How to Choose an Executive Coach
By Marla Skibbins
Introduction: As your career advances within an organization, your roles and responsibilities evolve. Old styles of management, skill sets, and forms of leadership may no longer fit your new circumstances. But how do you know what to keep and what to discard? Knowing what is needed in your new role should not be a matter of “hit or miss.” That is why many corporate leaders utilize the services of an Executive Coach.
But what makes an excellent Executive Coach? What should you be looking for? As a Master Certified Coach who has been working with executives and thought leaders for two decades, there are some key factors that you should keep in mind when choosing a coach:
1. Chemistry: Chemistry, chemistry, chemistry. I can’t say it enough. In a top five, chemistry should be the first three of the things you are looking for in a coach. You've got to have chemistry with your coach. But, what does that mean? You need to feel that this person is on your side, that they have compassion and empathy for you, and that with them you feel trusting and open for sharing. You need to feel safe.
Now, I can hear you saying, “I don't need an ally, I don't need to feel safe”,and this would be true if you were hiring a consultant. You would need them to share their information, experience, and expertise with you. But an Executive Coach works at a level deeper than just teaching and training.
No adult wants to come face-to-face with areas of their performance that are undeveloped or harmful to others or to the success of the organization. An essential role of the Executive Coach is to ferret out those areas, in the name of growing you into an even more powerful and skillful leader. You need to be able to deeply trust your coach before you will be willing to take the first step down that sometimes difficult path of self- discovery and leadership growth. You also need to know that your coach will be able to handle your defensiveness and resistance when it arises in a way that allows you to learn and grow beyond it.
You need that combination of chemistry to relax with somebody who makes you "feel safe and vulnerable” and also somebody that holds growth with rigor. They're walking with you and pushing you forward. They are warm, direct, and willing to give you real-time feedback.
2. Coaching Expertise: By expertise I do not mean that they need to be an expert working in your job, your industry, or have spent time in the “C-Suite.” Expertise means the ability and professionalism to meet your energy level, and the confidence and executive presence to meet you as a peer. Expertise in your field or industry is probably the least important element on my list.
Expertise in coaching, however, is extremely important. I have been a member of the largest global Leadership development and Coach Training company for decades. I have seen how mission critical excellent training is.
There are many people out in the marketplace who are coaching with no certification. Anyone can call themselves an executive coach, and they do, but they don't have the slightest idea of what coaching is. Ultimately coaching is not about consulting. It is not about telling you “stuff” or giving you a plan. It's about you and the coach helping you develop and grow. I specialize in working with clients that want to develop their leadership capacity and with a hard focus on their emotional intelligence social intelligence and team intelligence.
At times, I will bring in content and advice, but at the end of the day I point back to my client and say “OK, So out of that, what will you use?” “What is the piece in you or in the situation that you think needs to shift?”. It’s bringing the content and bringing in my client and utilizing my training to guide the development and growth. This is a particular co-active coaching method we utilize in the Level Up EQ Program.
Always look for a trained coach. An MCC is a Master Certified coach. It means that they have coached at least 2,500 hours and have gone through a rigorous coach training program that was approved through the International Coach Federation. A certified coach will be somebody that understands how to cultivate and leverage your awareness. They will empower you to develop to the next best leader, as opposed to just telling you what they think you should do.
Here are key questions you should ask your prospective Executive Coach:
Where have you been trained?
Where are you certified?
What level of credentialing do you have? Are you an Associate Certified Coach, a Professional Certified Coach, or a Master Certified Coach? (ACC, PCC, or MCC)
3. Feedback: Many coaches operate exclusively on a one-to-one basis. They meet with their client, and only with their client. Their understanding of their client’s work setting comes only through the filter of the client’s eyes.
Part of choosing a coach who works in your growth area is also questioning “How will you know about me? How will you learn about me, beyond what I tell you?”.
You want to choose your coach to assess you, but you also need to choose to be assessed. You need to receive feedback about how you are as a leader, your level of emotional and social intelligence, and how your team feels as a whole when you lead. You then need to be open to that feedback and even be hungry for it. You want to provide your coach with a wide range of people that will see you in a wide range of situations to get external feedback about you as a leader. You are smart and you are aware, but you will miss things that you need to know.
4. Return on Investment: Human change complex and is not always as measurable as a mathematical problem. But we can at least point to change. So there needs to be a process of measurement and assessment. You’ll need to ask your coach “What’s my ROI in your engagements?”
Sometimes there's a significant two hundred, three hundred percent return on the investment. It comes from saving time, increased employee retention, creating engagement and removing the drag and the back-channeling that happens because of disengagement.
If your coach can’t help you assess on whether there has been a change, then you’re left hoping there has been but without any data to back that up. Are your colleagues going to say there has been a shift with you? Will they see your growth?
Something that I find important and that I implement with my own coaching is being in a continuous feedback process with you and the stakeholders in the in the coaching engagement. We align your stakeholders around what your coaching plan is and have them actually chime in, rate in the beginning, again at midpoint, and then again at the end. Instead of relying on hope and impression, we come out with an ROI report that will give you invaluable information about what has changed and what hasn’t changed, versus just hoping there was change.
5. Diversity: You do not need to find a coach who is perfectly “like-minded,” someone just like you. You need to look outside the box. If your coach shares your same experience, world view and intellect, how will they be able to solve a problem that you haven’t been able to solve?
Be aware that you want somebody that can invite you outside of your norm and who can encourage you to see things differently. This means you have to be willing to hire someone that might be younger than you, might be older than you, might not look like you, might not have the same pedigree as you, might not have anything in common with you, may have never been an executive inside an organization. You are looking for something different than you. Your coach needs to be relatable, but also someone who will push you outside of your comfort zone to new ideas and solutions.
Are you ready? I have had clients say “You better be good for this price.” I always come back to them with, “In the end, it has nothing to do with me being good. It's how ready YOU are to change.” Of course, the coach needs to show up, be an expert and be excellent at what they do. But there is nothing the coach can do if you are not ready to make the effort in shifting and aligning your behaviors with growth and development.
So, are you ready to hear the feedback, to look and see what you need to shift with your behavior and address that feedback? Are you willing to be gritty enough to drive that change, even when you're tired, even when you're frustrated? Are you willing to self-manage and relationship-manage your way to excellent leadership?