Here are four strategies for identifying and evaluating the best executive coach for you, your team, or your organization. Understand the coach's niche and area of expertise. Review their education, credentials, and advanced training. Delve into the coach's intellectual leadership.
How do you manage confidentiality? Trust between the leader being trained and the coach is the basis of a good training process. Confidentiality is part of the profession's code of ethics, but be sure to ask the coach how confidentiality will be handled. This is especially difficult if your coach will involve your organization's stakeholders in the training process. You should make sure that they talk to you about what they plan to share and that they get your consent before sharing anything specific. What credentials do you have? You must ensure that the coach is certified by a certification body such as the International Federation of Coaches (ICF).
This certification ensures that your coach has the right skills. In addition to your coaching credentials, you may also want to know if you have experience in your context (e.g., role, hierarchical level, sector). In my opinion, coaching skills are more important than context. Depending on your goals, both skills and context may be important to you. When choosing from a group of executive advisors, your experience prior to your coaching career can play an important role in your effectiveness and utility for an executive client.
Choose an experienced executive coach with a strong business background. It's good to look for a coach who has a business or other degree and, ideally, some industry experience. A good coach has experience training real executives in real companies and can provide references and testimonials that support experience and the ability to deliver results to coaching clients. Aside from this, education and certifications aren't of much importance. Your coach must fully invest in you as a leader and as a person.
Look for someone who is excited about your career, your personal development, and your future. Your triumphs should be their triumphs. Active listening is a lost art, even among some of today's coaches. A coach's job isn't to have a sure answer before you're done thinking. They should be fully committed to what you're saying. Doing so is necessary for them to use their coach training and provide them with the most relevant knowledge and observations.
Motivation is essential, but responsibility is the guarantee of that quality. Many leaders need a responsible partner: someone who makes sure they do what they set out to do. That's not weakness, it's just intelligent leadership. If you want to overcome major challenges and experience significant changes during your participation as a coach, you'll need to find a coach who knows how to expertly use both motivation and responsibility when necessary. During the first meeting with potential coaches, the leader's task is to evaluate the leadership advisor's ability to select the best executive leadership coach to improve her leadership skills.
The executive coach must be able to investigate and discover unproductive or unhelpful assumptions and confront the leader in a calm, polite and non-judgmental manner. Without a proper diagnosis, any cure an executive coach can offer may prove ineffective. or even harmful. As an executive coach during my first meeting with potential clients, I discovered that most leaders don't really know the right questions to ask me.
Coaching certifications in alphabet soup do not guarantee the coach's ability to deliver results to the executive. The best executive coaches have conversational intelligence and can actively listen to business leaders. The best executive advisors have a series of stories about their own experiences that they use to teach business leaders, helping them avoid some of the most serious failures in the business world. When choosing from a group of experienced coaches, varied industry experience can play an important role in the effectiveness and utility of a coach for an executive client. In case the coach wants to share information with other people, he must first obtain permission from the executive.
In turn, executive advisors can listen to a problem and tell the business leader what they've seen, discussing different ways to solve the problem. As a coaching consumer, it's always a good idea for the leader to know the entire process and to know the criteria for selecting the right executive coach. Just as it is difficult for the leader to change her leadership style, it is equally painful for team members to change their perception of the leader that has been formed over the years, even when the leader works with the executive coach to change her behavior, the impressions of team members are persistent and sometimes even stubborn. The best executive advisors have seen and experienced a range of interpersonal relationships, and have witnessed first-hand what motivates people and how they work together. One of the best qualities of executive advisors is that they can help business leaders envision these objectives.
Most large organizations now routinely use executive coaching for their leadership development plan.
