Objective
This short write up was produced to give you a quick overview of:
- What is executive coaching and what it is not
- Why it is important
- What you should hope to get out of your coaching sessions
- Workforce Group's 5-Step Transitioning and Transformational Coaching Methodology
What is Executive Coaching?
Executive Coaching is defined as a process that aims to improve the performance, focus, and capacities of individuals. It is a form of development that helps people produce extraordinary results in their lives, careers, businesses, or organizations, helping them to bridge the gap between where they are now and where they want to be.
Coaching is the process of unlocking an individual’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
Coaches work with the coachees to achieve speedy, increased and sustainable effectiveness in their lives and careers through focused learning.
What Coaching is Not
Coaching is not therapy
- Therapy deals with healing pain, dysfunction, and conflict within an individual or in relationships. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past that hamper an individual’s emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with the present in more emotionally healthy ways.
- Coaching, on the other hand, supports personal and professional growth based on self-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. Professional coaching is future-focused, and the coaching relationship emphasizes action, accountability, and follow-through.
Coaching is not Consulting:
- While consulting approaches vary widely, the assumption is that the consultant will diagnose problems, prescribe, and sometimes implement solutions.
- With coaching, the assumption is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.
Coaching is not Mentoring
- A mentor is an expert who provides wisdom and guidance based on his or her own experience. Mentoring may include advising, counseling and coaching.
- Leadership coaching services does not necessarily include advising or counseling and focuses instead on individuals or groups setting and reaching their own objectives.
Coaching is not Training:
- Training programs are based on objectives set out by the trainer or instructor. Training also assumes a linear learning path that coincides with an established curriculum.
- Though objectives are clarified in the coaching process, they are set by the individual or team being coached, with guidance provided by the coach. Coaching is less linear, without a set curriculum.
Why is Executive Coaching Important?
- We all have goals we want to reach; challenges we’re striving to overcome and times when we feel stuck. Partnering with an executive coach can change your life, setting you on a path to greater personal and professional fulfillment.
- Coaches partner with their clients to design the life they want, bring out their clients’ own brilliance and resources so that they can achieve excellence and create purposeful, extraordinary lives. By creating clarity, coaching moves the client into action, accelerating their progress by providing greater focus and awareness of all the possibilities which exist to create fulfilling lives.
- Coaches help people get unstuck and reach goals through a structured approach which promotes accountability. Getting out of one’s comfort zone is necessary to moving forward, so coaches help clients manage their fears and stress. Coaching helps equip clients to face challenges.
What benefits will you get from your coaching sessions?
Improved performance and productivity
Through the process of goal-setting and planning, executive coaching services help individuals gradually achieve what they want most in work, life, relationships, and beyond. It also provides unbiased feedback on the individual’s performance.
A safe place to gain perspective
Having a coach gives the individual a safe space to talk through sensitive issues. The coach often is a third-party participant, and their ability to remain uninvolved but give guidance allows the coachee to gain perspective without feeling intimidated or embarrassed.
Deeper Level of Learning
Coaching helps individuals to improve their craft, by providing tools and techniques to overcome obstacles when the coach is not around. It enables individuals take greater responsibility and accountability for their learning, actions and commitments.
Build Personal Awareness
Through executive coaching, an individual can learn more about themselves, become aware of their blind spots. find out how they are perceived by others, and improve on areas of their personalities that they are not satisfied with.
Workforce Group’s Validated 5-Step Coaching Methodology
There are five steps in our coaching process, and each of these steps have been meticulously designed to help clients overcome challenges and achieve their desired results:
Step 1: Set Vision & Direction
The first thing we do is help you clarify your vision and direction. This will entail working with you to gain clarity around the following questions:
- Where are you now?
- Where will you like to be?
- What does the next level look like for you?
- What is slowing you down, standing in your way or stopping you from getting what you really want?
Step 2: Strategize Action
After vision comes action! Step two in our coaching process is to brainstorm and strategize with our clients to generate the best course of actions that will aid them in arriving at their goals.
What this means is that we take the clarified vision and direction developed in step one and we break it down into an actionable yearlong plan, 6-month plan, 90-day plan, 30-day plan, all the way down to a day’s plan so that you know, every day what exactly you need to do to achieve the results that you're looking for.
Step 3: Evaluate and Upgrade Skills
Even the best strategy cannot be executed without the requisite skills. Therefore, the third step in our methodology is to guide our clients through the process of acquiring and upgrading the essential skills they need to achieve the results that they are looking for.
Specifically, we will help you answer these questions:
- What skills & knowledge will help you accelerate your results?
- What skills and knowledge are you lacking that you need to buy, borrow, or build to achieve your vision?
Step 4: Optimize Environment
The fourth thing we help clients do is to guide them on how to optimize their environment. The role our environment plays in our performance and the results we achieve is huge. Sometimes, subtle things in our environment may end up slowing us down, or even stopping us from getting what we really want. During the session, we will coach you on how to optimize your three crucial environments:
- Physical environment
- People environment
- Mental environment
Step 5: Master Action
In our fifth and final step, we help our coaching clients master their actions. We all know that implementation, not ideas, is the secret to success. The results achieved at the end of the day will be largely determined by the number of right actions we take. We will work with you to bridge the gap between knowing and doing.
There you have it, our 5-Step Coaching Methodology, carefully designed to significantly increase your probability of successfully achieving your goals and vision.
- 1. Schedule your coaching sessions as soon as possible.
- 2. Attend your coaching sessions at the scheduled time and date.