Executive Coaching – the ins and outs!
Coaching is a growing market. Many enter the market as a life coach, learning basic skills focused on the GROW model. The move from Life Coach to Executive Coach has its attractions since the average fee for an Executive Coach is so much higher. The Association for Coaching’s figures published in 2004 showed that even 5 years ago the gap between the potential earnings of a life coach and an executive coach was wide with a life coach earning on average £75ph and an executive coach £250ph.
The signs here at Quadrant 1 International and amongst our associates is that the market for executive coaching is still growing. The number of enquiries for executive coaching over the past 3 years has been increasing steadily, and this year is no different. Alongside this the number of life coaches is also growing making the marketplace for life coaching very crowded indeed. It is quite commonplace to find life coaching courses with over 100 people attending and networking meetings are full of such coaches looking for business. It is important therefore to stand out from the crowd.
Here are some guidelines for succeeding as an executive coach –
- Broaden and deepen your coaching skills
- Take the context and perspective into consideration
- Define the relationship boundaries
- Work within a clear structure
- Agree confidentiality and reporting
- Make sure outcomes are well-formed
- Evaluate your client’s investment
1. Broaden and deepen your coaching skills
Tools like the GROW model and SMART are useful when you begin your coaching career, but they have limited impact in an environment where jobs and relationships are complex, fast and ambiguous. If you are going to be effective as an executive coach you will need more than this. Here are some of the barriers to goal setting and achieving that you are likely to come across at all levels in an organisation:
- A fear of communication, especially 1:1
- Arrogance (I’m right, they are always wrong)
- Lack of drive and energy
- Low self-motivation
- Low self-esteem
- Low confidence
- Reactive – takes no initiative
- Chip on the shoulder
- Growing anger
- Too much anxiety causing stress
- Stress of the job
- Loss of focus and unable to concentrate
- Too much reliance on structure and procedure
- Too many ideas, poor or no execution
- Talking at, not engaging
- Poor listening skills
- ‘Feeling a fake’ syndrome
- Aversion to risk – likes comfort zone too much
- Takes too much of a risk – shooting from the hip
- Micro managing (the perfectionist’s dilemma)
- Blind optimism – too trusting
- Too little trust for team members
- Low impact because not wanting to upset or inconvenience others
- Getting stuck in the detail
- Procrastination
- Poor decision making
- Not a team player – likes to work alone
To help a coachee free themselves of the habit of a lifetime takes skill and confidence in using advanced techniques such as you find in Neuro Linguistic Programming. Conversational coaching alone rarely shifts these states. You first need to reveal the pattern creating the behaviour and then teach the coachee how to change it. Simple for an NLP trained coach, much harder if you only have the GROW model to work with.
So investing in advanced skills is really a must for the executive coach if you want your sponsor to see and hear positive changes in your coachees.
Having a business background is a real advantage to the success of an executive coach. Credibility is important and this comes from familiarity with business methodologies such as feedback systems and business improvement methodologies. Some coaches with specialist techniques derived from their experience as actors or sportsmen and women may not need a business background but without such specialisms it is important to build on your experience in business.
2. Take the Context and Perspective into Consideration
Who is the client?
As an executive coach you are likely to have two sets of clients – one is the coachee and the other is the person within the organisation who has initiated the coaching and therefore paying your bill i.e. the sponsor.
The need for coaching therefore is likely to be presented from the Sponsor’s perspective which could be quite different from that of the coachee.
Is the coaching for remedial or developmental purposes?
It is not uncommon for a sponsor to hire a coach in order to ‘fix’ a difficult manager, or one who has been placed under review for consistent poor performance. It can happen, of course, that after one session with a coachee their insight into the ‘problem’ causes you to question your initial brief from the sponsor. Sometimes a sponsor may be more ‘stuck’ in their thinking than the client.
Other foresighted leaders and managers recognise the power of coaching and hire a coach for ongoing developmental purposes.
