Coaching has empowered many people e.g., athletes, singers, politicians, and teams towards higher performance and achieving their goals. Executive coaching does the same for leaders in organizational environment. But what is executive coaching? And what does an executive coach do? In this post, we briefly answer these and other basic questions about Executive Leadership Coaching.
To explain executive coaching, let’s briefly go back in time: it’s 1875. The US-American universities Harvard and Yale played one of their first football matches. Yale had a coach, Harvard did not. The results: over the following 30 years Harvard only won 4 games. This, in essence, is the value a coach can provide in sports, and what the benefit an executive coach can generate for business leaders.
What is Executive Coaching?
For us at Shine, Executive Coaching is a journey designed to help leaders align who they are with what they do, and develop both the understanding of their role as leader and the appropriate tools to impact consciously. We believe that Executive Leadership Coaching goes way beyond guidance and leadership development; during our Executive Coaching programs, we challenge leaders to uncover their strengths and address the obstacles that hold them back. The ultimate goal of leadership coaching is to empower leaders to drive purposeful action and transform their leadership approach.
What does an executive coach do?
An executive leadership coach provides guidance and support to help leaders navigate personal and professional challenges. Executive coaches create a safe, reflective space where leaders can explore their strengths, uncover blind spots, and identify unconscious beliefs or patterns that limit their potential. Through the coaching process, executives will equip themselves both with new leadership skills and tools to bring the highest value to their organizations and environments, and develop themselves profoundly e.g., by tackling underlying fears, unconscious triggers or thinking patterns that time and again drive leaders into unproductive and ineffective behaviours.
Why would a leader need a coach?
At Shine, we love a quote by Google’s former CEO and Chair Eric Schmidt, that captures the essence why any human being can benefit from a coach –and this includes executive leaders, however self-confident they might be:
Every famous athlete, every famous performer has somebody who’s a coach. Somebody who can watch what they’re doing and say, ‘Is that what you really meant?’ – The one thing people never are good at is to see themselves as others see them.Eric Schmidt (ex-Google CEO and Executive Chair)
Actually, in the following interview, Schmidt stresses why executive coaching makes a difference:
Let’s just talk about Silicon Valley today […]. You can imagine that there’s very little time for the touchy-feely stuff. And yet: that touchy-feely stuff, which is sort of even a derogatory term that I’m using, is crucial for people to feel that they’re valued and motivated. And since people are your only asset, you better get that priority right!Eric Schmidt (ex-Google CEO and Executive Chair)
If you want to know more about Schmidt’s experience working with a coach along his stance at Google, check the book A Trillion Dollar Coach.
Executive Coaching: See what you don’t see
Being a successful and effective leader requires more than having a solid toolbox full of well-oiled leadership competencies such as excellent communication abilities, the capacity to influence, the ability to develop an inspiring vision and deliver against it or efficient decision-taking. Leading consciously and effectively requires a full range of leadership qualities, both focused on business and achievement-related competencies and people/team-related abilities. All these leadership qualities must be built on a solid foundation of self-knowledge and self-awareness. Even though the more technical skills can be acquired at university or along an MBA, developing authenticity, courage, integrity and knowing how to manage emotions is not something you’ll typically learn at any of these institutions.
It is precisely at this point that executive and business coaching brings value: in a personalised way, it contributes to developing self-knowledge, self-awareness and key skills required to be an effective, impactful leader.
Great coaches become our external eyes and ears and give us a more accurate picture of reality, recognise the intentions of our work, help us identify blind spots (i.e. things we don’t see), and constructively challenge the link between what we do and what we want to achieve.
Fact is: there are many challenges that, faced alone, can become tough: you often don’t see the full picture, might be stuck on analysing the problem instead of driving for the final end goal. And if you ses the solution, you might not always know how to make it happen or be hesitant.
Executive coaching for CEOs and Business Leaders
So, executive coaching can be a powerful way to help in your professional leadership development – and more often than not at the same time your personal development. Especially given today’s global scenario, where managers and team leaders need to constantly evolve to adapt and learn new skills, tools and above all attitudes to lead authentically and intentionally.
Is executive coaching the only way to develop these skills? – The obvious answer is no. But: we experience every day that coaching is an accelerator of development. It gives flexibility and the right personalised approach to facilitate change, make leaders more empathetic, self-aware, better emotion managers, better listeners and communicators, better solvers.
Coaching skills that every manager can learn and develop through executive coaching
What are the skills a good executive coach should have to bring the value described above? Here’s a list of some critical coaching qualities that we at Shine believe every leader should learn and integrate into their toolkit to develop their leadership impact and leadership effectiveness:
- Developing active listening
- Achieving empathy and motivation in team members
- Develop emotional intelligence
- Ability to generate clear and motivating communication: assertiveness
- Ability to create value-key questions
- Help people challenge their fears and limitations
- Create comprehensive and achievable action plans
- Learn to delegate wisely and wisely (to whom, when, how)
To wrap up: now you know why more and more managers are opting for executive coaching: its effectiveness as a development tool has driven them to achieve their two main objectives: achieving results and developing people. All starting by developing themselves.
