Executive Coaching

Why Coaching?

It is notable that the traits and behaviors that get a manager to the current level, are often not the ones that serve him or her at the next.  In fact the traits that are responsible for success at lower or mid-level management often become impediments at higher levels.  The further you go up the organization, the harder it becomes to get honest unbiased feedback from others.  We provide an independent, unbiased, in-depth and confidential way for getting performance feedback.  This is where an experience third party coach can be particularly helpful.  Executive coaching can yield great results for busy executives in helping them to learn, adapt and adjust to this rapidly changing environment.  Executive coaching is seen as a wise investment with a healthy ROI as observed by many independent experts.

What is Coaching?

Executive Coaching is a structured, but personalized, one-on-one process for learning to be more effective.

• Executive coaching is an efficient and convenient way to identify and clear roadblocks.
• Executive coaching is a highly personalized experience that must be tailored to the personal and business needs of the client.
• A skillful coach serves multiple roles such as a facilitator, business advisor, personal consultant, and a sounding bard.
• A coach isn’t a therapist. Coaching is for healthy normal people who are interested in learning how to do things differently and better.

Coaching is Creating New Insights not Problem Solving

It is important to acknowledge that effective executive coaching is really about creating new insights and behaviors, not about changing the person.

Benefits from Coaching

Executive coaching is a powerful way to fine tune and improve your management and leadership styles to ensure these are serving your personal and business goals.  Executive coaching has many benefits including:

• Help you understand, in detail, what you do that has made you successful and why
• Identify how to better deploy your strengths and positive attributes to current situations
• Identify and overcome personal, interpersonal, and business barriers to excellent performance
• Grow and explore new ideas, alternative approaches and solutions
• Clarify where you want and need to be and help you ensure that your behaviors and tactics are serving your goals
• Create confidence that you fully understand your challenges and have a clear path to meeting your personal goals

Attributes of the Effective Coach

What is an effective executive coach?  An effective executive coach must have the necessary business knowledge and experience, be able to look at issues from both the strategic and human sides of the enterprise, be capable of quickly understanding the key technical aspects of the business as well as the challenges of changing human behavior, and should possess competent research skills to be able to ask penetrating questions and collect useful data.  The effective coach should also be certified to use a collection of licensed instruments and profiles.

James Haupert draws on many years of consulting and coaching experience with CEO’s, division managers, VP level and other executive levels in many Fortune 500 and 1000 corporate settings.  He has worked with managers in many industries and across the enterprise. Since 1990, he has coached hundreds of executives to find improved skills and behaviors to better meet their personal goals.

What Should I Look for in My Coach

Let’s start with the most important point – the right coach has to fit your needs and your situation and the things you want to work on.  Obviously you want to have a match between the skills and knowledge of your coach and what you want to accomplish.  You probably don’t want to select a psychologist coach to fix a business strategy problem, nor a coach with a manufacturing background to help you with a sales problem.  Beyond this obvious point, what should you be looking for?  Here’s some useful questions to evaluate in a prospective coach:

• What does this coach know about my business?   My industry?  My function and type of work environment?
• Does this coach have the right balance of sound theoretical or academic knowledge combined with experience in management practice?
• Does this coach have a clearly deployed methodology that fits my situation?
• How are the outcomes of his or her coaching determined?
• What kind of data collection and feedback does this coach use?  How does this work?
• What new insights, personal learning and behavioral improvement can this coach deliver for me?
• Can this coach gain the trust and confidence of my peers and key stakeholders to get them to open up and give honest feedback?
• How flexible is this coach?  Is the experience of this coach broad enough to meet my needs if we need to change the coaching plan after the 360 interviews?

Four Advantages of Having a Coach – The reasons busy managers typically choose executive coaching services are:

• Convenience – This is a much more cost and time effective alternative to offsite executive programs. Coaching doesn’t take you out of your office.
• Personalized and Focused – It is more focused because it is targeted to your specific situation and is supported by a step by step approach that you control.
• Speed – a structured third party process is an accelerated way for busy executives to identify and work issues, in real time, that fits their schedules.
• Timely Feedback – Too often, performance feedback comes after the fact when it may be too late to be very useful.  Data collected through a formal 360 process is a timely way to identify and prevent issues early before they become problems.