What is Executive Coaching?

Executive coaching (a close relative of leadership coaching) is concerned with helping organizational leaders maximize personal performance or produce growth and change in their organizations. It’s an interactive relationship where the coach uses advanced listening and asking skills to elicit goals, strategies and solutions from clients. The coaching process is unique: instead of focusing on offering expert advise (consulting), or speaking from the wisdom of broad experience (mentoring), the coaching process maximizes buy-in and personal responsibility by acknowledging you as the foremost expert on your company and your life. The executive coaching relationship is designed to maximize the abilities of a leader, and provides the professional tools, advocacy and support needed to do so.

Coaches move beyond surface conversation by listening on an entirely different level. They use assessments, tools and sophisticated conversational techniques to help you identify the core leadership or corporate issues you face, and help you design creative strategies to purposefully address them. Coaching exercises can help you create bold, new ideas, think new thoughts, and develop actionable strategies to pursue them. And we provide structured follow-up to keep you aligned with those important objectives instead of getting mired in the urgent.

Who Benefits from a Coach?

Coaching is not about fixing people. It’s about taking good leaders and making them great, and helping great leaders access and utilize their full abilities. In short, coaching is for people who want to accomplish more, do it better, and strengthen their people in the process. Coaching can be beneficial to any organizational leader who is internally motivated to grow or change. Want to learn more about how coaching works? To read some great coaching articles, click here.

Leadership for the 21st Century

According to Warren Bennis, “Coaching will become the model for leaders in the future…” Voices like Jack Welch of GE, Harvard Business Review and others have touted the future of coaching. And over and over, organizations that have embraced it have discovered it has a high return on investment, increases employee satisfaction, raises performance and lowers turnover. To see more of the research, click here.  If you’d like to find out what coaching can do for your organization, contact me today.