You are the executive CEO of a successful owner operated enterprise in Richmond VA, your business generates over $500K EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes), you feel like there is potential for more and you intend to take your company to the next level? If this is you schedule a call with one of our executive coaches to estimate the ROI of executive coaching for your business.
Insights from an executive business coach
How to motivate a team at work
Great leaders ask each team member what they intend to achieve and what their definition of success is. Great leaders set clear goals for the team and break those targets down to each team member so that they get to develop a general outline for how to meet that objective and hit the target for the team. Great leaders participate and work together with the team to establish practical milestones to achieve these objectives. Great leaders determine when there is a need for a critical feedback path, so that the leader knows how the team member is progressing. Great leaders offer positive empowerment and inspiration and give purpose to the mission. Great leaders express confidence in the subordinate's ability to increase results. Great leaders make the team member recognize that the only person who is in charge of their results is the team member him-/herself. As much as as manager tries and wants to help for the sake of a quicker achievement, the team member is the one who is ultimately in charge of his / her outcomes, growth and ongoing improvement.
Tailored coaching for entrepreneurs
When using coaching as a leadership development tool
Coaching managers should perceive coaching as something broader than just the efforts of exterior coaches who are hired to help executives build their personal and professional skills. That work is important and sometimes vital, but it’s temporary and executed by outsiders. The kind of coaching managers should implement is the one that establishes a real learning organization with ongoing coaching that is executed by people inside the organization. It is an activity that all managers should participate in with all their subordinates on an ongoing basis, in such a manner that helps define the organization’s culture and its mission. An effective coaching manager as a leader asks questions instead of providing answers, supports team members instead of judging them, facilitates their growth and leadership instead of dictating what has to be done, asks for ideas from all team members on how to solve the situation instead of just relying on own attempts to solve it individually. A coaching manager with cooperative leadership style can approach any obstacle with a calm, objective and clear focus. A deeper understanding of issues and solution-focused fact finding creates the blueprints for resolutions.
Which are the best leadership coaching companies?
When developping leadership skills becomes more important with new responsibilities
Most people begin successful careers by developing expertise in a technical, functional, transactional or professional domain. In most instances coming up with the right answers means everything. For the purpose of rising up the career ladder proving yourself that way has been sufficient in most cases. But once the employee moves into people management the tables turn and at that point the manager has to ensure that his / her subordinates have the same or even better quality in their answers. However, managers differ in their style to leading employees and generating results. At times some managers tend to just oversee employees and the work they fulfill and to solve issues on behalf of their employees. Managers who have implemented coaching leadership strive to empower and inspire employees to take their skills to another level and resolve issues on their own.
How to motivate a sales team
How to keep a sales team motivated when sales are slow and low
You can assist your sales staff enhance their current performance, or in the case of already well performing sales team members, help them excel even more. Performance coaching is a powerful method when leaders deploy it for the benefit of the entire sales team. At times getting the performance coaching right can be challenging for even the most experienced managers. When an employee is not on track to target a manager comes to a point where he / she must decide wheter to fire or hang in there with a direct report. Often an alternation between ignorance and micromanagement by the manager have contributed significantly to the situation and lead up to this point. Before a problem grows, the manager should already touch base along the way and ask staff members about their ideas how to correct the issue, prevent it from becoming bigger and from happening again. In case of a high performing employee the manager should trigger constant and never ending improvement by asking questions in that regard.
Who offers life executive coaching?
How managers can trigger a coach within every employee and unleash hidden potentials
Great leaders tap into the potential coach within every manager and team member. Hidden within many employees is a source of information and knowledge waiting to be conserved and shared with the broader team. A great leader can encourage his own team members to become coaches and trainers themselves by enabling them to hold their own mini-seminars on an important topic or skill. If the company offers a virtual platform or chatroom then this represents means of leverage where team members can create and share their own learning content, guidance, insights, stories, and tips for where to access the best training to get the job done. Great leaders should ask themselves whether the team member has the capacity to accomplish the objectives and get the job done. Four common bottle necks are time, skill set, tools, and personality. Great leaders determine how to remove these bottle necks and whether or not the team member needs the leader's help to remove the barriers. This is key in the role of a coaching manager.
The top executive coaches reveal
True leadership and culture in business management
Culture contributes significantly to a company's success. But when old management practices begin to impede progress this might become a problem. Risk aversion and internal politics might be hampering cross-divisional collaboration, senior leaders might end up resisting innovation. Furthermore, when rapidly changing technologies let managers often lead with out-of-date knowledge and practices, the risk is that those senior managers might keep passing these down because that’s what they know how to do. The solution: Leading change. According to Boyatzis, Smith, & Blaize, 2006 the act of showing compassion involves being with a team member in their pain. It’s understanding another’s feelings and demonstrating an intent to act in response to those intuitions and allowing team members to innovate and transform the company's culture and success.
