Posted by admin on December 17, 2009 under Uncategorized |

EXECUTIVE COACHING
IN BUSINESS

Norman Lanier, Ph.D.
Dr. Norm and Associates

Business executive coaching and consulting services are aimed at helping individuals increase their leadership perspectives and skills. These services can be considered part of a specialized, individually focused development program; however, as key executives increase their comfort, awareness and leadership effectiveness, the corporation stands to benefit exponentially. Executives who expand their roles and skills as leaders tend to promote healthier cultures and more productive functioning among those whom they lead.

The mission of a business executive coach is to help speed up the learning process. Executive coaching frequently focuses on the following needs:

• Identifying and modifying an executive’s managerial style.
• Developing greater leadership presence and communications/presentation skills.
• Adapting effectively to change.
• Balancing demands of work life and home life.
• Planning for organizational change (e.g., modifying the existing culture; restructuring).
• Thinking through people-related issues and challenges.
• Maintaining focus on a leader’s obligations to empower, teach and coach others.

A highly effective firm recognizes the need to understand a client company’s business, and to empathize with its leaders’ problems and realities. There is a need to understand not only the individual’s personality, role and responsibilities, but also the business objectives and uniqueness of the organization. Emphasis needs to be placed on the following:

• Understanding the organization, including various functions and positions within it.
• Identifying key success factors for individual roles and positions within the organization.
• Evaluating the individual in terms of key success factors.
• Providing honest, encouraging feedback to individuals.
• Helping individuals establish goals, objectives and a plan for growth.

Executive coaching is not the one and only way to bring about growth and development. Many individuals would point to having taken on a challenging job that “stretched” them as being one of the most significant developmental experiences of their careers. Many individuals have found
off-site experiences such as attending the Center for Creative Leadership or Harvard’s Executive Development Program to be of exceptional benefit to them personally and professionally.

Experience suggests that the more corporate-wide the support is for putting people in challenging jobs and/or sending individuals to off-site development experiences, the more powerful the experiences become, and the more reinforced the learning becomes. We have all had the experience of learning something but then not really getting to apply it – such learning typically “fades” rather fast.

A hybrid-type of training, recently developed at Dr. Norm and Associates is a mixture of classroom training (where leadership skills are explained and practiced) and field coaching (where the knowledge and skills from the classroom are applied to real-life, practical situations).

For any activity or program to be effective, it needs to have endorsement and support from the top. If a CEO or a group executive is not committed to developing people, the operating managers will tend to undervalue the same thing. This commitment to developing people is just as critical now, during difficult economic times, as it is when the economy is strong.

This commitment to developing people entails tremendous persistence and work. It involves trying to be really good at the fundamentals:

• Selection
• Training
• Senior executives getting to know and tracking the progress of talented individuals
• Rewarding excellent performance
• Building bench strength and planning for succession
• Providing honest performance reviews and feedback information
• Coaching

In this day and age, talented individuals are oftentimes “flooded” with feedback information from a variety of sources. An expert business executive coach can help the individual consider and sort through the information, understand it more fully, synthesize it, and come up with a clear, focused development plan.

To summarize succinctly: Effective executive coaching accelerates learning and development.

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