Top Executives: 3 Powerful Ways An Executive Coach Fuels Your Continued Succes
Posted on April 21, 2020 by Shefali Raina, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
Top executives will understand how a partnership with top executives will create significant ROI for them
“Alice: Which way should I go? Cheshire Cat: That depends on where you want to end up. – Lewis Carrol”
Whether you are a senior wall street executive, a high-tech leader, a startup founder, or in a leadership role elsewhere, if you have not experienced a powerful Executive Coaching partnership, you are missing out.
HERE IS WHAT YOU MIGHT THINK RIGHT NOW
As a smart, successful, experienced professional you might think “I don’t need an Executive Coach. I have mentors”. You might also think “Coaching is for the average Joe who is struggling in their role”, or “I just don’t have time for this”.
These are normal thoughts. The human brain is programed to think “what got me here will get me there”. We prioritize near term goals over long term success. We prefer status quo over the unknown. As a senior leader, if you are reasonably successful at present, at first instinct, you will likely not recognize the opportunity cost of non-action on this front.
WHY DO ELITE ATHELETES AND TOP EXECUTIVES HAVE COACHES?
But consider this: Why do elite athletes have coaches – are they not talented, driven and already successful? Why do already successful top executives, from CEOs to Hedge Fund Founders, from Venture Capitalists to top Startup Leaders have coaches? The one thing most of my clients say after we have worked together is “I had no idea that results would be so immediate and tangible. I wish I had done this sooner”.
What tangible personal growth are they experiencing? What positive ripple effect is their commitment to personal growth having on their teams, their organizations and communities?
What growth and acceleration have you not experienced yet?
THREE POWERFUL WAYS AN EXECUTIVE COACH CAN FUEL YOUR SUCCESS
1. Strengthen your Leadership and Impact
As a top executive, you are successful when you drive results. Typically, you create results by succeeding in three things:
- mastering your domain and subject matter,
- leading successfully by inspiring followership, influencing stakeholders, and empowering talent to operate at their best level, and
- controlling your environment, prioritization, decision making and execution
Executive coaches will not help you master your subject matter/industry domain. But they will help you exponentially on the other two fronts:
- Leadership success – a good coach will help you strengthen your leadership impact, communication skills, build your personal brand, cultivate emotional intelligence and gravitas, and elevate your credibility and impact.
- Strategic Impact – a good coach will help you amplify your strategic thinking ability and raise awareness of your cognitive biases and how to channel them positively. You will learn to create your unique framework for decision making, navigating difficult situations, people and change.
Despite your success to date, you have gaps and blind-spots in both these areas that you may not recognize. Take a moment and look at others around you – peers, stakeholders, board members – do they have gaps and blind-spots visible to you that are holding them back from more success and impact? Notice how you can see these in others but not in yourself.
An executive coach will help you understand your leadership and decision- making gaps, your blind-spots and challenges. Most good coaches will use an evidence-based approach to partner with you and build a game-plan around skills, habits, behaviors and actions, bespoke to your unique needs. For example, I use a neuroscience driven approach, where clients learn the basics of how the brain works and we use that as a foundation to craft not just ‘what to do’ but also why.
With the support and partnership of your coach, you will execute on this game plan to create maximum impact. You will focus on practical, immediate results as well as long term acceleration.
2. Become a Self-Mastery Ninja
Most of my clients deal with relentless demands on their time and go from meeting to meeting, and challenge to challenge on a non-stop basis. If this is you, like them, you are at significant risk for elevated stress, cognitive bias, reactionary decision-making and mental exhaustion.
As a senior executive you have already learnt to be self-aware. But a good executive coach will help you take it to the next level and create self-mastery. You will build habits to manage your triggers, challenge your biases, cultivate mental clarity, mitigate stress, minimize mental drain and experience well-being.
These habits will help you operate in a more sustainable way and be resilient and equally measured in the face of calm, chaos or crisis.
3. Have your own personal safe zone sounding board
As a top executive, there are many situations where you are conflicted, challenged and uncertain. You are also isolated by choice, as you have to use discretion in who you communicate with, when you communicate, and the unintended signals you send.
An executive coach is your safe zone sounding board. They help you put things in perspective and see situations at the macro level. They operate as your challenger, your confidante, and blind spot identifier. You coach will not tell you what to do, but rather help you refine your own thinking. You will explore every facet of the issue in an objective, strategic, non-reactionary and non-emotional way. This will help you move forward with clarity, confidence and decisiveness.
WHAT DO YOU THINK NOW?
How do these reasons sound to you? What stands out? Do your own research. Ask around. Dwell on it. And then make a decision that serves you, your people, and your organization best.
“If you are not learning constantly, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest” – Charlie Munger
