1. An Independent Sounding Board

 If your coach is really doing their job, they will be honest and forthright with you. You will be able to talk with them about personal and professional challenges and opportunities and in return receive open and honest feedback and support. This can reduce feelings of isolation and provide much-needed insights that are hard to gather without trusted third parties. The ability of the coach to be a truth-teller is critical and this rests in the fact that they are not relying on you for their income, nor are they a family member. This gives your coach the freedom to drop truth bombs when needed.

2. Self-Awareness

Research has shown that self-awareness in leaders is highly correlated with organizational effectiveness and profitability. Team members prefer to follow leaders who see themselves clearly and are willing to be vulnerable and transparent with the team. When you begin the coaching journey, your coach will want to gather feedback from your peers and team to get a sense of how you are perceived presently. 

Many coaches use behavioral assessment tools to complement the data they receive from their peers and team. Throughout the coaching engagement, your coach will share those perceptions of you based on observations, interactions with others, and any other tools they employ. This compilation of data points helps your coach provide effective feedback and coaching to help you build a clearer awareness of where you’re strong and where growth opportunities exist. 

NOTE: When I am working with senior executives, I rely on a Behavioral Strategy for Accomplishment instrument which provides an in-depth description of your behavioral patterns, and helps you be aware of and understand your behavioral style. I do this in conjunction with Tom Perrin, a Ph.D. in Psychology, who spends a total of three hours, one-on-one with you to help further clarify your key strengths and opportunities for growth. 

3. Leverage Your UVP’s

Everyone has Unique Value Propositions and as a leader, it is critical to recognize and leverage these strengths within your organization. A perceptive and supportive coach can help you see the uniqueness and value of these capabilities and to help you lean into them to enhance your impact on your team and your company. 

4. Help Define and Refine Your Goals

We all have goals and dreams, but often over time clarity fades and focus gets distorted around what is inherently important to you. An executive coach helps you bring focus to your goals and offers support in their achievement. As a consistent resource to you, your coach can bring those goals back into focus when needed and can also help you re-define and refine them as necessary. Your coach can also help equip you to develop focus around the goals and priorities within your company.

5. Processes

A skilled coach will have processes for helping define key issues and challenges. These tools and questions help you focus and prioritize the core challenges and opportunities that you face at any point in time. Sometimes, simply prioritizing what you tackle next and keeping a focus on that task is enough to positively impact your trajectory. The coach should also have tools to help you in processing these key focus areas.  

6. Skills and Knowledge

A talented coach will provide insights and knowledge that augments or complements that which you bring to the table. They will also help you develop or enhance skills that are necessary for you to succeed in your environment. The goal of the coach is to ultimately amplify your leadership and management skills and potential, and operational wherewithal.

7. Adapt Responses and Priorities

As your company grows and morphs, it will go through fundamental changes that require you to grow and adapt your responses and priorities. Your coach provides insights and counsel to help you navigate these many phases of change and growth.  As you move from working hard “in your business” to working hard “on your business,” your executive coach will help and support you in these transitions. At times, this may mean bringing in complementary team members to expand your ultimate potential. The consummate executive coach can be a powerful resource to help define and divine healthy transitions and additions to your team.

8. Clarity of Team

As your company grows and your team expands, your ability to keep team members in perspective can get distorted by familiarity, distance, and/or time. It is critical for you, as the leader, to keep perspective on the capabilities and deficits existing in your key team members. As you make critical executive decisions around promotions, changing roles and responsibilities, disciplinary actions, and even dismissals, a perceptive coach can offer insights and reflections on those important aspects of your team as an independent resource and an outside perspective. Often, talking through thoughts and concerns around team members with an independent and confidential resource can help give you clarity.

9. Embrace Diversity

We tend to attract and hire people like ourselves. While that feels good at the time, the need to attract complementary and diverse team members is critical. A talented coach can help you see any of these monochromatic threads, if they exist, and help you expand your ability to attract and retain a diverse pool of talent. 

Diversity in your team does not only relate to demographics, it also relates to work style and behavioral tendencies such as assertiveness, sociability, consistency, detail orientation, and self-confidence. An experienced and intuitive coach can help you build a diverse, yet homogeneous team that is well rounded, collaborative, and effective.

10. Self-Care

Bookending self-awareness is self-care! Often, we’re busy taking care of everyone else but ourselves. The coach can help you review your habits and behaviors around self-care and attune you to ways to build positive momentum in your quest for good health and life balance.

11. Confidentiality

Confidentiality is sacrosanct in the coach/client relationship. Any coaching agreement should detail the confidentiality that is also implicit in the relationship. Being able to speak frankly and in confidence with your coach provides the ability to explore areas that you may not be able to discuss with team members, stakeholders, or your family.

12. Results

The ultimate upside of engaging a talented coach is the results. An effective coach is going to help you gain clarity around personal and professional objectives and opportunities. They can help you leverage and build on your strengths. Your coach can be that resource that helps you move to the next level organizationally and personally. 

