Individual Executive Coaching - What To Expect

The concept of executive coaching is defined as "the process of equipping executives with the tools, knowledge, and opportunities they need for further personal development and thereby become more interpersonally effective." This implies a partnership requiring an individual to take responsibility for investing time, energy, and resources to develop and apply relevant skills and an organization to take responsibility for setting clear performance expectations and relevant feedback, support and incentives to help the individual succeed.

The need for this has less to do with "tampering with a winning formula" and more to do with getting better at an extremely challenging job in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex operating environment with more and more responsibility. This often means that as the need to perform better and differently occurs in situation where, at a senior level, relevant and constructive feedback is scarce, an executive may be unaware of their impact on others. Moreover, what to change, how to change it and how to measure success is also more problematic.

The coaching process helps people obtain information that is personally relevant to achieving their goals. People are motivated to work on their development when they perceive discrepancies between where they are and where they wish to go. This process creates an action plan for development which:

· Is very specific and actionable
· Underscores the executive's personal responsibility for change
· Draws upon external resources for growth
· Emphasizes improvements in current behaviors while increasing readiness for the future
· Develops methods of measuring results

Coaching - The Mirrors of Your Life
Executive coaching is an intensive, feedback-based process designed to take you through this developmental process. This "program" holds up mirrors to you sufficiently powerful to get messages through that something may be done; it assists in generating a developmental plan based on this feedback; it provides a structure to keep this plan on track, and, as a follow-up, conducts a reassessment to measure the success of this effort.

This program evolves through four phases, with roots in both organizational and clinical psychology as well as adult learning perspectives and your own business imperatives.

Phase I: Assessment
Your leadership, interpersonal skills, personality, and values will be assessed through the use of interview, psychological testing and assessment. This process utilizes information obtained from superiors, peers, and direct reports through a very comprehensive 360-degree feedback instrument, using norms from an upper management data base. After all this data has been compiled, I will review the information with you and integrate the various components into an objective, constructive feedback session. This forms the basis for developmental planning.

Phase II : Consolidation and Developmental Planning
The above data are owned totally by you. It is up to you to decide what to report to others in the organization. It is also a challenge to digest, understand, and summarize. Out of this we will produce a list of major strengths and developmental needs. This summary list may be shared when appropriate with your manager or others in your organization. A concrete development plan will take shape out of this and specific plans are committed to (who will be involved, what will happen, what time line is realistic, etc.)

Phase III: Implementation
Too many management development programs end with this type of planning. Executive coaching emphasizes follow-through. It builds in support and input as you work on translating insight and motivation into action. The exact nature of the assistance depends on the changes sought. This may unfold over an extended period of time. It takes place at two levels - behavioral and personal, and tries to channel this energy so that the "good" of the individual and the "good" of the organization are aligned.

Phase IV: Reassessment
The reassessment is a small scale version of the original assessment, often involving other individuals in a formal feedback process to provide a comparison to the original "snapshot." Reassessments hold you - as well as me - accountable for results.