Executive Coaching
Given the scale and nature of the demands and challenges being faced by most senior business leaders, they often experience apparently conflicting pulls:
- A need to develop themselves to ensure they are operating at optimum performance levels
- Little time to give to their own development
- A need for highly tailored development that matches their specific requirements, and recognises they have already undertaken considerable business education.
Executive coaching is an effective means of addressing these different needs. It is a highly tailored process that provides a mix of challenge and support to enable the individual leader to meet their development goals and which does this in a highly flexible and time-efficient manner, enabling development to be integrated into the normal working day.
Most of our coaching assignments focus on:
- Leaders of high potential who are preparing for more senior positions
- Recently appointed executives who wish to make a quick impact in their new roles
- Experienced executives wishing to enhance their effectiveness by further developing a particular aspect of their leadership - political skills, interpersonal style, presence/impact, ability to lead/manage major change projects as well as key skills such as influencing, negotiating and confronting.
We do not undertake coaching of a remedial nature, where we believe the individual’s performance can best be addressed via direct feedback and discussions with their line manager. We consider that coaching of this kind is unlikely to provide our clients with the best return on investment opportunities. It also gives coaching a reputation as a remedial activity, therefore discouraging take-up.
The key characteristics of our coaching approach are:
- Using a clear coaching framework, tailored to the individual, through which specific development goals are clearly agreed, a coaching plan is drawn up, and outcomes against which progress can be assessed are defined
- Ensuring that our coaching is purposeful and focused and leads to tangible change and improvement so that clients get value for money
- Holding regular, typically monthly, coaching meetings of approximately two hours duration to explore and work on the development agenda
- Carefully matching coaches to the needs of individual executives to ensure successful partnerships that provide appropriate challenge, stretch and support
- Bringing a strong business focus and understanding of the psychological, emotional and interpersonal issues which affect performance
- Identifying those aspects of thinking, behaving and acting that, if adjusted in minor yet significant ways, can have a major impact on performance
- Maintaining client confidentiality while ensuring that the process is as transparent as possible, so the needs of different stakeholders are met
- Focusing on the development of effective learning skills which individuals can use to drive their ongoing development and continuous improvement beyond the coaching assignment.
