Who Is An Executive Coach? What Does An Executive Coach Do?
by Shahnawaz Alam Job & Career 06 October 2023
Coaching is a word limited to no specific time or level of profession. As an ever-evolving species in an ever-evolving corporate world, we constantly need coaching.
Coaching can be the building block of any career, or any objective someone is trying to meet. Executive coaching is a type of coaching that helps C-suite employees build their leadership qualities. It helps them regulate their thought process, stress management skills, and more. Whether someone has been in a leadership position for years or is transitioning into one recently, they can opt for executive coaching.
Coaching can help leaders uncover different areas of their skills and capabilities. Read this article to learn about executive coaches and how they help you.
What Is Executive Coaching?
Like most other coaching relationships, executive coaching involves a coach and a trainee. The only difference here is that the trainee is a C-suite executive. The role of the executive coach here is to help the trainee or the C-suite executive polish their leadership styles and increase their management skills.
More so, such coaching also helps the trainees overcome overwhelming stress, conflict, and turbulence. An executive coach helps their clients fathom their extent of skills and proficiency through expert training, compassion, and constant support. They provide support to their clients as they keep building their leadership skills.
Usually, clients willing to succeed as a leader and develop a high-achievement and goal-oriented workplace need executive coaching. Most of the executive coaches provide coaching over phone calls, via mail, or through virtual platforms.
Who Is An Executive Coach?
An executive coach takes on the responsibility of acting as a career coach to C-suite employees of an organization. The duties of an executive coach fall under three different categories: –
Mentoring: It helps nurture the clients by exposing them to new perspectives, people, and scenarios. It helps a professional build a growth mindset.
Counseling: Counseling deals with different problem-specific and emotion-based scenarios. The executive coach acts as a counselor to help their clients examine their past and how that affects their behaviors. It also helps them develop their strategies and provides a way forward.
Coaching: Coaching requires lots of introspection. However, coaching is all about the future of the client, not their past. It involves personal development, goal setting, and propelling growth.
They help their clients build their leadership skills. They also take on several responsibilities of teaching their clients, include –
- Optimizing leadership performance.
- Managing stress and overwhelming situations.
- Implement changes.
- Identify and overcome obstacles.
- Helping them to adapt their leadership style to changing situations.
Their responsibilities to the websites involve taking on different responsibilities such as –
- Personal and professional objectives.
- relationships
- Strengths and weaknesses.
Who Hires An Executive Coach?
While we may have restricted executive coaches to C-suite employees in the definition, this is not always the case. Anyone can hire an executive coach and get trained under them. Many aspiring professionals in different industries want to work in different industries.
Some of the professionals who work at a normal or junior executive level can hire an executive coach. They can get this professional coaching to build their soft skills managerial qualities, and develop their EQ. Perhaps there are many examples of certain professionals who started off from the grassroots level, and with the help of executive coaching, they ended up on a different plain.
According to a recent survey carried out by the Harvard Business Review, the behaviors of organizations hiring executive coaches have changed. Ten years ago, companies used to hire coaches to fix toxic workplace behaviors. Now, the focus has shifted to increasing the capabilities of high-performing employees.
Here is what the survey suggests –
- Developing high potential or facilitating 48% of work.
- Act as a sounding board 26%.
- Address different derailing behaviors 12%.
Aside from changing toxic workplace behaviors, executive coaching has moved to a completely different spectrum.
What Does An Executive Coach Help Achieve?
The areas of improvement and development with an executive coach are vast. But, if we were to look at the major areas, then we would find a picture that looks somewhat like this –
Driving Results
Your psyche and thought process are directly connected to how you react, behave, enact, and execute. A professional executive works to drive results by helping you understand your thoughts. They help you identify how your thoughts can affect your mood and your behavior.
Creating Followership
Through executive leadership, a leader can build followership. Just assigning work to people and pushing them will not give a leader the desired output. Instead, pushing too much can make them lose what they already have and even lose teammates. But, coaching can help leaders inspire and build followership.
Managing All Parts
A manager needs to manage all areas of their work responsibilities. They have to manage the upper-level employees, manage across teams, and manage down. Executive coaching can help find answers to all of these areas of management.
Situational Leadership
A leader must adapt to lead in different scenarios. They have to maintain their position in different changing situations and solve unexpected problem areas. This is where their skills to adapt to difficult situations come in. Keep reading to find out more.
Mental Fitness
Mental fitness is the strength a leader must focus on. It is not just the technical skills that make a leader. An executive coach can help a leader develop their mental fitness. They can help their clients achieve mental strength, learn how to stay motivated and earn the ability to keep their poise during any overwhelming or stressful situation.
Thanks to an executive coach, their emotional resilience and strength to keep talking under difficult circumstances also improve. An executive coach helps learn how to build and maintain mental fitness and manage stress during difficult situations.
Doing The Right Thing
An ethical leader always does the right thing, and they do it the right way. They put the organizational needs first, then their team, and then they put themselves. An executive coach can help their clients develop ethical leadership qualities.
Bottom Line
Executive coaching can help you transform your career. Whether you are a high-level employee or a budding professional, executive coaching can help a lot. Professionals up the leadership ladder can transform their qualities, improving overall performance and work culture.
Hopefully, this content was helpful. However, if you have any queries regarding executive coaching, please shoot them in the comment box. We will address them and try to provide the answer you want. Thank you for reading.
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