Find the Right Coach

Find the Right Coach: 8 Guidelines for Executives

Executive summary by Dr. Robert Karlsberg and Dr. Jane Adler

It seems that coaches are everywhere these days.Senior Executives are hiring coaches in increasing numbers, and for a wider variety of reasons. In the past, coaching was viewed primarily as a remedial tool for executives whose careers were skidding. Today more and more leaders use coaches on a consultative basis, for everything from accelerating leadership transitions to facilitating board, shareholder and employee relations.

Today’s leaders proactively seek coaching to build on strengths, accelerate initiatives and identify potential derailing obstacles before they cause serious damage.

Over many years of working with senior executives, we have formulated 9 practical suggestions. To gain the most from your coaching experience, follow these guidelines:

1.Define your goals

What are your most immediate goals?

Some common reasons why Executives seek coaching:

• accelerate career advancement

• increase leadership effectiveness

• improve presentation and communication skills

• improve negotiation skills

• reduce stress

• enhance career transitions

• provide insight for more objective decisions

• improve interpersonal and team relationships

• assist with crisis or change leadership

• help lead culture change

• enhance executive hiring decisions

• improve delegation and reduce time constraints

• plan retirement or the next career

2. Establish Rapport

You want a coach who listens. The best coaches are objective and unbiased. There’s no formula for assessing rapport in advance.

3. Be Yourself

The right coach will help bring out your best, not try to change you into someone else. One sure way to recognize a poorly trained coach is if he or she recommends a categorical change based on a textbook standard. Experienced coaches can pinpoint specific areas where a small change can lead to a significant result. The right coach won’t try to change you just for the sake of change. Find a coach who’ll help you be your best self.

4. Look for a positive focus

A coach is there to help you improve your game, not to ferret out and fix every flaw. The best results are achieved by focusing on strengths, not weaknesses. Of course the right coach will help you identify and correct major stumbling blocks to progress.

5. Confidentiality Is Key

A sense of trust and safety is critical to a productive coaching experience. Coaching isn’t therapy, but you should feel comfortable revealing any relevant information to your coach. Make sure your coach has a confidentiality policy with which you’re comfortable.

6. Look for Psychological Savvy

While advanced degrees aren’t any guarantee of effectiveness, a psychologically informed coach can help you use interpersonal dynamics to finesse conflicts and reduce any negative impact on company performance. A good coach will be multifaceted – able to combine one-on-one coaching with effective team intervention as needed.

7. Value Honesty

It’s easy for coaches with minimal training to fall into a trap of giving feel-good answers. Dr. Steven Berglas, former Harvard psychiatrist and instructor at UCLA’s Anderson school, explained in an interview with Chief Executive Magazine, “A lot of times consultants and coaches are deemed great because they’re adding syrup to a sundae. Instead of looking for consensus, weigh your coach’s input before you make your own decision.

8. Give your coach access.

Allow ample rein to inquire, research, survey, whatever it takes to thoroughly understand the issues and, most importantly, get you the information you need. Locating the right coach for your needs can be tricky but these guidelines can increase your chances for success. They will help you launch an ongoing, beneficial partnership with your coach and keep it that way.

Coaches Life

What in the World is Life Coaching?

Executive summary by Cameron Powell

In my speaking engagements I have often compared coaching today to psychotherapy in the 1920s. The level of public understanding of coaching, outside of people in a certain socio-demographic category, is still in its infancy. To the not-yet-initiated, coaching can sound like this. Coaching, whether for career or business, existential questions or relationships, begins with alignment. It's not by magic that coaches help clients achieve their goals. Most fundamentally, coaches help clients get out of their own way.

COACHING BRIEFLY DEFINED

Here is one definition of coaching, per the International Coach Federation: "Professional Coaching is a professional partnership between a qualified coach and an individual or team that supports the achievement of extraordinary results, based on goals set by the individual or team. Through the process of coaching, individuals focus on the skills and actions needed to successfully produce their personally relevant results."

"The individual or team chooses the focus of conversation, while the coach listens and contributes observations and questions as well as concepts and principles which can assist in generating possibilities and identifying actions. . . . Coaching accelerates the individual's or team's progress by providing greater focus and awareness of possibilities leading to more effective choices. . . . .

[R]esults are a matter of the individual's or team's intentions, choices and actions, supported by the coach's efforts and application of coaching skills, approaches and methods." If your definition of a coach is borrowed from high school or college athletics, where the athlete is beneath the coach and can even be dismissed by him, then the term "coaching" may be a bit misleading to you. A personal or executive coach is more like the coach of a pro track star or tennis player: in these professional relationships, the coach and the client are two co-equals and partners, and it's actually the client who decides how long the coach stays on the team.

A coach will help you implement strategies to reach your goals, tactical steps to carry out your strategy, and day to day accountability to keep you focused on the tactics, the strategy, the goal -- all while explicitly remaining true to your values.

Coaching is at its root about expanding your awareness and making you accountable to yourself. Coaches expand clients' awareness about themselves and then help them to be accountable to what they have learned.

WHO GETS COACHED?

Clients are not attempting, through coaching, to address emotional pain or psychological disorders. This is one of the key differences between coaching and counseling. See more at http://www.ferocecoaching.com/coaching-and-counseling.html. Coachable clients are functioning well and able to take action in the direction of their goals. Critically, coaching need not resolve issues of the past in order to move forward.

The coaching relationship is the key to its success. Coach and client are partners. A rarity in relationships, coach and client are collaborators in a joint enterprise: the client. At my coaching firm, our philosophy is that clients already have many of the answers within them, and to the extent that’s the case, it’s the coach’s job to draw them out.

Coaches don't often hold themselves out as expert or authority on subject matter so much as on process. The client and her coach jointly choose the topics of their work together, the format, and the outcomes the client desires. Coaches are for the emotionally mature. Those who imagine that a coach can turn their lives around are not yet coachable under most coaches' ethics. A coach is someone you retain only when you are ready.

FUNDAMENTAL SKILLS, NOT SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTISE

There is rarely such a thing as a "type" or "field" of coaching, wherein life coaches could be considered somehow different from relationship coaches. The reason there is usually no difference between, say, life or personal coaching on the one hand and executive.

coaching on the other, is that these titles describe only the client, not the coaching itself. What is the consequence of coaching being the same no matter who the client is? To be a career coach, it may help to have some knowledge of career resources, of course. The same is true for specialty aspects of business coaching, entrepreneurship coaching, or leadership coaching. But in general, you should opt for a coach with superb coaching skills and chemistry over a coach with subject matter expertise.