5 Benefits of Executive Coaching

Coaching need not end when at high school graduation or when you land that first job. It need not end no matter how many years you’ve worked. Learning is a lifetime exercise. Therefore, a coach is never out of date, and the benefits of executive coaching are numerous. Executive coaching can make all the difference in your career path at your company. Hiring an executive coach is a smart investment.

Bod Nardellis, former CEO of Home Depot said, “I absolutely believe that people, unless coached, never reach their maximum capabilities.” Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt agreed. “The best advice I ever got was to get a coach.”

Coaching is not therapy. Counseling looks at your past. Coaching is all about setting goals for your future and achieving those goals. In business, executive coaching helps your individual performance as well as guides you on your career path.

5 Benefits of Executive Coaching

  1. Productivity. An executive coach can guide you to be more productive at your job. Hard results mean faster promotions and bigger profits.
  2. Patterns. We all establish patterns in our lives, some positive and some negative. A coach can observe your patterns objectively and help you evaluate which patterns benefit you and which do not.
  3. Potential. An executive coach is trained to find your potential and help you develop it to the benefit of you and your company. Your coach can help you with a third-party moderation for 360-reviews, strategic planning and conflict resolution.
  4. Perspective. Sometimes it is advantageous to have a third party show you different perspectives on your work issues and company style. An executive coach will make you aware of your work attitudes and how your process change, challenges, and conflict.
  5. Promoting specific skills. None of us walk into a job completely proficient at all the skills needed to perform. Your coach will help you identify your weaknesses and guide you to improvement in communication, delegation, conflict management, team building or persuasion.

The benefits of executive coaching are not only for you. Your entire team benefits because your satisfaction in your job increases and as a result, you and your workmates become more committed to your duties. Of course, coaching requires a desire to learn and grow. Without this motivation, it is a waste of time and money. The right match of coach with trainee is absolutely key to the success of the coaching experience. Without it, the trust required for optimal executive performance will not develop. It is also important to establish exactly what you want from a coach before you begin meeting. A coach is not a therapist and although they can help with inspiration and guidance in becoming the “best you” possible, it is better not to lean on them for emotional or mental development. You can lean on them for career direction and guidance, though. A great executive coach can change the course of your career.

Hiring an executive coach is an investment worth serious consideration.
Sources:

http://www.thewallstreetcoach.com/the-benefits-of-executive-coaching.html

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140205155921-19987-12-ways-you-just-might-benefit-from-coaching

https://hbr.org/2009/01/what-can-coaches-do-for-you/ar/1

 

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Micro-Managers – The Good, The Bad and How Not To Be The Ugly

In 1966, Clint Eastwood starred in a movie titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” This spaghetti western told the story of three men searching for gold. The last scene is a famous three-way shootout, leaving the Good (Clint Eastwood) alive, the Bad dead and the Ugly barely surviving. In the world of business, we often encounter good, bad and ugly leaders. Many times these leaders are micro-managers. Is being a micro-manager a horrible attribute in a manager or not? Let’s take a look at micro-managers and how this complex characteristic can be good, bad or ugly.

The Good:

Few corporate executives aspire to be micro-managers. The ideal leader is supposed to be a great delegator and motivator, not someone who tries to control every aspect of their employee’s work.

However, a CEO who is a micro-manager has the ability to plow down obstacles and force uncooperative team members to take on challenges that drive the value of the product or service. Steve Jobs was famous for pushing his engineers past the bounds of what most considered reasonable—and getting great results from it. Walt Disney was a well-known micro-manager who obsessed over every detail of every ride design at his theme parks. This did not make him popular with his employees, but the end result was and is stellar.

To be an effective micro-manager, a leader must have a clear vision for success and how to achieve it. That leader must also be courageous and confident. If a plan fails, the buck stops at the micro-manager’s desk. Sam Walton of Wal-Mart and William Rosenberg of Dunkin Donuts were well-known micro-managers who spent a large part of their time visiting stores to make sure their products were of the best quality. The “Good” micro-managers above were all visionaries for their companies. Their passion for their businesses drove their desire for accomplishment. With that same kind of intense commitment, a micro-manager can propel a company to success. “Good” micro-managers can be an asset.

The Bad:

Unfortunately, micro-managers are usually seen as “Bad.” While they can be assets, micro-managers obsessively control and bring tension and frustration to their companies. If you are a leader with this style, you might sometimes feel driven to push everyone around you to succeed, but often it’s at the cost of your colleagues’ confidence.

You might be a “Bad” micro-manager if you:

  • Resist delegating
  • Correct tiny details instead of looking at the big picture
  • Discourage others from making decisions without consulting you
  • Ask for frequent updates on where things stand
  • Prefer to be cc’d on emails
  • Are never satisfied with anyone’s work

If you find that micro-managing is part of your style of leadership but is negatively affecting your company and the people you lead, change is possible.

 How Not To Be the Ugly:

Commit to hiring the right people. Look for employees that are accountable for their work. Screen possible additions to your team to see if they proactively seek information and feedback. Hire team players that are clear on the company’s goals and are able to articulate it back to you. If you create an extensive hiring process, you will be able to more easily trust your employees, and thus cutting the need to micro-manage.

