What Is Executive Coaching, and Why Is It important?

7 Min. Read

Executive coaching has a transformative impact on leaders, teams, and organizations. It elevates personal performance to previously unimagined levels and generates millions in ROI for businesses who invest in it, as well as delivering significant improvements in talent attraction and retention, collaboration, and innovation. In short, executive coaching works. 

Yet even though executive coaching is a $20 billion industry and growing, there is a lot of confusion about what it is, why it’s important, and how it can add value to your business.

What Is Executive Coaching?

The Bravanti team at ZRG Consulting Solutions has carefully curated four coaching experiences that powerfully transform leadership competency and empower teams. They are:

1. Individual Executive Coaching. One-to-one coaching for senior leaders to maximize their individual and organizational effectiveness, with a focus on self-awareness, leading others, and enterprise-level thinking and influencing capabilities, and a measurable ROI to the organization. 

2. New Leader and Team Acceleration. Whether newly promoted or new to the organization, this experience helps the leader quickly and effectively integrate with their new team to jump-start productivity and performance, making a demonstrable difference to your business in those critical first few months.

3. Team Coaching. We transform executive teams, aligning and engaging senior leaders to work through challenges, improve dynamics, and deliver powerful business results through shared vision and objectives. 

4. Building Coaching Capability. Your leaders and people managers learn coaching skills that transform performance management into inspired action, so they can motivate and empower their team members and accelerate behavior change in your organization.

Executive coaching is a confidential, business-intimate, one-on-one relationship between an external coach and a leader who is seeking growth, development, and impact. Often, they are looking to increase their effectiveness so they can either move up to or have confidence and competency in their current level of leadership.

For example, if you are moving from Vice President to Senior Vice President, this is a big leap and the perfect time to partner with an executive coach who will hold up a mirror to how you show up as a leader, illuminate your blind spots, empower you to harness what’s helping, and address what’s hindering your progress. If you are open to self-reflection and feedback, and committed to taking action and doing the work, it will be a powerful, career-changing journey for you, and game-changer for your organization.

How Does Executive Coaching Work?

Coaching is relational, so the first element to get right is selecting your coach. To facilitate your selection, we meet with you or your organization’s sponsor to discuss the context for your coaching, who you are as a leader, and your coaching goals.  Then, we select two coaches closely aligned with those contextual elements, and you’ll experience sessions each coach to decide who makes the best connection as a coaching partner for you. This gives you assurance that the coaching relationship will flourish from the start.  

Once you’ve chosen your coach, the engagement (at a high-level) typically works like this:

• Client Profile Questionnaire: This self-reflection tool delves into who you are, your principles and values, your strengths and assets, and what you want for yourself, which helps you prepare for coaching and helps the coach understand you at a deeper level.

• Goal Setting: You and your manager agree to the goals for the engagement, and key stakeholders are identified to provide feedback.

• Psychometric Assessment: You’ll complete a psychometric to provide a holistic view of who you are as an individual – values, drivers, strengths, what gets in the way. 

• The coach interviews stakeholders for input into a thematic report on how your leadership is viewed by others in the organization. This is reviewed with you in a coaching session.  

• The Client Profile, assessment results, and stakeholder feedback, along with what you have learned in coaching sessions, robustly inform a Development Action Plan that you co-create with your coach, and implement during the coaching engagement. The plan will also help to sustain momentum after the coaching engagement ends. 

• Regular coaching sessions extend over a period months. The sessions are focused on your action plan and specific deliverables.

• You and your coach will meet with your manager to review progress and discuss the action plan at about midpoint in the engagement. Another checkpoint takes place at wrap-up, to review results and strategize for sustaining momentum after the engagement.

What Is Unique About Our Executive Coaching? 

We’re differentiated by our dual focus on achieving the leader’s goals in tandem with delivering ROI to the business. We use a proprietary ROI Coaching Dashboard that measures tangible and intangible benefits of the leader’s success, and we track these end-to-end throughout the engagement. 

For example, we worked with a global consulting firm that wanted to develop three high performers (of widely different backgrounds) into stronger leaders, especially as the firm was adjusting after a large-scale merger. The results we achieved together included: 

• Combined $2.8 million in ROI. 

• Increased top-line revenue of $1 million plus. 

• Improvements in leadership skills, communication, collaboration, retention, and organizational strength.

• New solutions for clients. 

• Improved client relationships and stakeholder buy-in.

Executive coaching is about helping the individual succeed, but  because of your investment in them, we acknowledge a deep responsibility to deliver measurable financial benefits for your organization. 

Who Benefits from Executive Coaching?

Typically, we work with senior leaders, Vice President through C-suite, who are driven to enhance their leadership competency and impact, in order to accomplish long-term goals for themselves, as well as their organization. High-potential talent in senior leader succession pipelines also benefit greatly from executive coaching. Executives either reach to us themselves or are identified by the organization as leaders in whom they want to invest to carry the company into the future.

