What is Executive Coaching anyway?

As a 30+ year former corporate executive who reinvented himself and was more than ready to break away from a corporate gig, driven by the genuine passion and drive to proactively launch 2 small businesses in the sports space, I am regularly intrigued to uncover the abundance of individuals working as Executive Coaches. As a personal side note, in quite a few cases, these "Executive Coaches" were folks I worked with over my corporate career, as either former employees on my teams, or more ironically, those who were "asked to leave" because they weren't cutting it.

Regardless, the intriguing part to me is digging deeper to uncover the amount of experience (level and number of years) combined with the degree of business and career decisions these folks had been exposed to over their careers, which appears, in a self-proclaimed way, to qualify them to "coach" Executives. The qualifications and career experiences of those who market their services as Executive Coaching should be the primary decision criteria prior to selecting the right "fit" for you and your personal situation. This is something that is worthy of serious due diligence and research, if you're not wanting to waste money, prior to selecting the right mentor partner. Sourcing a genuine Executive Coach whose personal chemistry matches with yours is critical in ensuring a positive ROI if you're going to truly reap the rewards of them adding value in your business life.

This brings me to my next point. If I were looking to hire a competent and qualified Executive Coach, the first attributes I'd look for would be trust and confidence in their abilities to quickly understand issues, tenure of business leadership experience, career progression ie. job promotions, cross-industry experiences, and track record of success, to list but a few. The cross-industry phenomenon is an interesting one in that I'd be all over wanting to consult and be mentored/coached by someone who has best practices to share from their work experiences across a range of approaches and magnitudes, deployed by multiple organizations. I get a kick out of Executive Coaches who have only worked with one employer, regardless of the number of positions they've held, and feel that they are worldly and diversified enough to be able to provide coaching and advice on how to deal with leadership-level issues. Often, these are executives who have grown in organizations from entry level jobs and now hold senior executive roles...well, there's a recipe for adding valuable cross functional and experiential counsel...not!!

The other intriguing part for me is how many organizations now exist that offer "Executive Coaching" credentials and training programs for those who want to "become" Executive Coaches. While I think I understand the concept of being trained to become an Executive Coach, wouldn't those looking for coaching help prefer to work with someone who has the ability to quickly understand the issues at hand, share and compare them to their past experiences, and be qualified to offer sound advice on how to deal with situations? In other words, isn't the true value-add of an Executive Coach based on being able to confidentially share personal and business challenges with someone who's been in the seat before and "gets it" from past experiences, rather than from a prescribed theoretical training course they attended?

Let's just say that very effective Executive Coaches are those who have multiple career and job experiences to share, have strong interpersonal skills, are driven by a "glass is half full" attitude, know how to communicate, understand complex issues, have shown progression in their careers, and are super proud of their track records of performance. These "need to have's" shouldn't be negotiable when selecting an Executive Coach to add value in your role...just saying!

Taking it one step further, layer on top of that, someone whose primary client base is comprised of professional sports Coaches, coaching them on "coaching", and you've got the best of both worlds in not only being rewarded with great advice, but being represented by a qualified "Employee Agent"...quite the novel concept!! Good luck and thanks for reading this.