Executive coaching can be the conduit to empower and guide you and others to attain higher levels of profit and productivity.
There's no time, place or patience for mediocrity in business. As benchmarks are raised, so too is the blood pressure of people in organisations when faced with possible threats to their company's profile, profit, productivity and staff.
But there's a whole lot more to keeping a company afloat and its people happy than focussing on potential issues. It's also about how you can put the wind in the sails of your people, or risk being an anchor on their tails.
A skilled executive coach acts as a trusted external thinking partner and outside confidante, who suspends judgement, provides challenging conversations, questions, options and enables people to discover their potential while having some salient feedback.
It's upfront, honest, sometimes causing discomfort, but designed to get the person to a whole new way of thinking and/or behaving.
Executive coaching requires five things to be valuable or it can be a waste of time, money and resources, as well as, potentially discouraging someone from experiencing its value at another time.
- It requires a mutual agreement that both parties feel comfortable working with each other.
- It requires an agreement that an issue, concern or problem exists and that the coachee is comfortable with being coached.
- It is a series of confidential discussions - now and in the future enabling that person to trust and fully engage in the process without the fear of recrimination, intimidation or embarrassment at any level.
- The coachee must be willing to listen, respond and participate and importantly demonstrate, with evidence, they are trying to implement new strategies and ideas and will be open to further comment without being defensive.
- Both parties must nominate at the earliest possible time if they feel the process may not be working and that another course of action or intervention may be necessary.
A common challenge many people face in being a coach is to withstand the temptation to give advice by telling the other party what they should/could do without allowing that person to find the best case scenario themselves.
Coaches who are more direct, quick thinking and can "see" exactly what is needed through their own experiences or clear thinking, and therefore want to provide a solution, are indeed doing the coachee a disservice because;
- the person is no better off in the long run to learn and be confident to make decisions themselves, and
- it compromises the whole process by taking a short cut to the answer that could well be a different one than the coachee would have found.
While the coach wants to help the coachee, the role of the executive coach is to discover options and paint a compelling vision for people to understand the unintended consequences of their actions and find a better result.
If considering whether executive coaching is right for you and your company, consider the intelligent Vietnamese saying
"When we look in the mirror we see ourselves,
When we look in the past, we see the future"
If you don't like what's happened in the past or it is no longer good enough, and what you see in the mirror does not reflect what others see, take a smart move and attain higher levels of profit and productivity through executive coaching.