1. A Willingness to Learn

Just by embarking on the journey of finding an executive coach, you’re expressing a willingness to learn. That willingness needs to be underwritten by a thirst to engage in the exercises and embrace the learnings your coach is bringing to the table. That may involve reading books or articles, completing exercises, seeking other resources, and actively pursuing learning on an ongoing basis.

2.   Personal Accountability

It is critical for the leader to take responsibility and be accountable in the process. As the coach gets a clearer and clearer picture of you and your business, as a trusted third party, they will likely bring some things to the table that could make you feel uncomfortable. Owning those issues or behaviors is tough. As the leader, it is unlikely that many, if any, of your team members will be perfectly frank with you about any issues or behaviors that they feel are negative or destructive to your organization. If your coach brings some things to light you don’t want to hear, you need to be able to process those observations and own them when appropriate. 

3. Making the Time

Allocating and prioritizing time for coaching is critical. Coaching is professional development and needs to be a part of the leader’s allotment of their time. Much of what coaching is doing is helping you work on yourself and on your business. Too often our time as leaders is eaten up working in the business. When we commit and adhere to the commitment of time for coaching, this creates leverage, and many of the things that were repeatedly challenging you as a leader get resolved and disappear from your every day, actually lightening your load. Equally important is making the time to do the homework. At times, your coach will ask you to complete a task or assignment and taking the time to complete these activities on the timeline agreed to is imperative in the coaching journey.

4. Vulnerability, Transparency, and Trust

It’s hard to share some of the most challenging aspects of our work and our personal lives. These admissions are often uncomfortable and confronting. When you’re working with a coach, the very nature of the relationship demands a degree of vulnerability and transparency that allows the coach to guide you through the process toward real and systemic growth and change.

As a result of the confidentiality and intentionality of the coach working through these issues and challenges with you, a relationship of trust will grow. This trust will be underwritten by the authenticity, logic, and empathy of the coach and this is the basis of the Triangle of Trust. 

1. GO OUTSIDE

I spoke in a previous blog about getting outside, in the fresh air. That’s a great start! Get out in the woods, out on the beach, up in the mountains, down and dirty in the garden, or in your local green space. Take your shoes off and do a Richard Gere (see “Pretty Woman” – park scene). It will do you and your immune system a world of good!

2. PRACTICE MINDFUL BREATHING

I have also spoken about breathing and as critical as that is for obvious reasons, mindful breathing has been clinically proven to be able to reduce stress wherever you are. Whether it’s the Wim Hof Method, or the Navy SEAL’s Box breathing technique, breath work can have a significant and immediate impact on the Autonomic Nervous System which controls your response to stress.

3. PRACTICE MEDITATION OR TAKE QUIET TIME

Maybe take some quiet time to contemplate nothing, AKA meditation. The science around the positive impact of this ancient tradition on stress abounds. If that’s not your bag, why not take some quiet time to contemplate good things. Positive things in your life, things to be grateful for, things to look forward to. Either way, when you step back from the pressures of this abnormal state we find ourselves in, we may pull back far enough to look down on all the fuss and realize that it too shall pass.

4. PRACTICE HAVING A POSITIVE MINDSET

Based on this study, probably the most important thing we can do is to be positive about how this will ultimately impact our health. And this positive mental attitude can be underwritten by positive actions that we take, like eating well, exercising and taking good care of ourselves and our loved ones.

Step 1: DISCOVER

It’s amazing what we unearth at times. Very often during the discovery phase, issues or challenges that the leaders have, or have not been aware of come up. We appraise the leadership of fundamental issues and opportunities that exist within the company. In this time of ultimate upheaval, this is a great time to re-imagine your business leveraging some of these opportunities or releasing itself from some of these legacies and holdovers.

Step 2: STRATEGIZE

The fluid nature of this current set of circumstances works well with our approach to strategy. We help our clients look out to the horizon while we place singular focus on the near to mid-term needs. In an evolving situation such as we face at present, making plans for 12 months from now is fraught with peril. We work on a rolling three-month plan, which allows for constant course corrections.

Step 3: PLAN

We feel it’s important to separate planning from strategy. Strategy drives the plan, but this is where we take the strategy and put the detail to it. We work with our clients to allocate resources and responsibilities to get the strategy executed. We consider potential issues and put failsafes in place where necessary.

Step 4: IMPLEMENT

This is where the rubber hits the road. Many times consultants step away at this point, but this is where we step up. There are inevitable gaps and hurdles that come up in the implementation process and our goal is to be a resource to ensure maximum traction for the leaders and their team during this critical phase.

Step 5: RE-ASSESS

This part of the process allows us to help monitor progress and determine if the plan is gaining traction. We feel this is a critical part of our responsibilities to help ensure that things are on course and that we realign the plan, as needed, in real-time.