Sponsors can also offer coaching as part of a severance package for people leaving roles which are being made redundant.
What systems are already in place within the organisation?
Most organisations will have developed a culture which is unique to them and the people within the organisation will behave according to the culture. It is important therefore for the executive coach to be aware of factors such as –
- How performance is managed
- The disciplinary process
- The organisation’s dominant management style
- Any change programmes currently being implemented
More specifically –
- The industry type
- The relationship the coachee has with the line manager, team and customers
These factors form the success criteria for an executive coach’s coaching relationship and he/she will use his skill to not let such criteria get in the way of the coaching process whilst respecting the organisational culture.
Here are some tips to help set things up so that you have the best possible chance of success:
Have a conversation with your sponsor about perspectives. Open the way to go back to your sponsor so that you can challenge and test his or her perspectives. There are always differences in perspective. Make sure you have as much background as possible relating to the coachee’s environment. Specifically find out about the organisation’s future strategy and how this is going to affect employees. You also want to know about any business improvement methodologies which will have an influence on the dominant management style.
You may suggest an initial session with them both to facilitate clarity of expectations and outcomes. This will allow you to cover other steps in the process such as relationship boundaries, structure, confidentiality and reporting. Great diplomacy is required, plus an ability to put people at ease whilst leading them to a mutual agreement. When performed well this type of session can really help to increase awareness all round, and reframe any poor judgements of a personal nature which may exist between sponsor and coach.
The sponsor may want to measure the success of your coaching. Agree up front what such measures are and be clear with the sponsor about the degree of reporting back. If a coachee is to trust the executive coach and open up about issues of concern he/she needs to know that any sensitive information revealed in the sessions will not be reported back to the sponsor.
3. Define the Relationship Boundaries
Whilst there is a boundary separating personal and work roles they clearly influence each other, and often the boundaries are blurred. People don’t change just because they cross the office threshold each morning and vice versa. You will inevitably find that roles such as parent, partner and sibling affect the work role. Highly skilled coaches know that helping a client with communication or confidence issues can bring up past events when limiting beliefs were created or acquired and which are now acting as career limitations. Your success as a coach may depend on the client trusting you enough to openly verbalise and deal with these issues in the session. Coachees are very good at creating smoke screens to their vulnerabilities and only a skilled coach will have the sensory acuity and techniques to recognise and move the client through and beyond these unconsciously erected barriers.
Having the skills to work at this level will certainly help, but you can open the way to a ‘whole person’ approach by defining the relationship boundaries up front with both sponsor and coachee. Explain how clearing away personal issues that may arise will have a positive effect on the work role. Not everyone will agree with this so it is always a good idea to have the conversation with your sponsor. You may also want to have a conversation about outcomes in the event that you come across a coachee with an acute stress problem, or a coachee who realises he is in the wrong job, or with the wrong company. At what point do you refer back to your sponsor in these instances? It may be important to clarify these boundaries so that everyone is comfortable over the possible outcomes of coaching.
The boundaries between coaching and counselling are vague indeed. Many coaches are trained to a much higher level than some counsellors and are well positioned to deal with issues such as stress and anger. Nevertheless it is advisable to notify your sponsor when you encounter these issues to protect yourself and highlight a problem which may have gone unnoticed by line managers before your intervention. Some HR functions like to draw a clear line between coaching, counselling and performance review with clearly stated scope for each role. So even if you know you have skills to help a coachee with a personal issue you may be required to refer this to HR who may choose to bring in a counsellor. HR functions in other companies may be less strict about these boundaries, so it is always a good idea to check.
4. Work within a clear structure
Sponsors in organisations like to have structure so that activity can be measured and evaluated, but executive coaching doesn’t like to be constrained by structure. Every coachee is different and the content, speed and results will vary widely. What you can measure though is progress. As long as you have a structure for measuring progress from current state to desired state then you will be able to evaluate the investment in your services.
