Professional executive coaching is recognized as a valuable professional development benefit for individuals, teams, and groups. Those who have experienced coaching’s benefits and power understand what it is, who it is for, when to do it, how it works, why it works, how to choose a coach, and how to sustain the positive change.  However, many are still not acquainted with the powerful possibilities coaching offers professionals.

Professional coaching is built upon sciences and best practices. There is also an art to establishing rapport, being present in service of others, and asking effective coaching questions. The sciences of neurology, psychology, organizational development, performance enhancement, and coaching itself are the backbone of the profession.  Coaching’s impact has been extensively researched and found to provide significant, quantifiable, bottom line, return on investment.

Key outcomes of effective coaching:

• Improved performance, behavior change, and results
• Identification of strengths, challenges, and opportunities for improvement
• Meaningful new insights into self and one’s environment
• Improved ability to leverage strengths or mitigate challenges and limitations
• Learning of new principles, practices, and skills to enhance leadership, as well as individual and team performance
• Improved goal setting and accelerated goal achievement
• Recognition and overcoming of team’s blind-spots or dysfunction
• Habits that could be interfering with achieving full potential are revealed and altered
• And more

How Coaching Differs From Psychotherapy and Consulting

Many people wonder, what is the difference between coaching, consulting, and psychotherapy? All three require building a trust-based relationship and depend upon commitment and verbal communication.  However, there are significant differences:

Psychotherapy focuses on the past and provides coping support. Talk therapy is well-known, popular, and serves both ‘normal’ individuals and those with significant mental illness.  It is a process that helps people understand their past and heal from problems or events that are causing some degree of lasting stress, pain, or upset. Psychotherapy can be used as a short-term intervention to assist with difficult life episodes (death of loved one, new career, increased stress, etc.). Psychotherapy can go on indefinitely if the patient finds it supports their well-being and ability to clarify and function comfortably. The confidentiality between the therapist and patient is considered privileged, that is; protected by law with a few exceptions. To be sure, some psychotherapeutic interventions focus more on behavior change than others (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) but they all start with a diagnosis of the patient and provide a treatment.

Consulting focuses on the future and provides expert problem solving. If you have a specific problem, you might hire a consultant to provide you with direction and answers. Consultants are experts with specific specialties who help solve technical problems. Lawyers, doctors, business software experts, insurance providers, etc. are all in the consultant space. They ‘fix’ things. These relationships can be deep and trusting because clients rely on the consultant’s expertise to guide them through important and challenging situations into the future. Most conversations with consultants are confidential, but only a few are legally protected, such as communications with lawyers and doctors.

Coaching focuses on the present to impact performance, clarity, and well-being. It is only for the ‘normal’ population. Executive Coaching is a professional development benefit offered to high potentials at any level including the C-Suite. Senior leaders often invest in executive coaching for themselves to better serve the organization. Many in the C-Suite do not have peers to talk openly with and they often want someone who will ‘speak truth to power.’

Clients at all levels of an organization must be motivated and courageous individuals who want to improve their performance through better understanding themselves and their environment. Through self-knowledge and guided consideration of challenges, clients uncover why they behave as they do or why they are perceived by others as they are. Through non-judgmental, focused questioning, the coach invites the client to look at situations from many angles, reveals underlying assumptions, and will notice and reveal habits.

Some of the reasons to hire an executive coach may include:

• I have been promoted and I’m not experienced at managing direct reports
• Our team is not working well together
• I (or someone in the organization) wants to improve as a leader
• Communication within and across teams is not working
• We avoid conflict so shy away from giving and receiving valuable feedback
• We have had a great, successful few years and now I’m feeling overwhelmed
• I want a sounding board as I navigate work challenges
• My leadership team is great, but we are entering a new phase and I want to accelerate their development.
• I waste too much time on details; I need to delegate more.

Professional executive coaching is recognized as a valuable professional development benefit for individuals and teams. Those who have experienced coaching’s benefits and power understand what it is, who it is for, when to do it, how it works, why it works, how to choose a coach, and how to sustain the positive change. However, many are still not acquainted with the powerful possibilities coaching offers professionals.

See: IOC-science  and ICF-research