Why you need a Business Coach, How to Choose one, and How to get the most from Coaching?
This article explains how individual Leaders as well as organizations can benefit by having a Coach, how to go about choosing the right Coach, and steps to make a Coaching intervention successful.
It is well established that all individuals and all businesses can benefit from Coaching, at any stage of their journey. Coaches help you see things from a different perspective, guide you towards stronger decision-making, and provide objective support in the midst of change.
“There’s no question that future leaders will need constant coaching,” notes Ram Charan, author of Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty (McGraw-Hill, 2008). “As the business environment becomes more complex, they will increasingly turn to coaches for help in understanding how to act.”
All leaders face challenges and roadblocks such as managing direct reports effectively, being able to prioritize multiple conflicting responsibilities, or the desire to keep growing in an organization. Executive coaches can help address the unique roadblocks and obstacles individual leaders may be facing.
How can executive coaching help?
Individuals / Leaders can benefit from Coaching in the following ways:
When Leaders are involved in something, day in, day out, it’s impossible to be objective or to see things from a different or clear perspective. It’s easy to do the same things, to fall into bad habits, to fear real change. A Coach helps you see your business with fresh eyes, to support you with new challenges, and to guide you towards stronger decision-making. Specifically, a Coach can help in the following ways :
- Increase Confidence
The goal of an executive coach is to bring out the best in a leader. If a leader lacks confidence in his or her abilities, the Coach can help identify strengths and capabilities, and also help leaders leverage those strengths. Many Leaders suffer from self-doubt, blind-spots, or deep-rooted beliefs about themselves. The key to growth is to face these obstacles head-on, which a Coach can help with.
2. Establish Trust; Build Effective Teams and Relationships
Executive coaches can help leaders build trust between themselves and their direct reports, and also learn how to trust their team. With trust in place, the absence of proper delegation and a tendency to micromanage the team can be overcome. Likewise, an executive coach can help a leader improve internal relationships with colleagues and team members that have different personalities, perspectives, and work methods.
3. Take Decisions and Achieve Goals
A Coach can help you determine why you are finding it hard to make certain decisions. They can also guide you towards putting systems in place for logical decision-making. Working with an executive coach can help translate an overall vision into smaller, obtainable steps as well as help identify what resources a leader will need to bring his or her vision to life.
4. Gain a Clear Outside Perspective
Working with an executive coach helps remove the blinders that leaders may have regarding how they communicate, come across to their direct reports, view their own skills and capabilities, and perceive their organization’s challenges. An executive coach can pinpoint what behaviors a leader needs to change.
5. Get Continuous Support and an Accountability partner
Executive coaches provide support and resources while making sure a leader stays on track. This comes while formulating goals and accomplishing them, revising them as needed, finding ways to keep working towards those goals even when things go sideways, as well as monitoring progress towards goals. A Coach serves as a sounding board as well as an Accountability partner, who shows the mirror and asks the right questions to ensure that promises are kept.
Typical situations in which Coaching can help a business include:
- Developing leaders / senior management:
The senior management team has a direct influence on everything from performance to culture to morale. If they aren’t managing to the best of their ability, or have serious gaps in their skills and knowledge, you’ll end up with unhappy employees and a high turnover rate.
2. Improving employee morale:
High employee morale is vital to success in business. Poor morale often comes from problems with senior management and results in lowered productivity, negative workplace culture, and low retention.
3. Overcoming Stagnation:
If your business performance has plateaued for a while, it’s crucial that to take action, to arrest a decline. Coaching creates a bias for action.
4. Providing direction:
In business, you need clear goals to propel your company forward. A Coach can provide clarity and bring focus on things that matter
5. Addressing trouble at the top:
Lack of cohesion within your senior management team will filter through the entire organization. It can have a detrimental impact on your company culture, staff retention, and, ultimately, your bottom line.
Now that you understand that coaching can be impactful, how do you go about selecting the right Coach?
The important criteria you should consider when selecting the most appropriate Executive Coach
1. Training, background, and experience. What is their core expertise, what credentials do they carry, what is their thought leadership, and their view on Executive coaching?
What does their learning journey look like, have they kept their knowledge up to date, and are they continuously looking for development opportunities in order to best serve you as a client?
2. Do they have the right fit? Are they engaged, do they possess good listening skills, what is their coaching style, do they offer rigor and flexibility at the same time, what is their style of coaching? Could you imagine working with that individual very closely for an extended period of time?
3. What is their track record? In developing the required skills or mindsets in your Leaders including change management, influencing stakeholders, developing emotional intelligence etc.
4. Understanding of complex issues including business understanding and sector/industry experience
5. What about ethics and confidentiality, how will this be ensured?
6. Outcomes: Will there be clear, measurable, and agreed with outcomes from the engagement? How will the outcomes be measured and evaluated?
