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HOW DO COACHES HELP?
Readers, the week on the Educated Leadership Blog we are going discuss the practice of Executive Coaching.
The exercise was to reflect on the following statement:
“To be an executive coach, it is necessary to know that clients are the first and best experts capable of solving their own problems and achieving their own ambitions; that is precisely the main reason why clients are motivated to call on a coach. When clients bring important issues to a coach, often they already made a complete inventory of their personal or professional issues and identified all possible (known) options. Clients have already tried working out their issues alone, and have not succeeded.”
The first sentence does not sound correct to me. Coaches can be called for many reasons. Maybe the client doesn’t know what they want out of their career. Maybe they are not capable of solving their own problems. (If they could, would a coach have been called?) As noted by Coutu, et al, (2009) many times an executive coach ends up working in areas that resemble that of someone trained in psychology. Leadership is a mental exercise and the line between coaching and therapy is blurry where they meet.
Another indicator of the need for coaches to help people who are, at the time they call for assistance, incapable of identifying and addressing their shortcomings, is the sum that professional coaches can earn for their services. XXXXX wrote that the rates he found were from $300 to $3500 dollars an hour! An issue that hovers around the Executive Coaching profession is how they can document the impact they may or may not be having on their clients and their companies. Yet, the rates they command are impressive. I believe the fact that most people struggle to truly take stock in their inabilities. If they do have the courage to truly inventory their abilities, it is rare for that person to correctly identify their shortcomings and, more importantly, have the capability to design a plan to alleviate or mitigate those shortcomings. This point speaks directly to the second sentence of the paragraph. Having a coach to assist in finding the way forward and who is educated in the many ways of leadership can be the lever for a subpar leader to step up to a new level. The coach has the benefit of distance.
Now let’s talk about distance. The ability to look at a situation from a new perspective is very empowering. Those of you that have followed this blog through the years will recall that leaders can struggle to extract themselves from situations and relationships. There may be high levels of responsibility binding and blinding them. It may be a case of the leader’s ego giving them tunnel vision. The type and quality of relationships the leader has cultivated with their employees, peers, and leaders may impair their ability to see failings, too. The coach can see the interactions with a clearer perspective. What is that worth to a struggling leader? It can be priceless if it saves a career or a company or a relationship.
If a leader is busy dealing with a business, or a department, or a handful of people, will the have the bandwidth to “know all their personal and professional issues and identify all the options available to them? From personal experience, I can tell you there’s no way to know “all the issues and all the options”. If I spent the time needed to do such inventories, I would be failing as a leader! Leadership takes attention and time. As with any project, doing smaller jobs more often is more manageable than waiting for the issues or tasks to pile up. Work and life can draw 100% of a leader’s attention. The shortcomings or areas for improvement, when they become apparent, have had to reach a level that overpowers or impact the job or relationships of the leader. The task of correcting the path is now a mountain that could appear insurmountable. Facing a challenge of magnitude is not as difficult if one has a coach to urge, prod, educate, and listen.
The last sentence can be true quite often. Leaders will likely make some attempt on their own to improve. Leaders may have been trying and reached an impasse. They may have had partial success. They are looking for the catalyst to push them to a new level of performance. If it was easy to fix oneself, the pay rates for coaches would likely be much lower.
Examining the statement above was an exercise that allowed me to dive into the need for executive coaches. I would add that the dynamic environment in which leaders now find themselves can leave a leader in new relational territory. The need for assistance from a professional that has been looking at the world from a fresh perspective is growing and the profession is growing in response (Parker, 2012). I would like to take the lessons I have learned while earning this degree and help other leaders grow and succeed.
Coutu, D., Kauffman, C., Charan, R., Peterson, D. B., Maccoby, M., Scoular, P. A., & Grant, A. M. (2009). What Can Coaches Do for You? Harvard Business Review, 87(1), 91-97.
Parker, A. (2012). Coaching Profession Shows Growth. Retrieved from https://www.td.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2012/09/Intelligence-Coaching-Profession-Shows-Growth
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