Daniel Nesbitt | Marketing and Administrative Specialist | People Factor, LLC

As a company grows its executives are often placed under an extreme amount of pressure and stress. While everyone deals with pressure and stress differently, the addition of an executive coach is becoming much more common in the workplace. Executive coaching isn’t for everyone, but it can become a huge asset to some executives that are searching for guidance. An executive coach isn’t a therapist, or someone to give you business advice, or even a friend. An executive coach is hired to help by increasing clarity, focus, accountability, and confidence – all of which will help you make better decisions.

Let’s look at how coaching can help with each of these elements:

Clarity– executive coaching increases clarity because often your coach has limited experience with the industry that you work in. This means that when you are meeting with your coach you will be forced to slow down so you can explain everything clearly and simply, giving you a better understanding of the whole picture. This can feel very painful and slow but it is done to give you a better understanding of the task, leading to a much higher level of clarity in complex situations.

Accountability– one of the biggest benefits of having an executive coach is to hold you accountable. It can be very easy to let yourself get distracted when you need to do a task that you don’t want to do. We will often push that task until tomorrow, or next week, until it gets forgotten about or the due date passes. An executive coach holds you accountable because you know that we cannot make those same excuses to our coach that we might make to ourselves.

Confidence- Good coaches will help you picture success, help you put in place a plan or strategy that will help build confidence, and eliminate doubts. Confidence is critical to success, but it can be difficult to build our own self-confidence.

Along with clarity, accountability, and confidence, coaches also say the skills the executives can gain from coaching include better communication, better time management, becoming more reflective, understanding where their blind spots are, and being more organized.

Executive coaching’s benefit isn’t limited to the coachee either. Coaching offers the company a lower turnover rate and higher productivity for those employees. When a company invests in an executive coach for one or more of their executives or high potential employees, it’s showing them that the company wants to invest in them and see them succeed within the company. Companies don’t hire executive coaches for the reasons that they used to. Historically a company would only hire an executive coach to try to fix a problem employee, but now companies hire executive coaches to ensure that their employees are on their way to reaching their full potential.

Executive coaching can also be combined with other tools such as a DiSC assessment to help give the coachee a better understanding of their own personality and strengths, and how to work more effectively with those around them. When combining executive coaching with a tool like DiSC, the executive coach is able to add another layer of understanding and emotional intelligence to an executive.