Importance of Executive Coaching
Executives are the backbone of any organization, as their dedication, contribution, and decisions make the organization grow.
Coaching & Mentoring
Are You Coachable?
Even Michael Jordan had a coach, coaching your team is important if you want to drive continuous improvement. Effective coaching is a two-way street, where the coach offers to guide the individual and that person must cooperate and follow through. Essentially, the Coach helps the Coachee to come up with the solutions by highlighting performance improvement areas. We have looked at coaching on several occasions but from the coaches perspective. As I considered this topic, I realized that not much has been said about the Coachee and that relationship cannot work without both parties active involvement. As an employee, are you ready to for coaching? What should you do to ensure that the coaching sessions are successful? Here are my thoughts on how the Coachee can make the coaching successful. 1: Have A Willing Heart A willing heart is a first and most important point. You should be willing to accept the coaching with your manager. Given the nature of coaching where you come up with the solutions to the problems, a willing heart will make the process smoother. A willing heart means that you can take criticism and direction from someone else, and be flexible to use it for the benefit of the company. It will also benefit you as an individual and your career growth. Without a willing heart, the process will be an uphill battle that can lead to hating the job or your manager instead of improving your performance. “Where the heart is willing, it will find a thousand ways: where is unwilling it will find a thousand excuses” Arlen Price 2: Be Committed Coaching is a process that requires commitment, and when you are under fire or criticism, it is easy to give up. Complete commitment means believing you are worthwhile in terms of who you are and what you do. Your coach cannot make you commit to the process; it has to come from within. Allowing yourself and our cause to have sufficient psychological and material resources to achieve your career goals is self-commitment. Without it, you will sabotage yourself by giving all sorts of excuses and negative self-talk. Commit to the coaching process and the outcome will be great. “Nothing will work unless you do.” John Wooden 3: Have Inner Strength Your inner strength will take you miles ahead. When faced with a hard situation at work, how do you respond to it? You can react in two ways, meet with it head on and get a solution or break down. Having inner strength is your ability to control your emotional responses when under pressure and be able to concentrate on what is important. For example, you are an account manager and you lose a key customer. This huge loss will make the leadership ask questions. Your immediate boss will call you for a meeting to figure out what went wrong and how can that customer be won back or how to improve what the company did not to repeat the same mistakes. That is a coaching session, and your inner strength will help you put it together, look at every interaction you have had with the customers and come up with solutions to win them back. Without it, you will not even see where the problem is and the session will be futile. 4: Take Full Responsibility Yes, take full responsibility for your actions and reactions. Remember that at work, when you are being coached, it is more of giving you directions and pushing in the right way. However, you cannot go anywhere if you do not acknowledge your mistakes and successes. When you perform well, accept the applause’s, and when you perform poorly, own your mistakes and be the first to correct it. Your coach will be there to highlight your weak areas, and you can find the best ways to improve them. Taking full responsibility requires you to be humble. 5: Respect your coach Whose advice do you follow? The one you respect or the one you do not? I believe you will listen and follow someone that you respect. To benefit from the coaching, you need to respect your coach. Do not confuse respect with fear. When you fear someone, you will not be open to him or her. When you respect someone, you will be open and have constructive conversations. In summary, when you have a willing heart, you are committed, you have inner strength, you take full responsibility and you respect your coach, the coaching will successful. Remember you are the beneficiary of the coaching. Enjoy and be coachable! This blog was written by Jim Iyoob, Chief Customer Officer for Etech Global Services. If you would like to learn more about Etech, please contact us at info@etechgs.com.
Becoming a Focused Leader Part 1
Effective leadership encompasses a myriad of activities but may be thought of as being primarily about directing staff to achieve company goals. Providing that successful direction can be accomplished by targeting leadership focus on the most critical areas. Although focus can be defined as a central point of attention or activity, to be an efficiently focused leader, you must develop the ability to shift attention to the right target at the right time, sense current trends, and growth opportunities. The result will be that the people who follow you will shift their attention to the things you focus on. The urgently focused leader will develop the ability to: Focus on yourself Focus on others Focus on the outer world As Daniel Goleman quoted, “Leaders guide attention. But a single-minded focus on goals can run roughshod over human concerns.” Therefore, you need to be alert not to focus on one area and neglect the others. The challenge is in finding the balance that yields results based on organizational structure. In part 1 of this discussion, we will dig deeper into the first focus point. Focus on Yourself Focusing on yourself does not mean being selfish and working to advance only your personal agenda at every meeting, it means practicing emotional intelligence. You can read more about emotional intelligence here. It begins with being self-aware and in touch with your inner voice. As you develop self-awareness, your gut feelings can simplify your decision-making process by guiding your attention toward the best option. The more you listen to those gut feelings, the more comprehensively you will understand them, leading to better use of your intuition. As a word of cautionary balance however, you should not make all of your decisions solely based on gut feelings only. This process also requires open awareness, meaning that you take note of everything going on around you while at the same time maintaining attention on the critical tasks at hand. Self-control follows self-awareness and includes the cognitive control of your attention where you want it and keeping it there no matter what happens. For example, if you were working on your quarterly sales report and then a colleague calls to chat, you would ask to call them back later. You continue to pursue your goal despite setbacks and distractions. The same self-control helps you keep calm during a crisis to think objectively about the situation and make solid decisions. Self-control is also about exercising your will power. It influences how you act when you exercise self-restraint versus self-gratification and voluntarily disengage your focus from any minor disruptions. You must develop the discipline to resist distractions and concentrate on critical goals. Focused leadership is a balancing act that starts with introspection and evolves to impact the people around you. When you are self-aware and practice self-control, your team will take note and work collaboratively to reach your business goals. Part 2 of the Focused Leader discussion will be coming soon. This blog was first published on LinkedIn
