How Executive Coaching Differs from Other Kinds of Coaching

According to the Executive Coaching Forum, executive coaching is an experiential and individualized leader development process that builds a leader’s capability to achieve short- and long-term organizational goals. It is conducted through one-on-one interactions, driven by data from multiple perspectives, and based on mutual trust and respect.

The overriding objective is for the organization, executive, and executive coach to team up to maximize results. The $1M question is whose results? And the answer to that question makes executive coaching a unique animal in the coaching ecosystem.

The Focus is Organization-Centered

The focus and endgame for executive coaching is not individualistic, as is the case with other forms of coaching, e.g., life, wellness, or performance coaching. It’s not the executive’s growth and change that take centerstage, but rather the extent to which these serve the organization’s objectives. The coach is there to collaborate with the executive and key stakeholders (peers, customers, supervisors, reports, HR/OD) to ensure that the executive’s learning and growth advance organizational needs. The bottom line is that executive coaching is fundamentally a business proposition whereby the coach and executive work together for the ultimate benefit of a 3rd-party—the organization.¹

The Contract is More Specific and Focused

In most cases, a coaching contract is forged between the coach and sponsoring organization—and human resources is often involved. This means the collaboration is bound by clear ground rules, timeframes, and measures of success. The coach works on the issues agreed to by the client organization. Many life, wellness, and performance coaches, on the other hand operate, without contracts. In these instances, the client or coach may terminate the coaching at any time. Moreover, the coach works on issues, outcomes, and goals of the client’s choosing, which can change from session to session.

In contrast, a fixed timespan is established in most executive coaching engagements. Somewhere between three months and one year is common. It is rare for them to go longer, whereas many life coaching clients have been seeing the same coach for years, if not decades. Coaching has become normalized in their lives, you might say.

The Structure is Multitiered

The triangular (or quadrangular) structure of the relationship puts a certain pressure on executive coaching that isn’t there in other coaching. There are multiple tiers of stakeholders to satisfy. For example, the client’s supervisor, peer-level managers, direct reports, and the HR director.

Even if the coachee feels they are getting remarkable benefits from coaching, other stakeholders, such as the client’s supervisor or HR department head, may decide that the client isn’t progressing as much or as fast as they would like and determine that the coaching has stalled. In life or wellness coaching, the coachee is the sole arbiter of the coaching’s effectiveness. As long as they are satisfied with the results and have good rapport with the coach, coaching will likely continue.

The Boundaries are More Complex

Navigating the boundaries of executive coaching can be tricky. For instance, according to ICF ethical standards, maintaining 100% confidentiality between coach and client is nonnegotiable. The coach does not report to HR or leadership anything that transpires in coaching sessions—no matter how much they ask. Any reports on the progress of the coaching transpire solely between the executive and stakeholders in the organization.

Then, there is the awkward, but not rare case where all evidence points to the conclusion that the executive doesn’t have much of a problem at all. Perhaps their boss or the organization’s culture is the primary source of “interference” in the system.

These situations are so complex that they rate separate discussions. Suffice it to say that the executive coach cannot coach a person or group that is not in the room. By the same token, helping executives to “manage up” or to better cope, adapt, and set boundaries in toxic or chaotic cultures are common tracks in executive coaching.

The Process is Unique for Each Executive

Executive coaching requires a flexible process, along with application of many coaching and action learning methods—including practical homework assignments—that move the needle. This means executive coaching doesn’t come in one flavor. A critical aspect of contracting is to establish from the outset the specific kinds of coaching that suit the client and organization’s pressing needs—ones precisely calibrated to its measures of success.

In my experience, it’s best to focus first on an executive’s strengths, next on ensuring they’re in fact being used, and finally on building additional knowledge, skills, and behaviors needed to achieve organizational objectives.

During most coaching engagements, there isn’t time to do it all. So, the coaching agreement needs to specify a few pillars of executive performance and effectiveness such as:

• Leadership development
• Strategic vision
• Team development
• Social & emotional intelligence
• Communication effectiveness
• Productivity & efficiency
• 360° feedback
• Business skills development
• Conflict resolution
• Role clarity
• Professionalism
• Problem solving and decision making

Use of Feedback is Essential

Since there are many measures of an executive performance in a system, the use of 360° Feedback proves invaluable. Often the greatest “aha” moment for an executive is to comprehend their impact on others—precisely the information hidden from leaders by those in their sway.

I have long been struck by the loneliness of leaders, how isolated and out of touch with their staffs many of them feel. Just having a coach that understands helps ease the pain. But it’s not sufficient to remove its cause. Ultimately, the executive must become aware of how they have created this alienation, consciously or otherwise, and take responsibility for creating something different.

It’s not rare to conduct 360° Feedback and find that an executive is under fire from all sides and faces an uphill challenge. I think of these situations as “Executive Turnarounds,” and have seen them succeed when the executive is prepared to face reality and is open to transformative change with respect to interpersonal relations, prioritization, and proactivity. I’ve also seen them fail miserably when an executive has poor reality as to their effect on others—or denies the veracity of unflattering feedback. The ability to deliver feedback in a compassionate yet frank manner that motivates genuine change and action is an essential executive coaching competency.

Coaching the System is Vital

By now it should be clear that an emphasis on the executive’s personal life or goals is not what the organization is paying for. They are paying for the executive to deliver superior results. Defining what those results are—the executive’s true measures of success—is no small potatoes. It’s the norm rather than the exception for an executive and their organization to struggle to specify these measures in evidence-based terms.

A model of a typical executive coaching system might clarify the challenge here. The organization and its leadership; human resources; the teams, business units, or divisions the executive leads; and interdependent peer-level managers are all aspects of a system that influences and judges the executive’s performance. Often, the measures of success on some of these fronts are so vague or general that the executive ends up punching in the dark.

There is no way to navigate and succeed in any system without clarification of its boundaries and rules, followed by action planning calibrated to its true measures of success. This clarification is a central thrust of effective executive coaching, and so it’s a great boon to executives when their coach can navigate organizational dynamics, systems theory, and social psychology.

Executive coaching is likely to fail, and generally does, when it focuses solely on the semi-circle labeled “Executive Behavior.” No leader can succeed when many fields and forces that make up their system remain unknown to them. When executives know who’s measuring them—and why and how—it’s uplifting to see how well and how fast many can self-correct.

Endnotes

1. Rogers, J. (2016). Coaching skills: The definitive guide to being a coach, 4th Ed. New York: Open University Press. p. 143.