Maximizing the Impact of Executive Coaching
Executive coaching is a process designed to develop leadership skills and executive functioning. It can have huge impacts for your business, developing your high-potential employees and fostering a better company culture.
By providing a safe space for professionals to learn and explore, executive coaching can have bigger impacts than you ever imagined. So, how can you maximize its effectiveness to unlock your company’s leadership potential?
8 Ways to Maximize the Impact of Your Executive Coaching
Be ready for discomfort
Make your goals clear
Be open to feedback
Understand and build on your employee's strengths
Select your coaches carefully
As an organization, provide support
Measure the impacts of coaching and communicate them
Make it easily accessible on a wide scale
Each of these areas will help maximize the impact of your executive coaching for individual employees, and for your organization as a whole too! Let’s take a look at how.
Be ready for discomfort
Development deserves discomfort, and to get the very best results from the executive coaching process, individuals need to be open to feeling uncomfortable.
At the beginning of every executive coaching process, self- or feedback-assessment should occur to identify employee strengths and weaknesses.
A great Executive Coach will then work on developing these strengths to help individuals be their best possible professional selves. But they’ll also challenge weaknesses to explore improvement opportunities. This is where the discomfort comes in. But understand that discomfort is for the best, and preparing for this process will lead to greater benefits from your executive coaching program.
Make your goals clear
An Executive Coach will always establish well-defined objectives and goals, so that both the coach and coachee can maintain focus and collaboratively work towards both personal growth and larger organizational solutions.
Be open to feedback
Feedback is a key characteristic of executive coaching, so being closed off to it limits both an individual's opportunity to grow, and the organizational impact of the overall process.
To maximize the effectiveness of the process, take feedback from your coach seriously, and try to act on that feedback – they know what they’re talking about!
Understand and build on your employee's strengths
Everyone has different strengths, and it’s their strengths that are going to help them progress most. Individuals should be confident assessing their own strengths, communicating these with their coach, and using them as a base to build on.
This isn't always the easiest thing for an employee to do, so helping them to prepare for this process will help your organization see the most improvement and growth later on.
Select your coaches carefully
The relationship between an Executive Coach and their coachee is paramount to success.
Without a good relationship and solid understanding of the expected outcomes, you’re far more likely to see a lack of engagement in coaching sessions, which is going to negatively impact your end result.
Take the time to match each individual with the right coach for them and maximize the impact of your executive coaching process.
As an organization, provide support
Organizational support in favor of executive coaching (or any other kind of coaching!) is key to success, as is a focus on building a collective culture of growth.
One study found that participant’s manager support was very important to the success of coaching. Being able to complete coaching alongside colleagues, and feeling supported by the organization during this process, will keep employees motivated throughout and deliver stronger company results.
Measure the impacts of coaching and communicate them
Firstly, by measuring the impacts of the executive coaching process, learnings can be drawn as to what is working and what needs improvement, so that executive coaching can be finetuned to get the best results possible.
Secondly, by communicating the favorable effects coaching has had, it can prove its worthiness within an organization and encourage other individuals to participate in the future.
Make it easily accessible on a wide scale
Making coaching more accessible means that more individuals will reap the benefits of the process, which will have a positive cumulative impact on your organization as a whole.
At EZRA, we see the rewards of executive coaching every day – get in touch to see how we can help you make the most of this vital organizational process.