these paradoxes, which is itself a key leadership attribute.
Executive coaching is a place to practice with new behaviors as well as potential new strategies. This may include building new “muscles” whether that’s being more demanding, heart-based, strategic or pragmatic. Leaders are in some ways expected to be all things, and while remaining open to others’ ideas is essential, a leader needs to find their own “true north” from which to consider pressures from the market, staff, or partners. Paradoxically that clarity helps a leader be more flexible and approachable, and results in clarity which reduces stress and anxiety in the organization. Clarity of alignment helps executives be more agile, pivoting when new information requires a change of course.
Practicing Feedback
Executive coaching is beneficial for preparing to provide feedback: practicing how to appreciate an executive who may have great potential and yet some areas to develop. Or criticizing a manager who has failed to meet expectations. How can that message be delivered in a way that is balanced, genuine, motivating and authentic? Some executives have a habit of the “sandwich method,” praise, criticism, followed by praise. Others have a default of being very direct, because that is what they would want. And others are more moderate in the language that they choose. Executive coaching enables a leader to make a considered choice about which style of feedback fits the situation, rather than operating on habit or default.
Scenario Planning for a New Hire
Sometimes a client needs to hire a new leader, either as a replacement or due to growth, and clients need a forum which does not include the affected employees, in which to consider the role of the new leader, and who would populate that department or group. Some executives are considering navigating a reorganization, perhaps with input from some of their other department heads, and need to reach clarity about the overall purpose of the reorganization and their priorities, yet remain flexible so as to include the opinions of those who will be affected and may know the day-to-day work best.
Communicating Bad News
Some leaders benefit from executive coaching when their clients have been unhappy with their products or services, and it’s time to either reevaluate the skills and training of current staff, devise a way to attract new talent with new skills, or change course and identify a target market which can benefit from their core competencies. Executive coaching provides a forum for leaders to consider these options while still weighing the anticipated outcome and impact. It is nearly impossible for the incumbents to be able to engage in certain of these conversations when they may perceive their on stature or continued employment to be jeopardized.
Other kinds of bad news which benefit from a confidential planning conversation include reporting disappointing results to a manager, a board or employees. Missed revenue targets, the cancellation of a popular new product or service, or a big move can be challenging messages to deliver. A coaching conversation allows executives to clarify the message they are sending, and slow down to consider the potential impact of those messages.
