Is an executive coach worth it?
A coach with extensive knowledge and experience in organizational behavior and rigorous psychological training will achieve the best results. When done well, executive coaching is an effective and rewarding tool for improving the performance of leaders and their organizations and is likely to be worth the investment. In the last 15 years, hiring coaches for promising managers has become increasingly popular. Although some of these coaches come from the world of psychology, a more significant proportion are former athletes, lawyers, economists and consultants.
Undoubtedly, these people help managers improve their performance in many areas. But I’d like to tell another story. I believe that executive coaches who lack rigorous psychological training do more harm than good in an alarming number of situations. Because of their background and prejudices, they downplay or ignore deep-seated psychological issues they don’t understand.
Even more worrying is that coaching can worsen a bad situation when a manager’s problems are due to undetected or ignored psychological difficulties. I think the solution is usually to address unconscious conflicts when the symptoms that plague a manager are persistent or severe. An executive coach can give you unbiased and confidential advice from the perspective of someone who thoroughly understands the ups and downs of the workforce. An effective coaching relationship will be built on trust. Use them to clarify your goals and objectives and create a clear development plan and ask the difficult questions that enable true long-term transformation.
Many coaches gain a Svengalian influence on the managers they train and the CEOs they report to, with sometimes disastrous consequences. Another surprising benefit that often comes with coaching and the associated increase in emotional intelligence is a more flexible mindset and a greater capacity for creative thinking when making decisions and solving problems, making coaching clients more resilient, especially when faced with organizational change. To achieve quick results, many popular executive coaches base their interventions on those of sports coaches and use techniques that reject any introspective process that takes time and can lead to “paralysis” through analysis. Although every coach and how they manage their coaching engagements differs, I typically work with my clients over six months to a year.
There are many potential misunderstandings in this situation. So it’s an excellent opportunity to work with a coach and make this transition smoother, says Gwyneth Anne Freedman, executive coach in San Jose, California. The participants also felt they had better managerial skills and a higher level of self-confidence and were better equipped to deal with organizational changes due to coaching. Garvin was under fire during this challenging time, so he skipped the usual steps and enlisted the services of an executive coach himself. Mansfield’s coaching was discontinued, and after her boss and I carried out a carefully crafted intervention, he agreed to seek outpatient psychotherapy.
In fact, many coaches gain a Svengalian influence on the managers they train and the CEOs they report to, with sometimes disastrous consequences. Since many executive coaches were business types in previous lives, they make contact with CEOs far more quickly than most psychotherapists. If any of the following seven situations are annoying, hiring an executive coach for yourself or your team may be worthwhile. The problem was that while coaching seemed to achieve impressive results, whenever Bernstein overcame one difficulty, he inevitably found another to take its place.
The coach assumed Mansfield needed to learn to set limits, criticize her subordinates constructively, and avoid the trap of doing other people’s work for her.
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A coach with extensive knowledge and experience in organizational behavior and rigorous psychological training will achieve the best results. When done well, executive coaching is an effective and rewarding tool for improving the performance of leaders and their organizations and is likely to be worth the investment. In the last 15 years, hiring coaches for…