vExecutive coaching can be life changing and infinitely useful in helping professionals develop a strong set of skills needed for their jobs (just ask Bill Gates). To reap the full benefits, you will have to go in with a positive mindset and a genuine desire to improv
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“Coaching is only Coaching if it’s asked for."
With this desire for growth, here are 6 key benefits you can expect to get from executive coaching:
1. Committing 100% to You and Your Success
It’s simple really. The best executive coaches make you feel like the center of the world and that they care about nothing more than your growth and your success. If you don’t feel comfortable and willing to share with your coach, it’s time to find a new coach.
2. Helping You to Become More Self-Aware
Being self-aware is one of the most important factors in becoming a successful leader, manager and coach. The more self-aware leaders are, the higher the levels of organizational success and profitability they will achieve. And employees are more likely to follow leaders who are transparent about their own strengths and weaknesses. This ability to see themselves clearly inspires fellow team members to want this for themselves which ultimately leads to a culture of growth.
At the beginning of the engagement, your executive coach will collect information regarding how people see you and how you see yourself. A good executive coach will categorize the feedback into key subjects, and through a process of inquiry (i.e. lots of questions), the coach will lead you in a process of self-discovery that will help you better grasp your main strengths and weaknesses based on others’ perspectives. Moreover, your coach will help you build the skills necessary so that you can become more and more self-aware over the course of your lifetime. Skilled coaches have the ability to ask you questions that get you to think about how you see yourself, your strengths and what can be improved, and to learn to view yourself as objectively as possible. And they do this in a way that is supportive of what you want in life.
3. Shaping How You Perceive Others More Accurately
Not only do you need to have an accurate depiction of yourself, but you also need to do the same with others. We all have incorrect or incomplete perspectives of others. For example, some leaders may not acknowledge some of their employees’ true capabilities and potential, but they keep incompetent employees around because of inaccurate view on their abilities and competencies. Or worse yet, leaders allow toxic employees to remain because they are high-producers (this can be common in the world of sales).
A skilled coach will help leaders see how their perspective is tripping up their effectiveness and allowing a negative impact on the people around them and thus their overall culture. A great coach will not shy away from these “difficult” conversations. An executive coach must have the courage to take on these topics or they are not serving your best interests. You will learn to apply the same skills that you learned from seeing yourself more clearly to develop better and more accurate views of others. And with these more accurate views, you are now equipped to more effectively lead, manage and coach others.
4. Improving Your Responses
As a leader, you will want to learn new response techniques that are both effective and appropriate for people of all levels. An executive coach will help you improve your communication skills so that they can be applied throughout your professional and personal life.
5. Putting Forth Your Strengths
A good coach will take a closer look at you and help you uncover your strengths. Often times, we have a hard time seeing our own strengths and truly owning them. This seems obvious, but without it you cannot make the most out of your strengths. Too often we focus too much on our weaknesses but a great coach will help you grow into the best version of yourself by leveraging the strengths you have.
6. Nurturing Effective Relationships
Sometimes, leaders can be close-minded when it comes to building connections with new people. They choose only to build relationships with their preferred groups of people. In most cases, they simply engage with people who they identify with the most, whether it’s in terms of their educational background, race, work style, or beliefs. Your coach will work with you to grow your ability to create relationships.
Building relationships is the most critical skill for any leader to master. This is especially true when it comes to building relationships with colleagues who are different from you or just plain difficult to work with. A great executive coach will give you the skills needed to transcend these differences and create a relationship rooted in a shared future. When this sort of relationship is established, then both people are more committed to a shared future together than they are to their own comfort and natural tendencies.
"Without a pull toward some goal, which people truly want to achieve, the forces in support of the status quo can be overwhelming. Vision establishes an overarching goal. The loftiness of the target compels new ways of thinking and acting.
A shared vision also provides a rudder to keep the learning process on course when stresses develop. Learning can be difficult, even painful. With a shared vision, we are more likely to expose our ways of thinking, give up deeply held views, and recognize personal and organizational shortcomings. All that trouble seems trivial compared with the importance of what we are trying to create.
In the presence of greatness, pettiness disappears. In the absence of a great dream, pettiness prevails.”
Peter Senge
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and
Science of the Learning Organization
Doubleday/Currency
Phoenix Perform provides executive coaching & team building consulting for enterprises, get in touch today to see how we can help.
PHOENIX SUMMARY
Core Idea:
Executive coaching has a number of benefits including having a champion in your life who is 100% committed to your success, a greater sense of self-awareness & social awareness, improving your responses as a leader, and the ability to establish better relationships.
Key take away:
Executive coaching can significantly change the effectiveness of any professional. And for leadership coaching to be effective, one must go in with a positive mindset and a genuine desire to improve.
About the author(s):
Tom Willis is a Co-Founder and Partner with Phoenix Performance Partners. He had the great honor of serving as CEO for Cornerstone; a consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers; and an engineer with the Intel Corporation. His life is all about helping others uncover their talents so they can reach their unlimited potential and their organization can thrive.
| Linkedin: Tom
Brad Zimmerman is a Co-Founder and Partner with Phoenix Performance Partners. Zimmerman turned to organizational coaching more than 26 years ago following a successful career in sales and operations. Today, he helps businesses, nonprofits and other organizations develop cultures that transform work environments so people grow and the organizations thrive.
| Linkedin: Brad