Your business has recently hit a brick wall. While profits are good, you’re probably thinking that there is still so much more that can be done. If you’re thinking of expanding your business to reach new potential customers, an executive coach can help your business grow and help you set new business goals.
Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) for instance, loves to mention that the best business advice he ever got was to get himself a coach. Bill Gates and Fred Wilson share a similar opinion on the matter.
While business coaching and executive coaching differ, they could also blend in terms that the same coach is often capable in providing both.
Statistics are also favoring executive coaching – from 21-40% of Fortune 500 companies that were using executive coaching in 2011, according to the old Hay Group survey, more than 80% are now offering business coaching themselves.
Leadership Training Works
Getting through the start-up stage of your business is just the beginning. Once you’ve had a taste of success, expansion is probably all you can think about. In order to develop your managerial skills and expand your business successfully, you’ll probably need to seek for some guidance and some one-on-one training.
This is especially true for those who are looking to boost productivity and help their organizations with success planning, organizational development, redesign etc.
If you`re struggling to manage and engage other employees – an executive coach can help get you on the right track and will stick with you through the entire process.
Most Important Competencies Of Executive Coach
Choosing the right coach is often harder than it sounds. If you feel like you’ve maxed out your time, it is probably good to know in front what competenties your coach needs to have or which ones are of utmost importance to you. The International Coach Federation (ICF) has set the basic caching competencies and we are going to list just a few:
- Ability to establish an intimate and trusting relationship with the client
- Ability to express active listening and ask powerful questions
- Ability to create and raise the client’s awareness
- Ability to develop plans and establish goals with the client
Coaching can be a vital part of leadership training process. He can work one-on-one with you to ensure that you’re ready for a new location, help you look at current trends that may negatively or positively affect your business, ask the right questions and will make sure your bottom-line profit shows consistent growth.
New Skills Development
Adoption of new business skills is a great way to increase your leadership authority.
A good example of this is the impact that the change in the way you act and think would have on your employees. Say you’re targeting to increase productivity in one specific group of employees by implementing new action plans with different task delegation process. While you may not be opening a discussion regarding this, you will definitely make an impact with this change and will be putting less time into the implementation if the task are being better delegated.
New skill set adoption is a huge undertaking which may require some assistance. The right coach will be able to tell you whether or not your new skills are is the best to work on, what kind of other leadership improvements you`re dealing with and whether or not there is anything else you need to work on – such as direct communication, or technical organization and if you’re prepared for a more sophisticated training.
Business Benefits
Gaining actual business benefits may take some time. After you have completed the first stages of leadership training, you will need to begin to integrate your improved skills and help your employees see the benefits of better leadership as well.
This can be realized with sending them to complete new business training courses or to acquire IT certification if necessary, and finally the support of other executives in the process will also quicken the path to seeing the first benefits.
Conclusion
The right person will be able to assist you with the whole leadership management process, will consult with you on how to adopt and improve your skills and communicate with your new team members. On the long run, this could also help with enhancing client relationship, being more decisive in establishing authority and work a lot easier through stressful interpersonal situations.