As you may know, I have been an Executive Coach for the past three years after leaving the University of Cincinnati as Director of Executive Education. I have teamed up with another Cincinnati-based Executive Coach who had a brilliant career in a major software company.
During the last three years in our new careers as Executive Coaches, we have helped many clients become better leaders. From a business perspective, we have provided our client-companies an excellent ROI. We’ve seen some dramatic transformations, and helped our clients quickly get bottom line results.
In our prior careers we both were line managers in large organizations. We believed that we were coaching our people, but now we readily admit that neither of us were doing much developmental coaching. What were calling “coaching” is much different from the executive coaching we are doing today. Sure, as managers, we were providing day-to-day feedback and doing performance coaching, but that’s about it. We spent most of our time fire-fighting and reacting; not being proactive and developing our people.
Since the word “coaching” has many different connotations, but we suspect that most managers don’t really understand what they should be doing to effectively develop their people and build future talent for their organizations. Most managers have not learned the right skills and processes to change behaviors and help their staff to grow and develop. Most have no idea about what is really possible with the right skills and tools that executive coaches use to get behavior change.
We now recognize that being an executive coach requires a set of unique skills and behavioral experiences. It has taken us over three years of training, learning, and many engagements to master our executive coaching skills and processes.
Fortunately, there have been many companies that were more than willing for us to take over that responsibility from their managers and pay us very attractive fees for the needed behavior changes. Ironically, we have pre-empted many managers, and taken over many manager’s role grow and develop their people.
However, as you might expect, this recession has significantly reduced our executive coaching engagements. We are still busy, but not coaching the number clients we were two years ago. We suspect that companies no longer have deep pockets to pay external executive coaches the premium fees.
Unfortunately, we also suspect that there is less coaching in companies today. It’s probable that managers haven’t taken up the slack and are spending more time coaching their people. Most managers are probably neglecting this developmental experience. Most of our clients are saying that the need for coaching is even more important today, however there’s a lot less going on. The need has not gone away.
We are creating a two-day program called:
Coaching Secrets: The Skills Executive Coaches Don’t Want You to Know!
The program is in the beta stage right now. We are looking for companies that may be interested in a pilot program. We have created a very unique program that will teach mid-level managers how executive coaches achieve behavior changes. The program is loaded with our experience and very specific skills that have made us successful. Some objectives include:
- The difference between managing and coaching
- What makes a good coach
- Key coaching skills including advocacy, empathetic listening, and in-depth questioning
- Conducting an initial meeting
- Tools that pinpoint strengths, weaknesses, and developmental needs
- Using stakeholders
- Building a developmental plan
We’ve wrapped the content in a dynamic learning environment that is experiential by design. We will do several video role plays and provide honest and constructive feedback to the participants. We’ve also thought about the reinforcement to this seminar, and we will personally work with your managers to coach them individually after the seminar.
We are looking for a few companies that are interested in having nine of their managers experience the program. We’re looking for feedback, future endorsement, and the potential to run more seminars in your company down the road. Ideally we would like to run one session in October and two seminars in early December.
If you think your company may be interested, please let me know and call me or email me as soon as possible.
Rob VeVerka
