Coaching enhances performance. It can benefit anyone, not just athletes. Just like athletes, leaders are under pressure to perform every day. And just like with athletes, coaching is the best way to ensure that leaders can perform at a high level.
Workplace coaching is a burgeoning industry with a growing body of literature to support it. In this article, we break down workplace coaching, how it works, and how you can use it to help grow your organization.
What is executive coaching?
Executive coaches work with business leaders to enable their rapid development. They also assist with specific problems that a board member, or senior manager, wants to work through outside of the normal business framework.
Unlike training, coaching focuses very specifically on the issues that an executive wants to work through. Thus it becomes a speedy way to improve skills and achieve personal and professional objectives.
The executive coach gives the executive feedback and a new perspective that enables them to set goals and work towards them. The coaching sessions use objective feedback to drive the executive's thought processes forward through their issues.
What are the main uses of executive coaching?
There are many uses of executive coaching but the most common reasons for engaging a coach include the following:
● Onboarding or Transitioning: when a board member or senior manager is promoted, coaching can quickly help them prepare for their new role. It's also a very useful method for helping someone who is transitioning from one area of responsibility to another at the same level.
● High Potential: individuals who are identified as having real talent, can often be coached to accelerate their personal development within an organization.
● Organizational Change: coaching can support transformative business programs to ensure that leadership can keep pace with change.
● Neutral Party Support: sometimes the executive will need to run ideas over a sounding board to be better able to articulate them in their own business.
● Personal Effectiveness Programs: if the executive themselves plays a coaching role, for example in their management position or during 360-degree review processes, coaching can help them develop their own approach.
Why is executive coaching important in the workplace?
Coaching enables leaders to deal with the unknown.
The workplace is a dynamic environment, characterized by turnover and volatile market forces. The beauty of coaching is that leaders do not need to know everything in order to be effective; instead, they need to know how to empower those around them.
Executive coaching gives businesses a way of developing their senior staff in a cost-effective and timely manner.
Coaching sessions enable the staff member to concentrate on the issues that are most critical to their performance, without the fluff of lengthy training courses. They allow the director or manager to remain at their post whilst developing and thus don't take away from their contribution to the business.
It can be said that executive coaching is one of the most important methods for improving the skills of your leaders and directors.
It should be easy to demonstrate a clear return on investment for this kind of coaching. And anything that has a positive impact on the bottom line is something that your business should be considering.
Identifying Your Workplace’s Coaching Needs
If you are interested in bringing a coach on board, there are several ways to identify the coaching needs of your workplace.
First, you can bring in a consultant with expertise in gathering information in organizations through surveys, assessments, and interviews.
There is no better way to identify needs than by talking to the people involved in your organization.
In this case, you can select a sampling of your staff to interview, asking them about the skills and resources that they feel they need to do their job effectively.
If you feel that employees are not giving honest feedback or you are stuck, it may be time to bring in a consultant.
Find the best-fit executive coach for your company’s needs
Fill out our executive coaching form and the AIM Insights team will pair you with the right executive coach for you. You also have the option to be put on a rotation over a period of time with multiple executive coaches that specialize in different areas of business.
Regardless, these pairings are made based on metrics and feedback tested by AIM Insights. When you begin, you will be asked to take assessments that will generate the most effective executive coaches for you.
This can even be done through the
AIM Insights People Leader Certification program, where you will be paired with an experienced coach, personalized to your field of management, working with you through gaining a management certification to excel in your career.
What difference does AIM Insights bring to executive coaching?
Lots of benefits at a fraction of the cost.
There are two reasons why AIM Insights is cost-effective:
1. The insights from the initial assessments done on the executive client allow the executive coach to have enough feedback and guidance to give to the manager immediately
2. This is more effective than the executive coach going out and marketing themselves on LinkedIn, commenting on posts with no guarantee that they will be given a job. By creating a marketplace for managers and executive coaches to come together, coaches can spend more time coaching.
AIM Insights has hundreds of executive coaches, ready to guide you at a customized level. If you want to see efficient, long-lasting improvements within your organization, and you believe that executive training can benefit you, set up a meeting to speak with the AIM Insights team and find out how you can get started with a
customized executive coaching program.
As Bill Gates said:
“Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”