How To Maximize Executive Coaching For The Future Of Your Organization’s Performance Management

A few key coaching tips to help your organization

Business coaching, executive coaching, performance coaching or leadership coaching…the coaching profession goes by many names, but all these types of coaching are focused on the valuable goal of helping HR professionals to improve their executive’s performance. The market for business coaching is booming, reaching $12 billion in total revenue in 2019, with 2.8% annual growth during the past five years. 
 

More HR professionals are realizing the benefits of business coaching as a way to help their top leaders navigate complex decisions and groom future talent for success. Coaching is even making a starring appearance on shows like “Billions,” a critically acclaimed drama series on Showtime, where one of the main characters is an in-house performance coach who works with hedge fund traders and managers to boost their financial results.
 
Whether your company is just beginning to experiment with executive coaching or whether you have a coaching program in place, it’s important to manage your coaching relationships carefully to avoid some possible negative complications and ensure optimal results. 
 
Here are a few key tips to help your organization to get the most out of performance coaching and design more effective coaching relationships:  

Keep Coaching Focused on Career Performance 

Executive coaching is a valuable way to help leaders and high-potential talent to manage their emotions and confront their fears – but it’s important for HR professionals to keep workplace coaching focused on work-related challenges and career-specific issues, not personal lives. Executive coaches can help people improve their career performance by confronting self-limiting beliefs, changing their communication styles, learning new management methodologies and techniques, or embracing more positive attitudes. While all of these skills can have elements of personal development, they ultimately are all focused on improving performance at work.

If you keep your coaching program focused on business, you will achieve valued results: studies have found that 86% of companies believe coaching achieves a strong ROI, and 70% of people who receive coaching achieve improvement in communication skills, relationship-building skills, and work performance.

Don’t Confuse Executive Coaching with Therapy 

Performance coaches in a workplace setting – even if they have advanced degrees that would allow them to work as licensed therapists – should limit the scope of their practice to workplace issues, and should not expect clients to confide in them about personal issues that would normally be addressed with a therapist. 
 
Executive coaching is different from therapy, and organizations should not confuse the two: these are two different professional disciplines with different boundaries and limitations. Therapists have more complicated ethical and regulatory compliance expectations that are not always the right fit for a workplace setting. 
 
Working with executive coaches can help your talent focus on work-related issues, while therapy is often a better fit for helping with personal life challenges or mental health and emotional wellness.   

Set Clear Goals for the Coaching Relationship 

Unlike therapy, which is often subjective, open-ended, and not specifically goal-oriented, performance coaching is intended to help top executive talent achieve greater specificity and clarity on how to measure progress. Upon entering a coaching program, you should have some specific goals in mind for what you want them to achieve from the coaching relationship, and the coach should offer a specific timeline of when to expect results. 
 
Goals for executive coaching will vary widely depending on the executive and the coaching program, but goals may include such specific measurable targets such as “onboard 5 new sales hires by the end of Q3” or “commit to launching new product campaign in 2 target markets” or “make a decision on whether to expand the executive leadership team by next month.” 
 
Executive coaching is one of the most powerful methods to improve your organization’s leadership strength and to nurture emerging talent in your ranks. But to get the most out of your coaching program, be sure to focus on issues related to work performance while maintaining boundaries around personal or mental/emotional health issues. Don’t expect a coach to serve as a therapist, and vice versa. And most important of all, be sure to set clear goals and communicate expectations up front to maximize your organization’s performance management objectives. 

Author Bio

Chessa Eskandanian-Yee is the CEO of LeaderEQ, an Artificial Intelligence-Based Executive Coaching. Visit https://leadereq.ai  Connect Chessa Eskandanian-Yee Follow @LeaderEQai