Boost Your Career with Executive Leadership Coaching

Maximizing Your Potential: The Benefits of Executive Leadership Coaching

Some of the most common questions I get asked when people find out what I do are:

• How can executive leadership coaching help improve my performance? 
• How can executive leadership coaching help my leadership development? 
• What are the benefits of executive leadership coaching?

So I thought I’d capture some thoughts on how investing in coaching can give you an exponential return on your investment, if you’re an established leader, or you’re someone that’s just moved into a new leadership position, or even if you’re someone that aspires to become a leader.

The reality is, you have to invest money and time in executive and leadership coaching.  So how do you know you’re going to get benefits from your investment? 

Leaders at all levels are paid to make decisions.  The impact of the actions taken based on those decisions determine the value proposition of the leader making the decisions.  This cause (decision) and effect (productive behaviour) principle would then suggest that better decisions generate better actions and improved bottom-line results. 

In a previous life as a Service Engineer at Rolls-Royce Defence Aerospace, I would often carry out root-cause analysis to determine the root cause of a fault, or failure.  A well-known tool for this analysis is called the five-times ‘why,’ where you start with the effect, and ask ‘why did that happen?’  When you determine the answer, you then ask the question again for the answer, and so on until you get to the root cause(s).

What many people don’t realise is that you can use the exact same methodology for maximizing potential in the form of high-performance for you, your teams, and your organisation.

Let’s walk through the five-times why model.  If you want to improve any result that is a key success factor (KSF) or a key performance indicator (KPI), you have to ask ‘why are you getting the results you are getting?’  Assuming no effect of uncontrollable external variables, the answer will always be ‘behaviours.’  If you and your team is consistently generating high-performing results, than you are consistently demonstrating good habits and behaviours.  If results fluctuate, or are below target, then there are some bad habits that are being tolerated.

Next question – ‘Why do you behave the way you do?  The simple answer is, your behaviours are an effect of the decisions you make.  Think about it.  Every single action you take must first be preceded by a decision to take that action. The thing is, that decision is most often made unconsciously.  Remember we don’t just have habits of behaving.  We have habits of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Ok, next question – ‘Why do you make the decisions you make?’  To keep things simple, the high-level answer, that may surprise you to read, is your emotions.  The human brain has evolved in parts.  The limbic brain, the emotional centre is more evolved that the neo-cortex, the executive centre.  So although you may believe you make decisions based on logic, more often you’ll be making emotional decisions, and then wrapping logic around the emotional decision to satisfy your executive centre.

Final question – ‘Why do you feel the emotions you feel? – Again, we could spend hours on this topic, but for brevity the simple answer is ‘the meaning you give anything that happens.’  Nothing has any meaning, except for the meaning we give it.  As events happen in our environment, our brain processes the information after it’s been ran through several filters, e.g. your beliefs, your values, your past experiences.  Based on how we perceive the information, we choose to give it meaning.  Empowering meaning = empowering emotions.  Disempowering meaning = disempowering emotions.

So let’s summarise - the perspective you have of something will determine how you feel, which will determine your decisions, which determine the actions you take or don’t take, which will ultimately determine your results in life and in business.

So why the root cause analysis?  To answer the question, ‘what are the benefits of executive leadership coaching?’, most business minded people will look for a monetary return on investment.  So if you can increase productivity, you can increase the amount of output with the same amount of resources in the same amount of time, which will ultimately improve bottom-line financial results.

What executive leadership coaching does is that it works on the root-cause of what determines results.  Without coaching, most leaders go one layer down to behaviour. ‘Don’t do that.  Do this instead.” 

1. RESULT 
2. BEHAVIOUR / HABIT (how you act) 
3. DECISION 
4. EMOTION (how you feel) 
5. MEANING (how you think) 

For that strategy to work, the leader has to be consistently monitoring and managing their team.  This is one of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen across five continents in multiple industries.