What to expect from business executive coaching
How to improve leadership abilities
Coaching is better than repair. Providing positive feedback and honest suggestions for improvement early and often yields higher results, better outcomes, and stronger bonds and better relationships than any retroactive action or progressive rule ever will. Managers generally get this, so getting them to buy into this is not a rocket science. However making them implement how to document coaching conversations can be challenging. Managers should continuously look out for new opportunities to coach team members. They shoould benefit from the opportunities to inspire and motivate employees or educate them further and enable them with new skill sets. On the other hand managers should make it a habit to connect and ask for feedback from team members to assess situations and create solutions. Managers should invoke conversations with team members by asking guiding, open-ended questions, that are not closed yes and no questions. As a result such questions will encourage team members to provide honest, thoughtful answers about their view on things. Such conversations and feedback loops will enable the manager to establish beneficial relationships with the the team member.
Which is the best coaching company?
Science backs the importance of strategic leadership development
Studies based in procedural justice theory have shown that when individuals consider that the process through which leaders arrive at decisions is fair and well communicated, according to Rawls, 1971, staff will be more committed to a final course of action. But for now this erosion in the role of the manager has been significant. A research project that focused on how top executives view training and development programs, executives overwhelmingly said the most urgent issue they face is igniting their managers to coach employees. Furthermore, finding and deploying the most effective solutionsit appears to be the biggest challenge executives are facing.
The best executive coaches
The benefits of leadership team building and coaching skills
Great leaders deploy peer-to-peer coaching. Coaching offers some of the most effective and most valuable learning in an organization. Coaching managers tend to use their regular staff meetings as a collaborative problem solving session. This builds cohesion among their team members, and inspires them to think together about how to solve urgent organizational situations and challenges. It is also a very effective and rational way for the leader to coach multiple team members in one setting simultaneously, thus maximizing efficiency.
Business coaching vs executive coaching
The major benefits of coaching to an organisation
Studies have shown that non-directive leadership and coaching skills improve the coachees’ confidence, engagement, communication, and teamwork. Those skills facilitate a faster induction to the organization and - according to Hamlin et al., 2006 - and help reduce reported feelings of stress. Managers should encourage and expect their direct reports to engage and participate, not only because it will become easier for the manager to focus more on the big picture, but also because it’s a best practice and an essential skill that motivates everyone on the team to identify and troubleshoot issues as they arise.
What are the best executive coaching firms?
How can managers ask the right questions for appreciative inquiry
A manager on the path to becoming an effective coach for his / her employees coaching cultivates commitment to improving the organization without imposing an issue based orientation or sense of a general feeling of pessimism or despondency on employees. Instead, employees are recognized for what they already do well and encouraged to apply these strengths in such a way that facilitates performance and growth. According to Nelson et al., 2002 targets are met faster when a vision-focused, cohesive taskforce collaborates and deploys the employees' best sides, talents and strengths toward a common objective. Job satisfaction, good morale is key. According to Edmondson, 2002 the manager needs to do his / her best to get rid of fear in the workplace by assisting employees generate purpose within their role, function and responsibility inside an organization.
Who is the best executive performance coach?
The importance of having coaching frameworks
Each manager or coach has a unique approach to coaching subordinates. It's important for the manager to develop his / her own framework to use when coaching each employee. The manager's framework should guide the conversations the manager has with a team member. But independent from whatever those frameworks might look like, When those team members come up with their own solutions, they are more committed, and the fixes are more likely to be implemented. Furthermore, this issue-solving experience helps team members develop the self-confidence to solve similar issues on their own in the future so that the manager's coaching framework has less significance in the current situation.
How to find an executive coach
The right questions indicate best leadership quality
Managers need the space and time to actually manage. Managing people is tough, really, really tough. Employees ask for the managers' trust and compassion, so managers need to be able take the time to establish trust, starting conversations off with questions like, “How are things going?” and, “How can I help?” Such open questions potentially trigger a diverse and remarkable dialogue on various subjects, including but not limited to progress, improvement engagement, culture, productivity and performance. And, probably most important, they help identify the fires before we’re at high emergency alarm status.”. Reality-focused questions to ask are for example “What are the key things we need to know?”. The leaders should hone into what their team members have as a reply. Are the leaders missing something important? Are the managers talking about operational problems but missing out on the human side of things? Or the other way round? When coaching managers get their subordinates to slow down and think this way, they often lose themselves in contemplation and then an idea comes along, and off they go, engaging with the issue on their own with new inspiration, fresh energy and a new perspective. This step is crucial, because it stops team members from overlooking pertinent moving parts and leaping to conclusions. The manager's job at this point is just to ask the right questions and then get out of the way.
Who is the best leadership development coach?
The fine line between situational leadership and executive coaching
Situational coaching represents the otimum zone to be in in the context of a manager as a coach. All managers should pursue to become expert at situational coaching. Situational coaching involves balancing between authoritive and cooperative leadership style depending on what the current situation requires. Managers as coaches should first focus on and become really good at non-directive coaching, until it becomes almost an instinct, and only then start to mix that newly strengthened capability with the implementation of management by objectives and directive coaching.
