You can’t help it but feel that you have a unique sense of fulfillment and satisfaction when you know that you are working for a company where leadership executive coaching programs are given much more importance and emphasis over other kinds of training and employee development schemes. You’d appreciate it, even more, when you have prior experience working for a firm that doesn’t offer any kind of leadership skills. It is because you’d know and see the big difference working for the two of them since leadership training and mentoring schemes are structured not just on improving the leadership qualities of the top level management people of the company but more importantly, the benefits of which are cascaded down to all employees and staff. So you see the beneficial impact that they are supposed to have.
When the important principles of leadership programs are in effect within a business organization, it is important to ask relevant questions about them so as to gauge their beneficial impact. Like for instance, you may want to know if the prevailing corporate culture within your company is conducive enough to promote and improve the leadership qualities of the management side? It is observable among people in high ranking positions within business organizations who are known to have a high level of emotional and social intelligence, they are actually the ones who are so keen and adamant on improving their leadership capabilities and take it to the next level of competency.
How Do You Find the Right Executive Coach?
Regardless if the primary purpose you have for taking advantage of a coaching program is to explore budget deficits within your organization or to uncover other avenues for potential expansion, the most challenging part here would remain the same and that is trying to find and acquire the services of the right and qualified executive coach.
Executive coaching and mentoring arrangements are indeed new emerging professions we have today, and because it is still fresh and new, there are no laid standard practices yet. Professionals who offer this kind of specialized service actually come from different fields of expertise, too, such as psychology, training and human resources, management consulting, and much more. Most of them, though, did not undergo any kind of coaching training per se. So they are left with honing themselves and develop their own coaching style which they think would work best for their prospective clients.
As a matter of fact, those we qualified as great executive coaches come from a variety of eclectic career paths. If you are going to look for an executive coach to help you, I suggest that you make use of the following interview questions:
- What type of clientele do you honestly think you can effectively work with?
- What particular types of clientele do you think you are going to have a hard time dealing with?
An effective business coach does have 3 essential areas of competency. It is crucial that they have good interpersonal skills, good in mentoring and can easily influence other people. In this department, the candidate needs to have an extreme self-awareness, a keen sense of observation and knows how to listen with great attention to details. Second, it is important that you can trust them. The aspect of trust plays a significant role when they need to navigate through complex confidentiality boundaries. Third, of equal importance also is that the candidate should have an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the prevailing organizational politics and business practices. This will help them in assisting their client so they too can come to understand the organizational complexities of their business.
I came across an article once and it tackled current issues facing business coaches. The said content laments the fact that most of the coaches today are lacking a good amount of knowledge in the psychology department. It is asserting that some of these professionals may have originated from the motivational speaking fields and sports. Hence, they naturally lack required skills and expertise in handling the complexities of human behavior and personalities. In cases like this, the coaching experience tends to be more on the detrimental side rather than being advantageous and beneficial on the part of the organization they are serving. It can be likened to providing a coaching assistance to someone who is on Titanic and advised him to change seats with the other person next to him. Not until such time comes that the underlying issues are properly addressed, the ship is still bound to sink.
Comprehensive study shows that at least 96% of business organizations that opted to take advantage of leadership executive coaching find so much value in it and they find it very helpful in advancing their company’s interests. So if you are keen on taking your business and brand to the next level of competency, you should ponder on availing such top of the line coaching programs anytime soon.
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