As a professional executive coach, I'm often asked about the advantages of working with an executive coach. In my experience, executive coaching can be a powerful tool for helping leaders and teams to reach their full potential and achieve their development goals. Executive coaching is a comprehensive program that helps individuals and teams to increase their self-awareness, set business objectives, and develop as leaders and influencers. It includes a combination of training, teaching, facilitation, mediation, and positive psychology.
By meeting personally with the top managers or leaders of an organization (such as a director, vice president, president, or senior management member), the executive coach provides a safe, structured, and reliable environment in which to offer support. Growing companies often work with executive coaches to improve the skills of their leadership teams. An executive coach is like an advisor who promotes leadership training and growth in a company's teams or in its aspiring leaders. Many managers now take classes to develop their own training skills, so that they can help their employees improve their performance, get promoted, and become leadership roles. The student could be recently promoted (transition training), face a series of challenges (usually related to employee relationships), or be preparing for more important functions. A successful executive coaching campaign can turn a mediocre company into a high-performing company that can attract the best talent in the future, thus creating a virtuous circle. What's even more concerning is when an executive's problems stem from undetected or ignored psychological difficulties; coaching can actually make a bad situation worse.
I think that in an alarming number of situations, executive coaches who lack rigorous psychological training do more harm than good. So when a potential client recently asked me how working with an executive coach would benefit them, it was a good opportunity to reflect on the positive results of coaching. Executive team coaches will train leaders on how to lead their teams and teams on how to be better employees. While there are many variations, executive coaching usually includes a series of phases, starting with admission, evaluation, goal setting, and development planning. Nowadays, most companies hire executive coaches as a way to invest in their top executives and in their high potentials. At some point in your managerial career, you may have the opportunity to consider hiring an executive coach.
An executive coach is a qualified professional who works with people (usually executives but often high-potential employees) to help them become aware of themselves, clarify their goals, achieve their development objectives, unlock their potential and act as a sounding board.