Willingness to be coached and a good fit is two of the key ingredients for a successful coaching relationship. This was reinforced in a January 2009 Harvard Business Review survey, in which researchers queried 140 top coaches about what companies should look for when hiring a coach.
According to the HBR article, there are two basic hiring rules:
- Ensure executives are ready and willing to be coached
2. Allow them to choose the coach
How to make the Coaching intervention effective?
Once you’ve retained a coach to work with members of your senior team, what can you do to help people get the most out of the experience? Of course, the success of the engagement rests largely on the coach’s skill and the executive’s willingness to learn and grow. But the sponsor (whether a CEO, an HR leader, or another senior executive), also plays a vital role.
Ways for an organization to maximize the effectiveness of a Coaching intervention :
1. Provide access to the Coach
The better a coach understands the organization, its history, values, leadership models, and current challenges, the more effective their feedback will be. A window into the client’s conversations with co-workers allows coaches to see first hand how the executive relates to and is perceived by different groups, enabling them to better support the executive and the organization.
2. Reinforce credibility
You’ve brought in a coach because you believe in their skills and integrity. Although it is ultimately up to the coach to win the organization’s trust, you can make it clear through your words and actions that you are treating them as a true partner for the course of the engagement.
3. Set clear expectations
No matter how good the coach is, setting clear expectations (both with the Coach as well as other stakeholders/clients) is key.
4. Keep stakeholders from meddling
If coaches are evaluating coachees in order to determine the best opportunities for their development, some stakeholders may attempt to influence the process inappropriately. Sponsors can help by setting clear boundaries and asking executives not to interfere with or attempt to manipulate coaches’ evaluations.
5. Avoid power struggles
Although close relationships between coaches and their clients are in everyone’s best interests, you do need to be cautious when navigating the power dynamics that can emerge between different internal stakeholders. The sponsor should avoid creating the perception that the coach has a special status. While introducing the coach as a credible partner is important, it’s also important to avoid over-promoting the coach in a way that makes people feel threatened.
Here is how individuals can get the most out of their executive coaching experience
Stepping into any leadership position takes courage, grit, motivation, and emotional intelligence. Executive coaching can make a huge difference in the trajectory of your career if you embrace it and put in the hard work to stay humble and challenge yourself to improve, while also seeking out new mentors and learning opportunities.
1. Stay open to feedback from your coach and others. Getting the most out of coaching starts with an open mind and an honest self-appraisal of your strengths and vulnerabilities, leadership style, personality traits, and potential challenges. An executive coach can help you become more self-aware, identify blind spots and potential detailers, which in turn improves your decision-making, communication, and ability to effectively lead others.
2. Be ready to think outside your comfort zone. Having too narrow a focus can limit your perspective as well as potential opportunities. A great coach will help you to see the bigger picture and think outside your comfort zone. This may include stretching in new areas, seeking out new opportunities for professional growth or talking openly with peers or mentors to look at a particular challenge from a different angle.
3. Build your goals around your strengths. While everyone has development areas to work on, it’s important to build your goals around your strengths first. An executive coach can help you to develop a framework for your goals that acts as a guiding light to keep you focused and on-track, while also developing your vision for where you want to go.
4. Don’t let your strengths play as weaknesses. Often strengths could also act as weaknesses, especially in situations when Leaders take on more work than they should. A coach can help the Leader learn to set realistic boundaries and overcome self-doubt.
5. Take action to achieve results, while creating balance. At the end of the day, the best leaders are those who are able to clearly communicate their vision, co-create a plan with their team, and execute it successfully, while maintaining balance. In order to get the most out of coaching, you need to create both time and space in your life to learn and grow beyond where you are today.
Conclusion
Executive coaching has the power to transform your business and your leadership. At its core, it’s all about listening, active support, and gentle guidance -something which most leaders don’t have but desperately need. A good coach can help you discover what’s holding your business back and how you can face those challenges head-on.
A Coach can help Leaders increase their confidence, build effective teams through higher trust and better relationships, gain a different perspective, set goals, make decisions while providing support, and creating accountability. Likewise, the organization introducing a Coaching intervention benefits through improved employee morale, clear direction, better and cohesive leadership.
Picking the right Coach is not that complicated. You need to consider the person’s background, experience, and training, their track record, whether they would be a good fit in terms of Coaching skills, and their ability to deliver the desired outcome. In addition to picking the right Coach, it is important to ensure that the executives are ready and willing to be coached and to create the right environment for the success of the coaching intervention.
Real change begins with you. Are you ready to commit to your growth? Get in touch to start your transformation.
Sign up for a FREE discovery session, (email ram@ramsundaresan.com) to start your journey to greatness. www.ramsundaresan.com
Transformational Leadership and Business Coach, with a mission to challenge individuals and organizations to uncover their ikigai and achieve their potential. Engaged in Executive/Corporate, Business, and Personal coaching that produces measurable results makes individuals more effective, productive, and successful and helps them lead meaningful, fulfilled, and happy lives.
