Executive Coaching: How to Prepare for Executive Coaching

Executive coaching is a type of business coaching program wherein an executive-level employee works with a professional to improve their leadership skills. Executive coaches differ from life coaches in the sense they focus on professional development for senior management officials rather than assistance for people who want to gain more control over their personal lives and issues.

Business executives can work with their human resources team to select a good coach for their unique purposes. Professionals in the field of executive coaching might possess a coaching certification from a reputable institution or be an experienced independent contractor. In either case, read reviews and case studies from other clients to ensure you select a coach equipped to provide this sort of professional development training.

Once you select a coach, you’ll work together to come up with a leadership development plan as well as a schedule to regularly check in with each other. These sessions help you pinpoint problem areas for correction and strengths you want to continue improving. Some people choose to work with an executive coach for a defined period of time, while others continue to meet with their coaches in perpetuity.

Executive coaches help professionals become better leaders. Consider these reasons to seek out the benefits of executive coaching:

• To build confidence: As a business owner or executive-level employee, you might feel inadequate in your position of authority. An executive coach can help you learn to feel more confident in your leadership style and build the qualities necessary to oversee and guide a wide array of stakeholders.
• To explore your psyche: To better understand your own thought processes and personality, sometimes all it takes is an external coach to serve as a sounding board. Maintaining a regular executive coaching engagement with a trained professional allows you to increase your sense of self-awareness as a person and as a leader.
• To fill gaps in your experience: You can work with an executive coach to better develop leadership competencies you feel you could improve. This allows senior management officials to develop high-potential areas of growth into fully developed skill sets. An executive coach can also help you identify these gaps in the first place.
• To improve your work-life balance: In professional performance coaching like this, some degree of personal development can occur as a welcome side effect. As you become a better executive, you can also enact behavior changes to improve your work-life balance because you’ve become more proficient with your professional responsibilities.
• To prepare for a promotion: Executive coaches can help you make the leap from employee to a new role as a business leader. If you’re making the jump from middle management to the C-suite, an executive coach can help you get ready for the decision-making and leadership skills an executive or vice president requires.

Executive coaching can help you lay the groundwork for professional success. Keep these five tips in mind to get the most out of this type of coaching experience:

1. 1. Be honest and authentic. As a senior leader, you have a duty to be honest, authentic, and open—and the same goes for your involvement in the executive coaching process. To reap the most benefits from this experience, share your true and unvarnished feelings about your current situation with your coach. They’ll help you the most when you’re able to express true vulnerability.
2. 2. Define clear objectives. Make your bottom-line goals clear from the very beginning of your relationship with an executive coach. This helps inform them as to how they can best lead you through personal goal setting. It also helps them see where their leadership coaching skills are most necessary. For example, if you want to focus primarily on overseeing your direct reports, make that clear so you can stay focused on that goal as opposed to venturing off into other arenas.
3. 3. Keep an open mind. When you sit down with a career coach, open yourself up to their input. If you stay closed off, you’re less likely to gain important insights from this sort of relationship. Executive coaching works best when you approach the process with an open mind.
4. 4. Stay on target. Stay dedicated to talking primarily about your career in your professional coaching sessions. While there might be some additional benefits for your life outside of work as a byproduct, personal life coaching is more suitable if this is your primary focus.
5. 5. Vet executive coaching candidates. Finding the best executive coach for you means vetting multiple candidates. Look into accredited and reputable executive coach certification programs as a barometer of who might be the best possible coach to enlist as a guide.

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