Why Executive Coaching Must Be Central To Your Leadership Arsenal

Executive coaching can help leaders navigate new terrain!

Executive coaching can help leaders and managers navigate their way through the leadership maze. A recent search on Amazon revealed that there are some 83000 books with Leadership in their title.  Leadership is written about from so many different perspectives and values.  Organisational and team leaders have a pivotal role in creating a vision for their own lives and their businesses.  There is a real skill in being able to not only implement a great vision but also to be able to get employee buy-in and commitment across a diverse workforce. Executive coaching is a preliminary step to help you get in touch with your own intuition.

Executive coaching is the choice for leaders who understand the value of stretching their vision and helping them tap into their own intuition.  Good coaches and practitioners encourage leaders and executives to discover their own unique contribution and skills set. Then aligning this with that of the organisation as a whole.  Every Leadership challenge is different from another.

How executive coaching can help

Executive Coaching can help senior leaders and managers to:

• Understand their own unique leadership style and how this impacts on their organisation.
• Help understand the challenges leaders face. Know how they can vary styles and communication opportunities to maximise employee and stakeholder commitment
• Develop a unique leadership framework which will maximise their impact on the organisation they lead.
• Help as a sounding board to create a  great vision  which engages hearts and minds and thus optimise results
• Help leaders to understand and develop a range of strategies to deal with difficult situations and people depending on their own unique style.

An executive coach can help you to cut through the theory and find a way through the leadership maze.   You will find ways of operating which align with your preferred style and the culture of your organisation.

The CIPD has conducted research which shows 99% of leaders and managers felt coaching was effective!

Expanding as a leader

Going deeper an executive coach will really create a shift for the leader.  This is done in a number of ways.  Executive coaching is challenging. As a result, you will experience an expansion of your skills and abilities in a number of ways.

1. Helping you out of your comfort zone

All of us unconsciously work in our comfort zone.  Learning new ways of doing things and using parts of our internal toolkit we are unfamiliar with can feel uncomfortable until we get used to thinking or responding in a different way.  A good executive coach will understand your discomfort and support and guide you as you traverse the boundaries of your old comfort zone.

2. Challenging unconscious beliefs

If we realised that our beliefs were creating our lives we would be much more selective about the beliefs we choose to adopt.   Often we think that it is the environment, or other people or external factors which are preventing us to get where we want to, but that is never the case.  A lack of an ability to achieve what we want is always about our internal belief system.  Executive coaching helps to probe and challenge those beliefs freeing your mind up to new possibilities.

3. Expanding your vision

We all have limited vision.  It doesn’t matter who we are, how visual we are or how imaginative we are.  In some way our vision is limited.  If you are not getting the results you want then it may well be time to explore and expand your vision.   It’s also about exploring how much faith you have allowed your vision to happen.  Coaching helps to uncover your blind spots and to create the environment for you to not only visualise what you want but to bring it to fruition.

4. Raising self-awareness

This truly is an earth school.  If we ever feel we have stopped learning then we are deluding ourselves.  We always have something to bring out of ourselves which can be surprising.  We are all unique and so there is never a one size fits all when raising self-awareness.  A coach can help you raise your self-awareness which helps you be the best you can.

5. Expanding your consciousness

Our minds are tricky.  It’s only possible to see what we have learned or become conscious of.  However, our consciousness is simply the tip of the proverbial iceberg.   What lies beneath the surface is hundreds of times bigger than what we can currently perceive.  While an executive coach is similarly expanding consciousness, they understand that the truest and most honest words to ever be uttered are:  “I don’t know”

6. Formulating and realising expanded outcomes

Setting goals and targets are fine.  Setting outcomes can be change-making.  A good coach will help you look at what you wish to achieve through a variety of lenses.  In turn, this will enable you to be much more effective in setting and realising your outcomes.

If you are considering employing an executive coach, visit my coaching page and find out more about what I offer.