Coaching and Mentoring in Practice

What benefits should an executive expect to gain from our coaching engagements?

If the executive enters the coaching program with an open mind and a willingness to grow they should expect to gain the following benefits.

See yourself more clearly

This is a fundamental cornerstone of successful coaching. Research shows that most of us don’t see ourselves very clearly and the problem is that it’s critically important that we do. You can’t plot a journey to a given destination if you don’t know where you’re starting from. Accurate self-awareness in leaders is highly correlated with effectiveness and profitability

See others more clearly

Leaders often run into problems because of their inaccurate assessments of the people they work with. Losing good people, they underestimated and missing targets or outcomes based on the failings of people they overestimated. The same skills you develop in seeing yourself more clearly will enable you to make more accurate assessments of others

Learn new ways to respond

To quote the title of Marshall Goldsmith’s famous coaching novel “What got you here won’t get you there”. The skills that were sufficient to get you to your current position will probably of themselves not be enough to make you successful at your new position or get you to your next position. Adding new tools to your leadership toolkit is a fundamental way of achieving your goals

Leverage your existing strengths

Understanding the uniqueness and the value of your existing skills and learning how to leverage them to make them even more valuable comes from greater self-awareness and it is part of the coache’s role to help you achieve this, particularly for existing skills that you may be underestimating.

Build more productive relationships

Leaders can dramatically limit their effectiveness by only being able to develop productive relationships with certain types of people. All too often this will be people like themselves. Coaching will help you recognise that tendency and help you develop tools to work with a broader set of personality types

Achieve what you want

Coaching will enable you to become clearer about your goals and about what you are capable to do in order to achieve them. The coach is your support system on your journey between where you are today and where you want to be. Providing honest and unbiased feedback and guiding you to stay on track along the way. Most importantly the coach is unreservedly on YOUR team