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questions on coaching and leadership
What is executive leadership coaching?
Executive leadership coaching will help you find your own answers through deep listening, powerful questioning, and no-BS accountability.
Executive leadership coaching is a specific method of partnership where the goal is to increase personal and professional success for the client by increasing clarity, raising awareness, gaining insight, and accessing your inner knowledge. It is an empowering process that operates on the assumption that you are creative, whole, and resourceful, and thus ultimately capable of overcoming your own obstacles. Executive leadership coaches help you find your own answers through deep listening and powerful questioning. Executive leadership coaches do not often give advice and are trained to keep their own opinions out of the conversation.
Executive leadership coaching typically takes place on a recurring regular schedule for a set period of time — usually 6 or 12 months. The coaching industry is governed by the International Coach Federation. ICF keeps the bar high for the industry by offering a Code of Ethics and standard Core Competencies that coaches must demonstrate in order to be certified.
What does a typical leadership coaching session look like?
The appointment begins by clarifying your intended goals for the coaching session.
For a typical coaching session, you would send in any completed assignments the day before the appointment. You would also send in a “Focus Report” that allows you to articulate what’s happened since the last appointment and what your goals are for the session.
The appointment begins by reviewing the information in the Focus Report and getting clear on your intended goals for the session.
Trained coaching skills include deep listening, powerful questioning, reflecting back and synthesizing what is being said. Coaching is a dynamic process based on what you bring to the appointment. A few of the roles the coach holds are: thought partner, devil’s advocate, mirror, hand-holder, accountability partner, and teacher (when working with a specific leadership tool). This results in increased clarity, new knowledge, clear next steps, and relevant assignments for contemplation and integration of new learning.
At the end of each session, “next steps” are discussed to help you get clarity on what you want to accomplish between that day and the following session. The appointment concludes with you articulating what you are taking away. Reiterating insights helps you deepen your learning.
What is integrative leadership?
Integrative means serving to form or coordinate into a functioning, unified whole.
Integrative means serving to form or coordinate into a functioning, unified whole. Leadership is the capacity to guide or inspire toward a shared vision. Our first order of leadership development is self-leadership — to learn to guide ourselves toward the vision we have for our life. As we do this, we learn to coalesce our various parts, bringing ourselves to a higher level of functioning and thus more effective leadership. The concept scales upward from there. Can we coordinate the parts of a project into a functioning, unified whole in order to guide toward a shared vision for the success of that project? How about the parts of an organization?
“Integrative” implies that when we encounter obstacles and bumps in the road, rather than look the other way, we face them squarely and learn from them so that our path forward is wiser, more efficient, and more peaceful.
Why would I hire a professional facilitator?
The cost of a day of facilitating, which greatly increases the likelihood of results, compared to the cost of getting all the leaders together in the room, it’s a no brainer. The ROI is huge.
It’s true, many leaders are used to running their own meetings. But in high-stakes conversations where the intellectual capital in the room exceeds the normal day-to-day, you’re going to want to make sure you get what it is that you came together for. An outside facilitator is the person designated to handle the design and process of the meeting and who is responsible for keeping the group on track towards its goals.
If you think about the cost of a day of facilitating, compared to how much it is costing you to get all your leaders together in the room, the return you’ll get on that investment is huge. Usually the leader calling the meeting needs to be focused on the work - the decisions, the strategies they want to explore, the challenges they’re facing. It’s not worth it for them to put their brainpower into figuring out how the people at the meeting should have a conversation to get the best results. A professional meeting facilitator will coordinate with you before the meeting, run the meeting, and include follow-up processes to make sure the results get integrated back into the regular work environment and systems.
how do I know if coaching is the right next step?
Contact us through the web form on this site and we will get back to you typically within 24 hours. We’ll reply with a scheduling link to find a time to meet via Zoom or phone. When we meet, the format is simple: 1) who you are and what you’re looking for 2) who we are and what we can offer, and 3) are we a fit and what are the next steps. Often we’ll offer to put together a proposal so you can have a tangible document outlining the leadership coaching or consulting services and pricing.