A simple Kirkpatrick type evaluation may suffice if nothing else is available, but your sponsor may ask you to tie your coaching in to the company’s performance review process, or talent matrix. This may take a little creativity but most management and leadership development models can be supported by coaching. The more complex the model used the clearer you need to be on expected outcomes for each coachee.
5. Agree confidentiality and reporting
As a coach your success will be greatly influenced by the degree of trust you can build with your clients. Revealing personal information gleaned during a coaching session will certainly kill your coaching business more quickly than anything else. For this reason it is crucial that you agree with your sponsor what will and won’t be revealed, and what will be fed back by way of progress reporting. Let’s take the confidentiality issue first.
The conversation I have with my sponsors goes something like this:
“I will never reveal information which is private, or historic information of a sensitive nature, or indeed anything the coachee asks to be kept in confidence. The only exception to this is if I am ordered to do so by a court of law or a tribunal. I may also ask the sponsor for guidance on revealing information which is potentially damaging to other employees, or the company, or which is physically dangerous to the coachee such as high stress levels, anger or OCD type behaviour. The guidance should help me to make decisions in a wide range of possible scenarios where to withhold certain information could lead to problems beyond the coaching remit.”
I will agree to feedback generally on what progress is being made, and any performance related information. In fact I use a simple structure to facilitate this process. It is based on a Kirkpatrick training evaluation model which I have customised for Executive Coaching and has four basic parts:
- Coachees response to the session. What did you learn about yourself, and others?
- What have you decided to do as a result of this learning?
- What stretch have you committed to as a result of the coaching?
- How will you measure your results?
This simple evaluation can be used in follow-up with a HR Business partner or line manager to give continuity of support to the coachee’s development.
When we have the freedom to choose our own framework we use the Harrison Assessment Paradox Graph which is a highly accurate leadership oriented online assessment. It is far superior to more commonly used instruments such as Myers Briggs or Insights which tend to leave you with a ‘so what’ after the assessment, and result in stereotypes. Harrison Assessment by comparison is highly practical, has no stereotypes, and comes with a complete set of Coaching Guides (designed and written by Quadrant 1 International specifically for Harrison Assessments) which the coachee can use to self-coach.
Executive coaching must improve performance in some way. This is what the sponsor is paying for – your feedback therefore will focus on this and hopefully show a return on investment. This is also good for your business especially if your sponsor is willing to give you a testimonial.
6. Make sure outcomes are well-formed
When discussing results with your sponsor you may benefit from moving the focus to outcomes, so that you set clear and well-formed outcomes for the coaching. This may not be necessary as your sponsor may have already thought this through, but you will still find the sponsor who says ‘We need to get Frank to stop bullying’ or ‘Maggie needs help to front up to the senior team’. So stopping Frank from bullying or giving Maggie confidence would be the expected result. But when Frank has stopped bullying what will he be able to do that he couldn’t do before? What outcomes should we expect in terms of performance, a more productive team perhaps or a more tangible outcome such as increased sales or lower costs? Will Maggie be able to use her new confidence to achieve performance related outcomes? Will her new confident interaction with the team bring fresh ideas or make the meetings more productive?
7. Evaluate your client’s investment
In the full thrust of organisational life your coaching can easily be taken for granted, even though the results may be saving many thousands of pounds, or generating increased sales or productivity. Wherever you can make the link between your coaching and tangible benefits you should do so as this will ensure you are valued according to your results.
For example, helping a coachee to remove a limiting belief, or to grow in confidence can add tangible benefits of many thousands of pounds, and possibly millions to the organisation. These results will not necessarily be attributed to your coaching intervention, and this is where the evaluation framework comes in. Whilst it will help the coachee to record their progress, it can also record the results as defined by the coachee although they may not be thinking in quantitative terms. You may need to guide them in this process to estimate the results in tangible measurables.
To find out more about Quadrant 1’s appoach to Executive Coaching call 0870 762 1300.
