Hints and tips
By Rob Cram (January 2008 Issue)
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8 tips on picking the best executive coach
Successful organisations that are ambitious and expect a lot from their executive team use top executive coaches. Top companies recognise that developing their senior teams will significantly aid the progress of their whole company. How do you know if your chosen coach is going to be any good? Proactive executives use coaching to tap into their potential and achieve greater fulfilment to excel in their job, grow as people and influence change. An excellent executive coach achieves dramatic results and is cost-effective.
So how do you select your coaches? There are seven key questions that top organisations should ask themselves before hiring a coach.
- What have they achieved through coaching? Who has been promoted, or how has a business changed because of their coaching?
- What will they achieve through coaching, within their latest project? How keen are they to be tied to tangible, measurable results? A good coach will work to, and achieve, very specific objectives – and an excellent coach will exceed them.
- What type of coach are they? Are they focused firmly and pragmatically upon the bottom line? An exceptional coach will have a solution to fix your problem.
- What model do they follow? Most successful coaches avoid any one model and adopt an eclectic but focused approach. Is their approach sensitive with people, demanding on issues and focused on results?
- How intellectually capable and mentally athletic are they? You need to brief them to understand your business or situation, but after that you need them to tune quickly into the way you think and be one step ahead.
- Are they a freeloader – how hard do they work? Successful coaches will prepare in detail for each session and have a process for follow-up.
- What unique knowledge or insight do they have? Are they recycling the same old hackneyed management development training fodder or do they have something new to offer?
- Does the relationship work? There needs to be trust, liking and respect for the coaching to work. You, the executive being coached, should feel comfortable with the choice.
World class coaches should be:
- stimulating
- challenging
- knowledgeable
- humorous – at times
- adept at keeping the process alive
- engaging
- original
- adaptable.
You should constantly review. Look back and add up all the managers, directors and CEOs who have achieved promotions, risen to the board, accelerated the development of their companies, overcome skills weaknesses and have a broader strategic approach and made the business more money. That is the real value of coaching excellence.
Rob Cram is director of training at Stirling Training Consultants. He can be contacted on +44(0)20 8993 6663, at stc@stirlingtraining.co.uk or via www.stirlingtraining.co.uk
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- Legal update
- Thinking tools
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- Super models
- Hints and tips
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- L Vaughan Spencer
Added Tuesday, 15 January, 2008, 17:37
This is an interesting piece, but I wonder if it should not do even more to recognise that there are different valid models for coaching? One of the tips suggests that good coaches will bring solutions to problems, but many coaches would argue that they should not be so directive. Rather the aim of a good coach should be to help individuals work out their own solutions. I also suspect bottom line effects will be hard to disentangle from other interventions and link directly to coaching. I wonder what others think?