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What is coaching?
In the past few years, coaching has emerged as one of the most effective ways to cultivate professional and personal skill sets for both teams and individuals. Typically, someone other than the executive’s supervisor does the coaching. This allows for greater objectivity and the freedom to experience learning on a person’s own terms.
“Executive coaching” is the term used to describe coaching for senior business leaders. There is a collaborative, individualized relationship between an executive and a coach. The goal is to inspire sustained behavioral change and to transform the quality of the executive’s work and professional life. Even though executive coaching focuses on work situations, coaching can often result in significant personal transformation as well.
Some areas in which executive coaches can help include:
- Developing interpersonal and communication skills;
- Managing time;
- Balancing work and life issues;
- Dealing with conflict;
- Thinking strategically for business planning;
How coaching works
Coaching involves listening, reflecting, asking questions, providing self-observations, and doing exercises. The coach creates an environment where the client ultimately becomes self-correcting (learning how to correct the behavior themselves) and self-generating (creating their own questions and answers).
Coaches must ask the right questions. A coach engages in a collaborative alliance with the individual to establish and clarify a purpose and goals, and then develops an action plan. Sometimes a coach will get permission to ask others about someone’s job performance and present the findings to the client. This often creates an opportunity to gather genuine, anonymous feedback about a supervisor’s management skills without putting employees at risk.
Change and transformation are also key. Coaches enable the individual to grow and generate new behaviors, striving for long-term performance. Behavior patterns are tough to change. But a coach observes the habits and opens up new possibilities, providing support during the difficult process of change.
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