The Courageous Authenticity approach to Executive Coaching appeals to four main focus areas: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
The Person
The personal side of life coaching is critical to my clients’ success. I work to bring out my clients’ unique gifts and talents, to extract the “whole person,” or the Who. And in executive coaching, we also spend time on the professional side. I work to enhance the impact that the Who has on the professional world, and that extends the Who to the What and How.
The Executive
An executive coach helps the client think through strategies and tactics that really align with their team, as well as their gifts and talents, so that the company is able to move forward and really make a great impact. A coach will help you:
- achieve positive outcomes in an efficient, effective way
- study the bottlenecks in workflow and determine where the breakdowns are,
- improve communication flow, and
- expand people’s capacities.
I call the area of decisions “lonely decisions” because we’ve often heard it’s lonely at the top. People tend to think that they are involved in their company either internally or externally. In coaching, we try to engage their gifts and talents, to delegate work more effectively, or to hold these people accountable within the organization. Coaching helps to bring new perspective, so that those lonely decisions are no longer quite so lonely.
Your Influence
Both internally and externally, we also think about how to grow our skills, communicate more clearly, and influence and enroll people in our visions more effectively. Leaders should engage in high-stakes conversations in order to boost their communication within the workplace. As a leader, you see situations differently than others do. As such, you must influence the behavior of those around you in a way that makes them feel safe.
Another area of influence in executive coaching is what I call the Mission Vision Principles (MVP) Process. People within an organization will have an idea of their roles and missions: professional mission, vision, and principles. They need to know what inspires them and how to communicate that in such a way that they’re able to influence others.
Your Production
In coaching, we also look at the product and service side. Executive or management level team members will determine what the company stands for by making higher-level decisions about what the company does, what products they will sell, and what the service model will be. They will strategically evaluate the marketplace. These team members will look at each person’s talents, products, the needs of the marketplace, and then break those down into specific tactics. If a team is not led to think at this level, then very often, ideas will stay at a very high level and will never get implemented. Coaching aims to break that cycle.