One crucial aspect of executive coaching is getting the executive to embrace change. Executives often get stuck in their day-to-day routines, unable to step out of their own realm or to fully assess their behaviors.
Throughout an executive coaching program, it’s important to encourage employees to step outside their comfort zones. They need to be excited about the engagement and eager about new opportunities that the future could present rather than worried about change.
If an executive isn’t open-minded or willing to embrace change, the engagement won’t be successful, and the executive won’t reap the benefits of the program.
So how can we help executives embrace executive coaching and be excited about change? The following tips will help you encourage executives within your business to be open to new possibilities:
• Encourage flexibility. Humans are naturally programmed to oppose change. We appreciate security and expect it on a day-to-day basis. However, this security can’t always be guaranteed. By encouraging flexibility within your team, you help them to understand that not everything is certain and how important it is to embrace change.
• Set a direction. When companies experience hardships and times of turmoil and uncertainty, it’s easy to let everything settle before creating a clear-cut action plan. However, without a plan in place, employees have a hard time moving forward and don’t know what they should do next. It’s important to set a direction for your employees to follow so they’re clear about their responsibilities and the expectations placed on them.
If you eventually find that this isn’t the best method for leading your team, then readjust and change the course. It’s best to have a plan of action than to not have direction for your team to follow. This can also show the company that change is sometimes inevitable and that flexibility will pay off in the long run.
• Keep perspective. Keeping a positive perspective goes a long way to embracing change. Help your executives to keep a positive outlook on their roles and the tasks that the company is working on. Having a sense of humor can help executives embrace change on a day-to-day basis. Executives deal with so many variables, so the more people in your company who understand that things don’t always go as planned, the happier they’ll be as a result.
An Arden Coaching executive engagement involves six months of conversation between an executive and their coach. During this time, the partnership will focus on uncovering the driving factors behind an executive’s behavior and habits. Using this information, they work together to establish goals and determine real actions to reach these goals. The engagement focuses on improving an executive’s communication and leadership skills to make them more effective in their role.
If you believe your company could benefit from executing coaching, click here to schedule a consultation with one of the esteemed coaches at Arden Coaching.
