Many people have benefitted when they get executive coaching — from high potential employees to seasoned CEOs. It’s a partnership. Executive coaches do not tell clients what to do; they help their clients clarify their goals, change behaviors, and strengthen leadership skills, emotional intelligence, and performance.
And better leadership results in a stronger, more successful organization.
Executive coaching is an investment in your people and your organization. But how do you know when the time is right to engage a professional executive coach? When are the times that you and your company will get the biggest bang for the buck?
5 Signs it’s Time to Get Executive Coaching
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Your Organization’s Strategy Needs to Change
The past few years have presented a great many challenges. But there are incredible opportunities as well. If your organization is either working through or poised to launch new strategic directions, executive coaching will help your leaders and teams effectively assess and drive new strategies.
Strategic thinking is a critical component of leadership. But it’s an overused term. What does “Being a good strategic thinker” really mean? There are specific steps and frameworks for becoming a strong strategic thinker. Executive coaching works with people to develop a strategic mindset and effectively work through proven approaches for success.
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Your Organization is Growing – Get Executive Coaching
Many companies are expanding, reorganizing, and changing the way they work. Is your organization hiring new employees? Have you made — or are you expecting — a significant number of promotions at your company?
New employees and individuals promoted to expanding roles and responsibilities are prime candidates for executive coaching. Coaching will help them with their communication skills, management abilities, emotional intelligence, and executive presence — expertise they may have not needed in their past roles. With coaching, they’ll get up to speed faster and perform at a higher level.
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Your Future Relies on Younger Employee – Get Executive Coaching
Not only are Baby Boomers retiring, Gen X employees are beginning to think about “what’s next” as well. Millennials are rapidly moving into managerial and leadership roles in organizations of all shapes and sizes. This younger, but less developed, portion of your workforce is perfect for executive coaching. Research demonstrates that Millennials love professional development and opportunities for their own personal growth.
As younger employees take over more of your company — and this will happen! — making sure you provide opportunities for their development achieves two goals. First, executive coaching at this stage of their career builds the leadership characteristics they’ll need to sustain organizational success over time (and helps short circuit the development of “bad habits” that could hamstring your organization). Second, because Millennials highly value development opportunities, you’ll enhance your ability to retain your high potential employees and keep them engaged in your company.
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Your Organizational Culture Needs to Change – Get Executive Coaching
Many executives do not spend much time thinking about company culture. For better or worse, it tends to simply “happen”. Corporate culture is the total sum of “beliefs and behaviors that determine how a company’s employees and management interact and conduct business.”
The research and insights of Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi in Strategy That Works clearly reveals the importance of culture in successful organizations.
Executive coaching helps change mindset and drive the ways that organizations can define and shape their culture. This is particularly helpful as organizations grow rapidly or leverage the opportunities presented by growing diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Culture is also vital when engaging in mergers or acquisitions (M&A). Successful M&A requires bringing together and melding people from different departments and different organizations. A shared sense of, and belief in, the organization’s culture helps make this happen.
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Your New Leaders Need Different Skills to Succeed – Get Executive Coaching
People are promoted because they have excelled at what they do and are ready for the “next step.” Their success is typically built upon experiences that are functional — e.g., finance, engineering, technology, or marketing. Now, the brilliant engineer is no longer expected to design the project… They are expected to lead the engineering team that will design the project.
New leaders need to focus less on their technical skills and more (much more) on communication, strategic thinking, team dynamics and performance, emotional intelligence, listening skills, and managing skills, such as how to provide feedback and how to navigate difficult conversations. Executive coaching helps to build these new skills quickly and effectively. Without this coaching, many technical experts who are promoted into leadership roles are, sadly, set-up to fail.
Results-Based Executive Coaching
Do any of these scenarios resonate with you or your organization? If so, results-based executive coaching will help you build great leaders, high performing teams, and successful organizations.
To learn more about how leadership growth and development can help your organization, contact Arden Coaching at info@ardencoaching.com or 646.684.3777.