Why Executive Coaching is Important

New month, new topic! We’re back with something brand new for November. Last month, we covered diversity; an aspect that Heylia hopes to help business leaders understand. This month is not too different.

November is the month of coaching!

This month we’ll be talking about the types of coaching that professionals on the come up may find helpful, as well as how coaching can run into some hiccups. At the end of the month, we’ll even give you a taste of what a coaching session would look like here at Heylia Partners! 

As for right now, let's jump into today's topic: why executive coaching is important. 

Getting to the executive position means you may already be proficient in what it takes to manage a company. You already have plenty of business acumen, right? Surley, someone like you doesn't need coaching in any form. But let's be real for a second. Nobody is infallible. Most of the time, people with this much experience might tend to overlook parts of their leadership strategy that have begun to grow stale, or may never have produced the results you were hoping for. It's never too late to look into coaching, and hone the skills you already have while picking up some new ones along the way.

Let's take a deeper dive into what coaching is and isn’t. Coaching can be a variety of things depending on what you’re looking for. It can help you work on leadership skills, career goals, work-life balance, organizational skills, team-working abilities, and many more. The best coaching draws from each of these aspects in order to consider the path forward that would make the most sense for you. And that's the main point of coaching: Moving forward. 

Coaching isn’t counseling. Counseling is about emotional-based, problem-specific guidance. While a certain level of introspection into yourself is important for the most effective coaching, focusing on the past, emotional traumas and cognitive behavioral change is something better suited for therapy (which is very much recommended!). Mentoring and Coaching are also two different methods of growth. Mentoring specifically is more about nourishing someone's progress in any given field through exposure and networking. For young up-and-comers, mentoring could open up a slough of doors for them to walk through. And yet, mentoring is severely lacking amongst executives and leadership in the corporate world — but that’s an issue for another day. Coaching, in most forms, is about forward focused thinking and solutions that can be implemented to address gaps, needed transformation, blindspots and importantly confront self induced narratives about your intrinsic motivators that may or may not be true. Coaching can address these areas in different facets of your work and life.

Now the biggest benefit in executive coaching, even as a veteran of the corporate world, is learning from peers that can offer much needed insight into aspects of your craft that you might be blind to (our last topic, diversity, being a good example of that). Blind spots are key to address in the world of leadership, and typically, you won’t know them until they are pointed out in a productive way. The challenges for executives who sit at the top of the food chain, is how do they regularly get insightful feedback on these, in a productive way, when a lot of folks around you will think twice about being seen to offer a critique. One of your blindspots might just be, you don’t make upwards or peer feedback, a seemingly welcome topic in your interactions with your colleagues and team members. Often the first piece of truly actionable feedback an executive will receive, is when it is already too late to action anything.

Coaching at its core is about providing leaders or executives with someone who can safely challenge them, and nurture their growth - at the same time. Challenge is required because no one hires an executive coach because they are flying high and doing awesome. You hire a coach because you have something to solve. Maybe you haven’t accurately identified what you are solving for yet. It is an instinct. You got that definitive feedback that made you say “ouch”. You simply have failed in your current role or past three roles, or the things that once used to work - aren’t working anymore. Whatever the story, you hire a coach because you need to work on something, even if you have not yet identified that “something”. And a coach can’t help you, if they cannot challenge you. Their job is part navigator - helping you navigate some stormy waters or new territory, and part truth-sayer - ripping the self-imposed blindfolds you may be wearing off (sometimes gently) so some much needed ‘real self talk’ can take place. Sunlight is the great sanitizer we like to say at Heylia and you can only address the things, once you see the things.

Some of the bad rap Executive Coaching can get, is often because it feels like a weakness for a tenured long term executive, with a storied career, to admit they aren’t doing so well after all. It doesn’t feel safe. Sometimes coaching isn’t effective if it comes from a place where your coach has all the emotional tools in the world, but none of the real world business context to understand their coach, their job, the business environment or dynamics of being an executive in a certain field. There are different types of coaching; some can focus on the personal journey and transformation, where context to your day job isn't as important. Some coaching is about enabling you to be a better professional version of yourself, and there - context is king. Think about what type of coaching you might need before you select a coach with zero business background or operational context. It might be that zero business background is just the ticket for the help you need. It also may not be. So the success of a coaching engagement is as much about the client identifying the right coach, as the coach indefinite in the right client.

The final thought about executive coaching has to do with the solutions to the problems that may be addressed during your sessions. Coaching is an important tool to address the variety of issues laid out in this post, but finding a sustainable solution to these obstacles needs to come from you. That isn’t to mean “the power was inside you all along,” or some other cheesy trope, but the reality is, no coach can reliably solve all of your problems. Using the tools learned throughout your sessions, applying them properly, and staying the course will become a part of your full-time job. At the heart of it is this single question. Are you truly ready to change? How willing are you to face some possibly painful truths about yourself. To consider changing your entire value system, to be a better and more successful leader? Are you ready to get uncomfortable? To embrace growth and tear some things down so you can build them back up? If you are - then maybe, just maybe, you should think about giving Heylia a call. We might agree to try you as a client!