Executive Coaching – Effecting change from the Top – Down

It is little wonder that we use a term like “the corporate jungle” to describe the experience that many executives have in their working world. Never have executives been under more pressure to deliver better results with fewer resources in a less supportive business environment. Neuroscience is showing beyond a shadow of a doubt that stress negatively impairs the quality of our thinking – and prolonged stress impairs our mental and physical health.

This cartoon published in Harvard Business Review illustrates the point brilliantly.

An executive coach helps business people to see the wood for the trees, gain perspective about their challenges and develop powerful strategies for coping with stressors without becoming stressed.

Executives typically seek coaching for the following reasons:

• to develop their strategic thinking and create a forum in which they can just think about their business and where they wish to take it;

• because they are frustrated that they have not been able to get the kind of performance from their team that they need, and they wish to become more effective leaders;

• because they feel swamped by the sheer volume of work and responsibilities that they carry and need to find ways to make it more manageable;

• to prepare for a new position or to get up to speed quickly in a new position;

• to make key career decisions such as “up or out”.

What is a Coach?

• A Coach is a catalyst who can unlock your potential and enable you to achieve breakthrough and deeply satisfying results.

• A Coach gets you from where you are now to where you want to be, enabling you to convert what you know into spectacular results.

• A Coach works with you over a period of time in order to enable you to achieve challenging objectives that really stretch you.

• A Coach is concerned with raising the quality of your thinking – it is quality thinking that results in quality actions.
  

What coaching is not?

It is not advice, therapy, training, tips, fixing, motivation or consulting.

Who needs a coach?

Everyone could do with a coach. It is the single most valuable personal investment that anyone can make. What would Tiger Woods, Jack Welsh, Bill Gates, Cyril Ramaphosa or Oprah Winfrey have achieved without the ongoing support of a coach?

Our focus in this area is at the following levels:

• Directors, especially newly-appointed directors

• Leaders

• Executive and Senior Management

A professional coach will:

• Enable you to achieve your personal best.

• Help you to navigate a path filled with obstacles and surprises and achieve outstanding results.

• Enable you to think more clearly and more creatively.

• Help you to overcome self-sabotaging and self-limiting beliefs.    

• Help you to find and maintain a work – life balance

• Get the best out of people who are passionate, creative and committed to themselves, others and life.

• Coach individuals and teams.

• Enable top achievers to outdo themselves.

• Help you to achieve breakthrough results and to maintain this long after the coaching has ended.

How does it work?

• You will determine what you want to achieve over the process. Your Coach will coach you from that starting place and always have that as the foundation and focus for interaction.

• You and your coach will co-create and identify such things as your values, your vision, your purpose, your mission, the goals you want to achieve out of coaching and put structures in place for achieving the goals.

• Your coach will work with you from a base of intuition, past experience and expertise, and ask you the questions that will unlock the door of creativity and enable you to produce the results and solutions.

• You will commit to actions and deadlines.

• Your coach will support you in the process, passionately, single-mindedly and with the highest level of service.