Executive Coaching in Organizations
Helping build stronger organizations, one leader at a time
Leadership is critical to your company’s bottom-line success, impacting employee engagement, retention, and performance. Executive coaching helps organizations achieve strategic objectives, build leadership capacity, and create culture change.
How Executive Coaching Works in Organizations
From a process perspective, executive coaching looks much the same whether an individual or an organization initiates the engagement. The difference is in who establishes the objectives for the coaching. Typically, an organization invests in leadership coaching with the ultimate goal of advancing the organization’s viability, effectiveness, and performance – which contrasts with coaching based on an individual’s personal priorities and ambitions. Regardless, each coaching relationship is unique and private, and each one-on-one coaching session is confidential, within parameters clearly established at the beginning of the engagement. Read more about Coaching for Individuals.
Crossing the Coaching-Consulting Divide
In some cases, I may coach more than one leader in an organization, offering me insight into the broader organizational culture. If desired, I will share those insights with the engagement sponsor, as appropriate. To protect the integrity and effectiveness of the coaching relationship(s), any detailed analysis of or recommendations about the organization’s culture, structure, operations, or strategy would be part of a discrete consulting engagement, crafted to uphold the original coaching confidentiality agreement. Read more about Management Consulting.
Types of Executive Coaching in Organizations
Although the coaching process is similar for all, it can be useful to think of the purpose and goals of a coaching engagement in terms of the leader’s role in the organization and experience in that role. Most coaching engagements fall into one of the following categories.
Performance. This type of coaching is for people who wish to develop competencies and habits that will enhance their performance as an individual contributor or team member.
Transition to Management. The change from individual contributor to manager is often underestimated. Coaching can help a manager navigate the profound mind shift from producing outputs to causing outputs to be produced. This means letting go of control, developing and trusting other people (and not being the hero), motivating others, and communicating differently and more than ever before.
Transition to Leadership. Transitioning from management to leadership has to do with scale. When a person goes from managing 5 people to 50, or from 100 to 1,000, the demands on their time increase and the number of peers decreases. This is about getting comfortable with a heightened level of attention, scrutiny, and influence; prioritizing big thinking and planning over fire-fighting; and becoming very precise and intentional about managing time and messages.
Trusted Advisor. When you are a leader there is often a gap between who you are and who you are seen to be. When you are powerful, people stop telling you the full story. A coach can fill the gap, becoming a sounding board, a devil's advocate, and your biggest champion, all in service of helping you become a more effective and inspiring leader.
Benefits to the Organization
Executive coaching helps support and grow leaders, especially as they transition into new roles or prepare to take on more responsibilities. Changes in the individual leader should show up in improved culture and performance in the organization. Coaching translates into doing and doing translates into business performance.
Improves individual and team performance by:
encouraging individuals to take responsibility and motivating them to excel
increasing emotional intelligence and self-awareness so leaders can use their strengths more effectively
unlocking hidden talents in the workforce
Improves morale and culture by:
reducing communication barriers and conflicts
addressing derailing behavior and beliefs
cultivating transparency and compassion
Increases employee engagement and retention by:
demonstrating the organization’s commitment to its people
improving leader resilience and ability to manage stress
Reinforces sustainable organizational change by:
promoting better communication, collaboration, and connection
developing more inspiring and supportive leaders
Prepares the organization for the future by:
helping identify and develop high potential employees
helping identify both organizational and individual strengths and development opportunities
"When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you haven’t."