Understanding The Principles of Executive Career Coaching
One of the success secrets known to professional athletes is that it’s difficult if not impossible to reach high levels of success on your own. Researching athletes at the highest levels of any sport will reveal in every case there is a coach and sometimes several coaches supporting them.
Furthermore, the coach is not just helping the athletes perform at their best functional level; they are also working with the athlete on best ways to cope with mental stress and to further their careers.
For this same reason, Executive Career Coaching has become a mainstay in many large prestigious organizations like NASA, Delta Airlines, and Jaguar Land Rover. At Jaguar Land Rover an Executive Career Coaching program was implemented with tremendous results.
“For Sandra Goddard, the program had a great effect. For the first time ever within Jaguar Land Rover demand was outstripping supply, as coaching became seen as positively developmental rather than a punishment. The level of coaching offered had changed too, becoming transformational rather than transactional.” – The Jaguar Land Rover website
If you are an executive, an executive considering a career move, or even an executive wanting to move up the organizational ladder, how can an Executive Career Coaching relationship help?
First, it will help the client become more self-aware, building that understanding of where they are currently and then, what direction they want to go. During the coaching conversations with their executive career coach, the client will discover what they understand from their current view about their chosen career as well as any road blocks that may be diverting them from reaching the next level. All of us, no matter what success we achieve, have blind spots. Areas where our belief systems are not supporting us and holding us back.
In Executive Career Coaching the executive coach brings their experience, skills, and training to help impact on a client’s given situation. Together with the client they can co-create a strategy for achieving further success. Moreover, working with an experienced executive career coach will often get the client to their goal more quickly than if the client tried to do so on their own.
Executive Career Coaching is a powerful relationship designed to focus on the client’s career and life objectives. Once the client has explored what their career objectives are, the coach can then help them design and develop a strategic plan to accomplish those goals.
Working with an Executive Career Coach focuses on several areas including:
• What are the client’s personal values and what motivates the client to achieve their goals?
• What changes need to take place in the client’s current career position that will aid the client in achieving their goals?
• What are the client’s strengths, skills, and knowledge that will assist the client in transitioning into a new career path?
• What new skills does the client need to acquire to help him or her achieve their goals?
• What obstacles might prevent the client from achieving their goals?
Through the coaching conversation, the client and executive career coach may brainstorm and co-develop a plan of action. The executive career coach will ask the client questions that support the client in gaining clarity about the specific steps the client needs to take to achieve their goals. These concepts to be explored might include:
• What steps does the client need to take to get from where they are to where they want to be?
• When will the client begin each action step? (Executive career coaches will guide the client to state this in very specific terms, i.e. what day, what time of day, how many times a day/week/month).
• How does the client plan to stay on track OR get back on track if the client becomes distracted?
Executive Career Coaching has become much in demand in the corporate world. Working with an executive career coach has been proven to bring meaningful and desirable results for both client and coach alike.
If you are an executive, with a passion for helping others, becoming an executive career coach just might be the next great career move for you!