What Is An Executive Coach & What Are The Benefits?
If you’ve decided it’s time to find your business’s true potential and wish to develop high performing teams, you’ll need to rely on a number of key factors to get there.
Offering learning and development opportunities to your wider teams is one key area, but many businesses fail to focus on the talent at the top of their business. No matter the level of skill found here, there is always room for personal development, which is where executive coaching comes into play. Developing your executive teams to a high degree can create a steadfast environment for the rest of your teams, resulting in improved performance all round.
Fancy taking your business one step further? With special consideration to your executive teams, your business will be positioned to thrive. Let’s take a look at exactly what an executive coach is and why you need to get involved if you’re not already.
Executive coaching 101: what is an executive coach?
Executive coaching is a finely tuned mixture of career coaching and performance coaching to enhance those at the most senior levels in a business. The executive coaching approach uses strategic steps to further boost skills and qualities already present in your leaders in order to strengthen their professional development and leadership skills.
Why is executive coaching so important? Senior leaders play a major role in any business, by finetuning the skills of those at the top of your business, you create a ricochet effect that also goes on to enhance your teams.
Consider how much of a key part your executive teams play in the grand scheme of your business, now imagine if they were not quite reaching their full potential because of a lack of continued development opportunities. With the ever-changing face of the modern digital world, staying stagnant can prove an issue.
By recognising that those at the top influence the wider business and should be prioritised for development, you give your teams the best shot at improved performance as well.
Ultimately, a professional coach is there to highlight your top talent’s best attributes and to develop these throughout their coaching sessions. The end goal is better leaders, better teams and better business output.
4 benefits of executive coaching
Business performance will improve
If the most senior people in your business are at the top of their game, naturally this will be felt by the business as a whole.
The ultimate goal of leadership coaching is to poise those at the top to perform to their best, thus positively impacting business performance. Following on from executive coaching, you’ll see improvements to business performance in a number of ways, including communication levels, team engagement and morale, conflict resolutions, decision making and the overall company culture.
Senior leaders are expected to have all of the answers all of the time, but if there is no ongoing support they may not always be in a position to meet your companies needs. Executive development is one way of ensuring those with lots of responsibility remain in touch with company requirements and can lend a helping hand whenever issues arise.
Executive coaching sessions are tailored to your unique organisational needs, but there will be a general blanket improvement across the board following on from the completion of an executive development programme.
You’ll see positive ripple effects on your teams
Those in a position of authority have the power to shape your business through their impact on the wider teams. Leaders who undergo executive coaching are more likely to offer a strong and reassuring lead to their teams; after putting in the work to maximise their own potential, your leaders are better positioned to bring out the potential of others.
Being coached has multiple benefits, not least the fact that a plethora of skills are developed, but it can also help to create a stronger culture within your business, in the form of a ‘coaching culture’. A coaching culture can be defined as when members of your team take it upon themselves to share new insights gleamed from development sessions as a way of improving their peers skillset.
A coaching culture encourages members of your team to take on the coaching mindset amongst themselves, creating a ripple effect that spreads out to all levels of the business. Once coaching skills have been implemented amongst senior leaders, they will be positioned to share this insight in a way that improves engagement and morale.
Communication will improve
One of the most common complaints exhibited by organisations is poor communication, which can impact operations in a number of ways. In fact, 86% of companies site poor communication as one of the key reasons for workplace failures.
When an executive coach comes together with your senior leadership teams, communication skills are placed in the spotlight. A coach will highlight and push to improve some of the key communication skills that go on to impact the business. In the long term, this focus on communication results in stronger teams and better understanding between leadership and staff.
As a result of improved communication, studies have found a productivity boost of 25% thanks to increased morale and motivation. You will find deadlines being met with ease, team work improving and a better sense of unified culture and identity.
Your leaders will become more agile
Another great benefit of working with an executive coach is the agility that leaders develop as a result. This can go on to impact decision making, strategic planning and a whole host of other areas that rely on flexible approaches as and when challenges arise.
Many leaders find that executive coaching helps them to pick up new methods and techniques to decision making and planning. They will have a refreshing new approach to overcoming challenges and will be able to employ new strategies in order to deliver work in the most effective way.
When senior leaders look at decision making and strategic planning with a new light, fresh new outcomes can result, which can be the difference between surviving and thriving as a business.
Explore executive coaching with Wiseup
Thanks to a vast network of over 100 experts and accredited coaches, we’re strongly positioned to support your team’s executive development and coaching needs.
Claim your free consultation; after reviewing your unique needs and matching your business to a selection of executive coaches, our bespoke programmes are delivered in 1-2-1 and group workshop formats.
Looking for executive coaching - London & the rest of the UK? Contact our team here.
About Wiseup
Offering executive coaching in London, Manchester, Birmingham and afar, our bespoke coaching programmes give teams across the UK the best leverage to upskill and outperform themselves.
Wiseup was forged out of the vision to bring coaching & mentoring to individuals and businesses in a tailored manner – there is no off the shelf product when it comes to hitting your goals. Get started with one of the leading executive coaching UK communities here.
