When Is Executive Coaching Needed?
Executive coaching is needed when responsibilities increase due to promotion, company growth, reorganization or a promotion. Each level of promotion involves new challenges, some of them hidden.
Coaching for Promotion
Promotion is a time for celebration, and is a result of strong past leadership performance as well as a track record of establishing trust within the organization. Promotion is an endorsement by your company of your future potential. It naturally involves increased responsibilities, often of number of staff, number of direct report managers, responsibility for budget, and visibility within the organization. This requires a new perspective and a new set of expectations and therefore deliverables. From a leadership perspective, the set of problem solving criteria and decision-making strategies changes, and therefore executive coaching can provide support to optimize the learning and effectiveness of these new leadership opportunities and challenges.
Coaching for promotion raises awareness of problem solving criteria. Often the new role requires a greater emphasis on holding the vision for the department and company. Coaching also involves exploring decision making strategies which are necessarily more inclusive of others in the group and their disparate points of view. This participation and reconciliation of views requires additional skills of exploring and inviting participation — even in the ways that participation will be included! A high stakes decision takes one kind of process, short term execution calls for another kind of decision making and monitoring. New expectations for brainstorming and exploring often calls for attention to cultural values, and especially, inclusion of those who will be responsible to implement and execute. Although those aspects of participation can seem to slow the process, it pays off by ensuring that decisions will stick. Coaching helps leaders identify and articulate their own signature style and deepen their skills, while integrating disparate points of view.
Coaching Due to Company Growth
Some leaders find that their title and role may not have changed but that due to company growth their role may have expanded from that of managing a small group, to a manager of managers ostensibly for the same department. Yet that scale of growth requires that responsibilities have expanded to meet the needs of a growing company. In Information Technology that may include responsibility not only for internal applications, but for encryption, interaction with clients’ or other systems, or frequent hardware and software upgrades. It also requires translating technology into business speak. In marketing, for example, company growth may morph the role from managing the development of collateral material and social media, to participating in setting strategy, interfacing with sales, and hiring or outsourcing writers.
In these cases, executive coaching helps leaders claim their value, enhance their leadership presence, and build a strategic vocabulary to represent the return on investment of those functional advances.
Coaching Due to Reorganization
Some leaders find that due to a reorganization, whether prompted by efficiencies, new product or service offerings, or an acquisition, executive coaching can help assess and integrate the new responsibilities. This expanded role may not even come with a new title, and yet may be an opportunity to develop and showcase new commitment and new skills. Whether explicitly matrixed by project team, customer markets, or product lines, a reorganization often topples previous lines of authority and the structure of staff being managed, as well as goals, incentives and other rewards.
Executive coaching helps these leaders quietly assume more responsibility, explore and experiment with scenario planning, identify ways to extend support through expanding a professional network, and develop essential influence skills. Diplomatic self-promotion is nuanced yet essential at this time, and executive coaching provides a confidential forum for exploring approaches.
Coaching for Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs begin a company based on previous expertise or an innovative service offering or product offering. Leaders who have previously worked in large companies with extensive resources and staff support may be surprised at the challenge of being responsible for all functional aspects. Typical key challenges are setting priorities when everything seems essential and urgent, and attracting and hiring the right leaders in a context of excitement, opportunity, risk and uncertainty.
Executive coaching helps entrepreneurs understand their leadership strengths, hire for qualities that need to be provided or augmented, and articulate the value proposition to potential new talent. By having an opportunity to reflect on values and goals, executive coaching provides entrepreneurs with a leadership development opportunity. Once you are a leader, especially an entrepreneur, there are no days off from being the leaders others rely on. For that reason, formulating resilience and renewal strategies are necessary to maintain the high energy required in an urgent entrepreneurial environment.
