Providing executive coaches to high-potential performers is one way to get the most from untapped talent.
Unfortunately, many executives select a coach based on referrals from colleagues, without adequately considering personal needs. The person sponsoring the engagement usually sends a few coaches for interviews and asks the executive to select one based on “fit.”
But without a greater understanding of what happens in a coaching relationship, it’s difficult to make a fair assessment and pick a good match.
In Your Executive Coaching Solution (Davies-Black, 2007), Joan Kofodimos says a coach should help the person-being-coached to achieve most of the following:
1. Strike a balance between supporting and challenging yourself.
2. Create feedback loops with colleagues.
3. Clarify your true strengths, values and life signature or purpose.
4. Understand and commit to the personal development process.
5. Broaden your perspectives.
6. Learn new interpersonal concepts and skills.
7. Maintain a confidential and safe environment to become more self-aware.
8. Influence how others view you.
Pick a coach for Support and the Ability to Challenge You
You’re more likely to open up to a coach who creates a safe, confidential and trusting environment. Coaches accomplish this in part by demonstrating they understand and respect your interests, values and concerns.
But coaches must also provide challenges that motivate you to perform beyond your habitual behaviors; confront you directly, yet nonjudgmental, with the impact of your actions; and probe the motives and assumptions underlying your behaviors.
Using a Coaching Relationship Well
The way you select your coach is significant. Do you see the coach as a subordinate? An outside consultant? An authority figure whose primary relationship is with your organization or boss? How do gender, race or other personal characteristics influence the way you interact with your coach?
Pick a coach who can raise issues impartially and show you how your behaviors affect others.
For Help in Developing Feedback Loops
At home, your spouse, partner or significant other will not provide you with critical feedback because he or she knows that it is more important to maintain the loving relationship versus communicating negative feedback. According to positive psychology expert John Gottman, there is a secret formula in relationships. Gottman’s research revealed that marriages are significantly more likely to succeed when the interactions between the couple are five to one, positive to negative. The secret formula is simple: Praise your mate often.
Your peers at work will rarely share authentic feedback with you. However, your coach should help you develop the skills needed to create relationships in which you can ask for honest feedback on an ongoing basis from your peers at work.
Instead of encouraging dependence, your coach should teach you how to self-coach and manage your development in the future. After an initial assessment, a good coach shows you how to form links with colleagues and how you can help them frame useful, specific feedback instead of vague judgments.
Your coach will teach you to ask for feedback and manage the conversation without being defensive. This includes learning how to determine which feedback is relevant and valid while prioritizing issues that you need to address and figuring out how to handle them.
For Help in Clarifying Values and Purpose
Skilled coaches help you clarify your developmental, career and life goals. Your coach should also teach you how to sort out your needs, wants, concerns and boundaries in any particular situation, which allows you to become more comfortable and act more consistently when completing goals, even in complex circumstances.
Here is what one of my executive clients had to say about clarifying his values and purpose during the coaching process:
"Have you ever watched, listened, and felt someone tuning a guitar or other string instrument? That is what it is like to have the good fortune of connecting with John Agno. He is a living tuning fork and you're that string instrument. Today, I have greater self awareness, am more in step with my calling, and better able to appreciate the journey, including the valleys, than ever before. Thanks, John for helping me get attuned with my life signature."
Structuring the Development Process
Your coach must help you manage each step of the coaching process:
For Guidance in Allowing Your Perspectives to Evolve
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Commit to fully engage in the coaching process.
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Get input from others
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Review feedback and plan development
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Hold regular coaching meetings to learn and practice new behaviors
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Implement behaviors in your daily work and personal lives
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Assess actual results in your personal and work lives
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Commit to fully engage in the coaching process
Your coach should help you break free of any limiting beliefs and assumptions. A significant shift in perspective can occur when your coach:
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Provides additional viewpoints
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Plays devil's advocate
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Looks at situations as others might
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Asks new questions to allow you to reach those "aha" moments
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Offers new approaches to put your new discoveries into practice
Help in Learning New Concepts and Skills
Good coaches present a mental model of what leadership means, what it takes to be effective and the key skills required. Your coach should teach skills relevant to your particular situation and assist with your implementation in daily interactions…to sharpen your interpersonal skills.
Choose for Confidentiality
Your coach must effectively navigate risky waters filled with sensitive, confidential information. Because there are no other relationships that must be protected, beyond the coaching relationship, both you and your coach can say the “unsayable” to each other in this safe, confidential and trusting environment; which helps you to reach an area of self-awareness where there is great leverage for developmental change.
Assistance in helping you Influence Others’ Views of You
You learn how to help your colleagues notice the changes you make by inviting them to become involved in your development through providing you with requested feedback in specific situations. A qualified, experienced coach can help you influence others’ views by:
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Positively managing your relationships
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Assessing key colleagues' willingness to share their feedback from participating with you in customer and internal company conversations
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Helping you solicit ongoing feedback on relevant behaviors
Roles a Coach Should Not Play
A good coach will consciously avoid roles that hinder your ability to build self-coaching skills and take independent action:
·Cheerleader: Coaches should not give positive reinforcement from the sidelines for everything you do.
Therapist: Coaches should not deal strictly with your personal adjustment and psychological issues, even if they’re qualified and licensed to do so.
Executor of the Boss’s Wishes: Coaches should do more than force you to conform to a superior’s expectations, even when given an agenda when hired.
·Shadow Manager: Coaches cannot advise you on business decisions or act on your behalf.
·One-Sided Advocate: Coaches must look at all viewpoints and resist taking one side.
Caution: Beware
Since the coach selection process is self-selecting, it is most important that you make your decision wisely.
Intuition is something we rely heavily on to gauge the course of our actions. Intuition is fast, automatic, unreasoned thought and feelings. However, we can be blind-sighted by costly intuitive errors when we over feel and under think.
Beware of deciding upon the look and feel of a good fit. Be sure to balance feeling comfortable with the person against your need to be challenged as you grow. You must believe the coach you select can help you change.
Coaching Resources:
The Self Assessment Center at: http://www.SelfAssessmentCenter.com
Executive Coaching at: www.ExecutiveCoaching.us.com
What is Leadership? at: www.WhatisLeadership.info
The Leadership Blog at: www.CoachingTip.com
Self-Coaching options at: http://www.CoachedtoSuccess.info