What Are The Benefits Of Executive Coaching Within A Business?

Ultimately, it is about seeing a behavior change in an executive that drives demonstrably better results for your business. For example, if your executive is a sales leader, as a result of the coaching, your business would expect to see:

• Increased sales.

• Reduced costs. 

• Faster growth. 

• Increased engagement and retention of team members.

Employees who feels invested in will also put in more discretionary effort, are normally more engaged, and less likely to leave. 

What Are The Benefits Of Executive Coaching On Teamwork?

Within a team, the impact we have is focused on building stronger bonds, improving communication, and strengthening alignment. When we work with organizations on this, the benefits include: 

• Quicker decision-making. 

• Faster speed to market. 

• Higher-performing teams 

What Are The Benefits Of Executive Coaching For Individuals?

Coaches are external to your organization, so they can confidentially and objectively explore your leadership strengths as well as what’s getting in your way. For example, if you want powerful impact when making important presentations, your coach will offer mechanisms for how you can adjust your beliefs and behaviors and enhance speaking skills to achieve your specific objectives.

Ultimately, we don’t know what we don’t know, so having a coach to clarify our strengths, surface our challenges, elevate our performance, and achieve our career goals is of incalculable help. Other benefits include: 

• Reframing mindsets and beliefs to drive sustainable behavior change.  

• Greater self-awareness, including impact on others and business results.  

• Heightened executive presence and influence. 

I once worked with an EVP in his 50s who was struggling with communicating with his Executive Team and Board. He initially wanted nothing to do with coaching, but through working together we identified the blind spot that was getting in the way of his leadership and turned his relationship with his superiors around.

• Increased sales.

• Reduced costs. 

• Faster growth. 

• Increased engagement and retention of team members.

Employees who feels invested in will also put in more discretionary effort, are normally more engaged, and less likely to leave. 

What Are The Benefits Of Executive Coaching On Teamwork?

Within a team, the impact we have is focused on building stronger bonds, improving communication, and strengthening alignment. When we work with organizations on this, the benefits include: 

• Quicker decision-making. 

• Faster speed to market. 

• Higher-performing teams 

What Are The Benefits Of Executive Coaching For Individuals?

Coaches are external to your organization, so they can confidentially and objectively explore your leadership strengths as well as what’s getting in your way. For example, if you want powerful impact when making important presentations, your coach will offer mechanisms for how you can adjust your beliefs and behaviors and enhance speaking skills to achieve your specific objectives.

Ultimately, we don’t know what we don’t know, so having a coach to clarify our strengths, surface our challenges, elevate our performance, and achieve our career goals is of incalculable help. Other benefits include: 

• Reframing mindsets and beliefs to drive sustainable behavior change.  

• Greater self-awareness, including impact on others and business results.  

• Heightened executive presence and influence. 

I once worked with an EVP in his 50s who was struggling with communicating with his Executive Team and Board. He initially wanted nothing to do with coaching, but through working together we identified the blind spot that was getting in the way of his leadership and turned his relationship with his superiors around.

People often get promoted because of their technical expertise, but at a certain level different skills are required to deliver. Without coaching, this executive would have been stuck and never had the breakthrough impact he did.  

By nature, the benefits of coaching for you will be unique to you alone. And as you grow in confidence, work on your feedback, and put your learnings into practice, your team and business will see the benefits. In this way, coaching is a force multiplier for those organizations who choose it. 

What Is the Difference Between Executive Coaching and Mentoring?

Mentoring is when you work with somebody who has done the job that you do, and is offering their experience, perspectives, and advice. Coaching helps you realize who you are as a leader and clarify your goals. Your coach listens deeply and asks powerful, probing questions to help you look within yourself, find your right answers, and move yourself forward. While coaches may occasionally share experiences and alternatives, they are clear when they are doing so, and do not advise or counsel you. In short, coaching is about fuelling self-development, mentoring is about showing you how.

Why Should You Hire An Executive Coach? 

The question is, do you want to succeed faster? If the answer is yes, then you should hire an executive coach. A coach provides an invaluable, confidential, external perspective on how you show up as a leader so you can have greater individual and organizational impact. When you understand the full scope of your strengths and blind spots, and commit to acting on both, you become unstoppable. 

In today’s global economic climate, delivering sustainable business growth is harder than ever. Your greatest differentiator is your people, and organizations who invest in executive coaching are using their strengths and untapped potential within to seize opportunities and stay ahead of the game.  

Read more in our report: Executive Coaching Research: Impact & Return

We partner in business transformation, leadership acceleration, culture transformation, assessment & succession planning, executive and leadership coaching, and talent acquisition. 
 
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