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What You Need to Know About Executive Coaching for Your Business

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Executive Coaching|What You Need to Know About Executive Coaching for Your BusinessExecutive coaching is a time-efficient, cost-effective, and dynamic approach to professional development that improves leadership effectiveness and personal career satisfaction. Executive coaching includes customized, one-on-one or group sessions delivered by a professional coach or mentor.

It is all about maximizing the results of individuals and leadership teams in all types of organizations, from small businesses to large corporations internationally. The benefits are many: increased performance at work, fewer sick days caused by stress, increased productivity, and more satisfied employees who stay longer with their company.

Executive coaches also provide a glimpse into the hidden truths underlying employee behaviors while giving organizations insights they can use to make strategic decisions on allocating resources and improving their culture over time.

Professional Coaches VS Life Coaches

Although both executive coaches and life coaches focus on helping you accomplish your goals, executive coaching focuses on organizational leadership, career planning, personal performance, and action-oriented goal setting. In contrast, life coaching provides you with a safe place to discuss your issues in order to improve yourself (or your relationship) personally.

Executive coaching has its base in psychological theories such as positive psychology or emotional intelligence, while life coaching originates from different psychological ideas or personal philosophies.

Today’s society has a broad consensus that the business environment is complex and unpredictable. Psychologists connect this to the fact that many business people are highly intelligent, making them more likely to work toward their goals.

In return, it is important to have people whose experience and expertise can help you make better decisions, especially during times of change – that’s where coaching can come into play and save the day.


The Benefits of an Executive Coach

One of the main benefits of executive coaching is that it saves organizations time and money. By hiring a coach, an organization can save as much as 30% or more in annual coaching fees. Additionally, many organizations find that executive coaching leads to less employee turnover and fewer sick days over the long term.

There are pros and cons to every form of professional development, including executive coaching. The benefit of business coaching is that it fits seamlessly into an organization’s structure and allows you to reduce costs by hiring the right executive coach for your company.

On the other hand, hiring an executive coach requires time, training, hiring procedures, and culture change in organizations – but the long-term benefits of it do outweigh the initial work to be done. Positive change doesn’t happen overnight, after all.

How to Find an Executive Coach for Your Business

Exercise good business sense when hiring an executive coach – and look for experience. For example, you would employ a cardiac surgeon over a general practitioner if you needed heart surgery. A surgeon has devoted his life to the heart and has helped many patients through different surgeries and procedures – and that’s the level of experience you’d want from your company’s executive coach.

Look for someone who has had experience in executive coaching and consider asking for a list of their clients’ names to see their level of success. It is also important that the coach has a good reputation in the business community. Look for a coach who can give you collateral, such as a book, a professional resume, an article about coaching, or real client testimonials. The more information you have about the executive coach, the better you can make an informed decision.

How to Transform Your Management Style

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StrategyDriven Management and Leadership Article |Management Style|How to Transform Your Management StyleIn terms of business management, there are so many different types of management style to choose from, and the type of business you run, what motivates your workers, and what you want to achieve as a business can dictate the best approach. Some management styles are inherently less productive than others, and the trick is to adopt a leadership strategy that promotes productivity and wellbeing within your organization. If your current style isn’t working then there are a variety of strategies that can help you to transition from one management style to another; in this article we’ll take a look at how to go about transforming your own management style without disrupting your everyday business or affecting your staff.

Establishing your style

Leaderships styles can vary from the dictatorial to a more hands-off approach. Each style can affect the wellbeing of your staff, and will hopefully increase productivity. However, productivity can also decrease if the right style isn’t adopted for a particular environment. Let’s take a look at a few well-recognized management styles and see how they can affect the workplace. You may recognize your own style, or perhaps draw inspiration to move to a type of management that might boost your team and increase profitability.

Autocratic

Amongst the more Dickensian management styles, the autocratic leader tends to lack empathy for his team, communicates poorly, and isn’t good at collaborative working. An autocrat (also referred to as an authoritarian) can leave their staff feeling undervalued and you can expect to be organizing leaving parties with increasing frequency.

Paternalistic

Just like working for your dad (this is not always bad, of course), being under the control of a paternalistic manager can have a similar effect to that of an autocratic boss; although, like parents, they tend to have a more empathetic approach when demanding that tasks are done their way.

Democratic

Like the name suggests, under the rule of a democratic boss, you can expect the whole team to get a say in the decision-making process, which is, of course, great, as people tend to feel more included, valued, and engaged when their voice counts. This can lead to better overall communication and a happier workforce. In a democratic office it’s good to have a wise chairperson, however, as a lack of experience can mitigate this extra level of responsibility for outcomes.

Laissez-Faire

You need to be careful with this one, as it can be seen as a little lazy to let the team take over all the decision-making, and without a strong captain at the helm to imbue a little experience into proceedings, problems can easily occur. If you go down this route it may be worth investing in some corporate training courses to up-skill your key team members.

Servant Leadership

Google are known for being good at this style of leadership; removing the focus on the needs of the business and reassigning it to the needs of the workforce. The idea is that a happy team will naturally be more productive. This style of leadership requires a hiring process that can find the kind of staff that are likely to respond best to this sort of working environment.

Changing it up

Moving from one style of management to another needs a stoic attitude, a determined and brave approach, and preferably a collaborative strategy. It might be a change in leadership style but the consequences affect the entire organization and the employees, so they should be kept in the loop and consulted throughout the process in order to get useful feedback and check that they are adapting to the plan.

Think hard about making a change for the better as it can be disruptive, but make sure it’s an egoless process, and everything should go to plan.