Clearly and frequently communicate expectations. If your team doesn’t know what you expect, they will not give it to you. Communication is important so that you do not have to control what others might or might not be doing. Set consistent times for this type of communication. For instance, on a certain project set a meeting once every month to make sure everyone is on the same page. Be careful not to treat your team like children who need to be told the rules again and again.

Listen. Great leaders are masters at listening to their team members. Micro-managers often fail to listen to their employees, arrogantly believing they know best in all circumstances. The people you work with have important insights and ideas. If you don’t listen, they will feel disengaged and their work will suffer. If you choose to listen, you will create an atmosphere where your employees feel that they are valued contributors.

 

As a leader, you have the responsibility to root out the bad micro-managing, fix the ugly and encourage the good. Prevent a three-way shoot-out: address the micro-managing in yourself and others directly. By doing so, you will find the gold in your company.

Sources:

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-10-11/in-praise-of-micromanagers

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_90.htm

https://hbr.org/2014/11/signs-that-youre-a-micromanager

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/218028

What You Should Know About Executive Coaching

Therapy takes you from where you are now and helps you go back and figure out how you got there. With executive coaching, it’s really about where you are right now and where you ultimately want to be. It’s about taking you from the place where you find yourself, help you to articulate and get clear about where you want to go, and then give you the tools to get there.

Executive Coaching

1.  Executive Coaching Does NOT Fix Broken Executives:  While some executives need extra work to improve their performance, a lot of executives are growing in their leadership capabilities with the help of a coach.  Why is it so effective?  Christine Turner’s research in the Ivey Business Journal indicates that executives improve through guided and focused one on one attention with a coach.  Turner says:

The executives said the most significant benefit was the individualized attention they received from their coaches. Add to this the fact that executive coaching takes place over an extended period of time and it becomes a great way to acquire and ingrain new skills.

2.  Executive Coaching is NOT Therapy:  The thought of lying on a couch and talking to someone who is not looking at us and answering questions like, “And how does that make you feel?” is terrifying to most executives.  Coaching is not about dealing with issues in a person’s past necessarily.  Coaches are focused on present performance and getting the most out of a leader.  Executive coaching may feel a bit like therapy when their coach exposes blind spots in leadership areas.   The pain is momentary because it serves as a learning experience.  The executive is coached to develop new skills to handle specific performance issues.  Sometimes, everyone but the executive can see what is happening to the morale of a team (or whatever issue is looming to hold back progress) — it takes “outside eyes” to help the executive adjust and begin to increase effectiveness again.  More than anything, executive coaching is an opportunity to learn.  Thomas J. Ucko describes the process:

Executive coaching is a structured process that starts with feedback about the executive’s leadership behaviors, and involves the executive in determining goals for more useful behaviors and in designing a plan for achieving these goals

3.  Coaching Gets Results:  Although Executive coaching is not a magic bullet, nor a quick fix, many executives are experiencing the positive results of it.  The Sherpacoaching 2014 report claims:

Coaches in the business for 2 years or less report results as 51% good, 49% excellent. Veteran coaches, those in business 15 years or more, see 23% of coaching as producing good results, and 76% of coaching arriving at excellent outcomes.

Executive Coaching is growing in popularity because it is helping executives increase their effectiveness as leaders.  Not only are the executives benefiting, but so are their companies and direct reports.  It makes sense to invest in Executive Coaching to multiple the effectiveness of an organization.

Contact Us to give you the tools to take you where you want to be.

4 Ways to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

A recent blog post from the Harvard Business Review questioned whether people can really improve their Emotional Intelligence. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote our emotional intelligence is relatively stable, but not rigid. He notes change requires “a great deal of dedication and patience.”

What are we talking about here? Emotional intelligence describes a person’s ability to understand her own emotions and the emotions of others. Insights from emotional IQ are useful for improving all professional and personal relationships. Quite simply, you make better decisions when regularly considering this information.

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Here are four tips to help you improve your emotional intelligence with the recognition that change takes time:

1. Become a better listener. A big mistake people often make in the business world is thinking about what they want to say next instead of listening to other participants in a conversation. If you tune in to others, you will catch important clues about their emotions and choose more appropriate responses.

2. Acknowledge your weaknesses. According to the Four Branch Model of Emotional Intelligence (Mayer and Salovey, 1997), emotional intelligence involves the abilities to accurately perceive your emotions and those of others, use emotions to guide thinking, understand emotional meanings, and manage your own emotions. You may be weaker in one or more of these four areas.

3. Set a goal. You are going to increase your emotional intelligence by setting a personal goal and taking incremental steps to reaching it. If you know you need to focus on understanding emotional meanings, you can work with a professional to recognize the signs people give you. Stopping to think about emotional meanings can help you avoid many difficult situations.

4. Improve by up to 25% by following a well-designed coaching program. Chamorro-Premuzic noted working with an executive and business coach can help you make improvements in your emotional intelligence. Ensure you are working with a coach who is giving you the right feedback.

Bridge the gap between intention and action. Get on the path to interacting more effectively with everyone you meet. Please contact us for personalized assistance today!