To create lasting improvement, whether it’s financial bottom-line results, safety performance, cultural scores, retention, product/service quality, you must work at a deeper level.  You must work  on what’s unconscious – your thoughts, feelings, and decisions.

This is where the real value of an effective executive leadership coach is found.  Having an executive leadership coach that facilitates you to do the necessary deep self-enquiry to gain conscious awareness (bringing the unconscious to the conscious), reflect and gain new insights, puts you on a fast track to take new actions that, done consistently, through the support of your coach, will bring you limitless improvements in your performance.

Developing Essential Skills: How Executive Leadership Coaching Can Advance Your Career

If you’re passionate about being an effective leader, then you’re likely to have your eyes on a position that is multiple layers higher on the organizational hierarchical structure than where you currently are.  Or maybe you’re already at an executive level and you’re considering a new challenge in another organisation.

Author, Marshall Goldsmith wrote a great book titled, ‘What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.’  In it he shares that many professionals get stuck in a certain level of success.  For example, they might climb to a middle-management position in their organisation, but find themselves always getting passed over for promotion to the executive level.

Goldsmith believes that when a professional’s career stalls in this way, it’s because they’ve slipped into bad behavioural habits, and shows up as treating their colleagues poorly. 

Habits by their very nature are unconscious, hence, we are not aware of why we do what we do; and without reflection, you may not recognize the impact of your actions on others.

Executive leadership coaching helps you to get clarity on the behaviours you’re demonstrating that aren’t serving you or your colleagues, helps you to break those habits, and replace them with more empowering habits that positively influence the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the people that you lead.  When you work on your inside world, your outside world gets better.

Maybe you need to work on you listening skills, communicating your messaging more effectively, delivering more effective feedback, managing your emotional regulation, being more structured with time, delegating more, or something else you may not be consciously aware of yet.

Whatever it is for you, coaching sets you in a frame of possibility, a growth mindset of continuous learning, and improvement.  It is the sledgehammer that smashes the rock of interference.

When you break old habits that don’t serve you and begin to build more habits that create a more empowered and cohesive team, you are positioning yourself to build a high-performing, learning culture, and a team that consistently achieves results.

When new opportunities come up to advance your career, where you have more responsibility, more influence, more impact, and more income, be prepared to get a knock on your door.

Achieving Your Goals: The Impact of Executive Leadership Coaching on Career Growth

What is a goal?  

"A goal is the object of a person’s ambition or effort, an aim or desired result.  The end towards which effort is directed."  It originated in the 1530s from ‘end point in a race.’  

Before you start directing your EFFORT, you must set a clear goal, a clear ‘end-point’ for your race to becoming a highly-effective leader.

Why is it important to set goals?

An idea I want to share to demonstrate why it's important to set goals is the Harvard Business School MBA study on goal setting.  The graduating class was asked a single question about their goals in life. The question was this:

Have you set written goals and created a plan for their attainment?

Prior to graduation, it was determined that 84% of the entire class had set no goals at all.  13% of the class had set written goals but had no concrete plans.  3% of the class had both written goals and concrete plans.

The results? 

10 years later, the 13% of the class that had set written goals but had not created plans, were making twice as much money as the 84% of the class that had set no goals at all.  However, incredibly, the 3% of the class that had both written goals and a plan, were making ten times as much as the rest of the 97% of the class.  One of the most important takeaways form the Harvard Study is that goals need to be planned for.  Without a plan, chances for success are minimal. 

So many people I work with are very clear on what they don’t want, but when I ask them what they want, there is a long pause, a blank look in their faces, followed by “I don’t know!’

Executive leadership coaching can help you get the specific clarity you need to progress your career in a direction that gives you a sense of achievement, validation, authority, satisfaction, pride, fulfillment, and legacy.  When you are clear on this, your leadership coach can support you in taking the fastest and most efficient path to achieving that goal.

If you would like to learn how executive leadership coaching can help you or the leaders in your organisation, click on the link and book a 30-minute discovery call with me to find out more.