Everyone’s heard of life coaching, but perhaps not as many people have ever heard of executive coaching. Sometimes you need some professional help achieving goals at work or figuring out how to maximize your productivity or need assistance in getting “unstuck” and moving the company along. Executive coaching can assist high level executives or those in crucial management positions brainstorm ideas that can help their company in the long run. For example, an advertising executive could learn more about video marketing, media training, and work on general communication improvement with his or her staff, liaisons from other businesses, and the target audience. It’s a method of letting an executive achieve more growth within the workplace and learn new techniques to help them along their career path that benefit the company they work for as well.
What Is Executive Coaching?
The goal of executive coaching is to get individuals in higher up positions with a company to move into the position or place that they want their business (and themselves) to be in. This requires the executive start approaching things differently — it’s a different kind of learning that lets the individual have a better understanding of how they’re learning and how it’s benefitting them. Because the individual is undergoing coaching from a third-party that has no stake in the company, its success or failures, and is not influenced in any way by the company, they can provide a special level of focus that inter-staff coaching or teamwork can’t. Don’t mistake this for mentoring or therapy — coaching is more action-based and is a forward moving process. There’s no real “looking back”; clients should be focusing on the present and future.
How Does Executive Coaching Benefit the Company as a Whole?
Executives in a company are relied upon to take care of a variety of other tasks in their day to day life. In managing a crucial part of the company or a significant amount of staff, it leaves them only a small window of time to work on their own professional development, which can be a key part of having them lead the company in the best way possible. Often, they have too much to do or are too stressed out to start using the best and most effective management practices.
Executive coaching can help streamline that process and emphasize the importance of making time for them to do so. Their enhanced development and growth can majorly benefit the company as a whole. For example, they may implement new practices, such as increased video marketing or video production.
Say a marketing executive starts paying more attention to the competition and the work his or her employees are doing. BrightRoll released a survey that polled 150 top advertising executives; it showed that over 90% thought that online video was as or more effective than display advertising. Three quarters thought it was more effective than television advertising and almost 70% thought it was better than social media. And with around 1 billion people using YouTube and video ads getting to over half the total population in the United States over 120 times a month on average, that makes sense!
What is the Process of Executive Coaching Like?
Executive coaching is for way more than just a couple of sessions. There’s a minimum of six months to a year of executive coaching, where clients pinpoint and prioritize what issues they see with their development and goals, and develop a plan for change with their coach. Usually the client and coach will undergo an initial session where they talk about what the client wants to get out of the relationship, what exactly can be expected from the relationship, some basic guidelines and rules, and timing and logistic. The client can also suss out how well the coach’s approach fits his or her own needs here and choose to either move forward or seek out a different coach.
Executive coaching can be an incredibly helpful process for executives who are dissatisfied with their performance or who are seeking to consistently improve their company and the way management is handled within the company.