Leadership executive training is a strategic imperative for organizations today. With the pandemic requiring leaders to course-correct overnight and creatively problem-solve, a brush up on the current leaderships skills cannot hurt.
The right kind of training can empower managers to be emotionally intelligent and agile, business-oriented and team-centric, productivity-driven and ROI-driven, and technically sound while driving informed decision-making. It is a complex role but an equally rewarding one.
So if you think executive leadership coaching is a wasted opportunity, think again. According to research, leadership coaching leads to:
- Higher productivity: 77% of respondents claimed that coaching had a significant impact on productivity and employee satisfaction.
- Skyrocketing ROI: Interestingly, executive coaching had a 788% ROI for a Fortune 500 company. Another study by the Manchester Review claims that an organization’s investment in executive coaching realized an average ROI of almost 6x the cost of the coaching.
Needless to say, leadership coaching is a must-have for employees and organizations today. In fact, for one-third of Fortune 500 companies, Executive Coaching has emerged as a standard leadership development initiative for elite executives and talented up-and-comers.
The writing is on the wall: With the business landscape constantly evolving and the ever-widening skills gap, engaging in leadership coaching makes business and logical sense.
In this blog, we will dive deep to understand the benefits of executive coaching and look at its comprehensive advantages for learners. Let’s jump right in.
What is an Executive Coach, and What Does an Executive Coach Do?
Let’s start with the basics and understand who an executive coach is. Quite simply, an executive coach is someone who can help the learner:
- Optimize leadership and work performance
- Understand their current set of skills, knowledge, and competencies to understand which area may need improvement
- Identify learning goals and chart out the next steps for coaching
- Effectively manage stress and work in a fast-paced environment
The primary role of an executive coach is to provide a reliable, approachable, and trustworthy learning environment for learners so that they can work towards bridging their performance/skills gaps.
If you are wondering about what do executive coaches do, keep reading. The executive coach strives to:
- Maintain a confidential relationship between the learner and themselves
- Provide a supportive learning environment by driving mentorship-centric coaching
- Help high-potential employees gain self-awareness and recognize personal goals to achieve their career-oriented development objectives
- Unlock the learner’s potential and talent, and act as a sounding board, should the learner need it at any point within their learning journey
Typically, most executive coaches adopt the GROW training model, which stands for Goals, (current) Reality, Options/Obstacles, and Way Forward.
With a basic understanding of an executive coach and what they do out of the way, let’s learn about the 360-degree benefits of executive coaching in the next section.
Top 5 Benefits of Executive Coaching
Why is executive coaching important? This question has evaded many to-be leaders and managers. Here are the top 5 benefits of executive leadership coaching:
- Enhanced Work Performance + Better Communication Skills
According to research by the Institute of Coaching, over 70% of respondents believe that they benefitted from coaching in the following areas: improved work performance, better relationships, and more effective communication skills.
Leadership is not just about gaining technical know-how; it is also about managing people, their expectations and striving to be better communicators as well as active listeners.
Furthermore, a good coach should be able to:
- Motivate and inspire others to perform to the best of their abilities
- Recognize the strengths of high-performing talent and promote the same
These ‘strong leadership qualities’ can be taught with the right kind of training.
- Increased Confidence + Self-Reliance + Teamwork
At its core, executive coaching is about becoming effective leaders and driving real impact within the organization.
They need to be able to add value to the organization’s objectives at every juncture/milestone in addition to motivating the employees to work smarter and more productively.
Without soft skills such as empathy, compassion, confidence, and resilience, achieving all this can become an uphill task.
An executive coaching training can provide the necessary training and support for potential leaders to become a powerhouse of talent and lead with greater confidence as well as self-resilience.
- Proactive Work Style for Achieving Goals + Greater Job Satisfaction
Leaders and managers worth their salt are the ones that can proactively achieve goals and pivot in challenging situations as needed. They need to be able to think on their feet.
With the right coaching, learners can navigate choppy waters without compromising on their own goals (or their teams).
Naturally, this can boost work satisfaction among leaders and motivate them to perform better.
While experiential learning is valued, leadership skills are something that needs to be continuously honed and learned as the skills/requirements change.
This can also serve as a competitive advantage for the leader in their respective field/sector/industry.
- Greater Accountability for Actions and Decisions
Leadership coaching instills a culture of accountability and responsibility. Leaders learn to take accountability for their own (and the team’s) actions.
By extension, leaders can also learn to trust their team members to ‘do their part’ and contribute to overall success. This also improves engagement within the team.
Finally, leadership coaching can enable managers to delegate work instead of micro-managing and getting overwhelmed with every project/new development.
Pro tip: Effective leadership coaching is one that can help leaders to self-actualize. They should be able to assess and reflect upon their thoughts and actions. Oftentimes, a change in mindset and approach is required to optimize the leadership skills learned. A leadership training program can serve as the perfect fertile ground for breeding high-quality and self-aware leaders and managers.
- Collaborative Work Style + Contribution to the Team’s Success
Executive coaching training, for all intents and purposes, can be considered as a ‘safe space,’ allowing managers to openly and honestly have ‘learning’ and ‘growing’ conversations that may need self-reflection and constructive feedback.
This is invaluable as most managers shy away from having authentic conversations that may highlight their incompetencies/vulnerabilities.
Executive leadership training can also double as the perfect avenue to ‘vent’ while honing the leader’s ability to work collaboratively and forge ahead with the team’s expectations in mind.
This small yet significant step also ensures that everyone is on the same page at all times. By driving a collaborative work style, the team can collectively work towards achieving outlined business goals together.
Apart from the benefits mentioned above, executive leadership training can help future leaders to:
- Promote a culture of healthy work-life balance for the team
- Drive greater emotional intelligence and work towards employee well-being
- Work with humility and respect for each and every team member
- Provide tailored support and guidance to the team
- Drive a results-oriented and transparent approach in the work style
- Extract actionable and qualitative insights and create powerful reports on individual and team performance, which can drive strong business decisions
- Set up a feedback mechanism in place, providing team members with the freedom to offer valuable opinions and suggestions, and act on relevant inputs to improve their leadership ability
- Seek continual improvement within themselves
- Appreciate employees and make them feel valued as well as heard
- Set micro and macro goals as well as targets, keeping long-term organizational objectives in mind
The Bottom Line
A staggering 86% of organizations have been able to see an ROI on their coaching engagements.
The professional and personal benefits of executive leadership coaching for a learner are too many to count and as wide-ranging as it gets.
Without continual training, leaders can find themselves getting stuck in a rut. With day-to-day objectives changing and businesses transforming on a radical level, the right kind of leadership can save the day and help organizations to move beyond seemingly impossible challenges.
To wrap up, executive leadership coaching can positively impact employee (and potential-leader) careers and empower them to:
- Improve work productivity and interpersonal skills, which includes better communication
- Build confidence, self-reliance, and teamwork
- Become more proactive towards achieving goals and extracting greater job satisfaction
- Taking accountability for actions and decisions
- Work collaboratively and contribute to the team’s success
Long story short, training in executive leadership coaching can fast-track your journey to success and advance your professional (and personal) career goals.
Keep the above-mentioned points in mind, and select the training that best fits with your professional and personal goals.
