11 Must Have Skills for an Executive Coach to Create Powerful Results
Who is a successful Executive Coach?
A successful executive coach is able to help produce results that his/her clients want. Executive Coaches need to some Special Skills to create Impactful Results for their clients. The true meaning of being Executive Coaching is not only to pay fee and get Coaching Certification. A skilled coach will be able to navigate through unique situations of his/her clients, see through their perspective and solve their problems to lead them to better positions in job and life. A coach isn’t magically endowed with the temperament to solve these problems but only through rigorous effort and constant practice.
Executive Coaching Meaning
First of all, a successful executive coach needs to have a flaming desire to actually be a coach in addition to merely being driven by the high-paying job incentives. This is a necessary driving force. It is only through a deep passion to help business professionals with solving their problems that one chooses to become an executive coach and master the profession. A good executive coach needs to have a helping mindset. If one finds coaching profoundly meaningful and fulfilling, then only he/she will be able to become a successful executive coach.
Now that a person has a strong desire to become an executive coach, he/she needs to possess the following skills to become efficient in the profession:
11 Skills for Executive Coaches to Create Impactful Results
1. Deep Listening during Coaching
Listening to the client deeply and understanding every nuance of his/her problem without any inherent bias is one of the most important markers of a result-oriented executive coach. It is only through establishing an open and free connection with the intent to listen to the client that a successful coach can be made. People are freer to express their vulnerabilities if they find that the coach they are talking to is intently listening to them and is interested and inclusive of their unique problems and perspectives.
2. Empathy and Understanding for Coachee
An executive coach which is empathetic to the client and promise to relate with their problems with their perspective produces the best results. It has to be done without any inherent bias or prejudice against the client. The coach needs realize that it is very important to put oneself into their shoes before proposing the solutions for their problems. It calls for a deeper understanding of all the aspects of the client’s life situations and the empathy to understand why dealing with the problems becomes difficult for them.
3. Generating New Ideas and Perspectives during Coaching
Many times problems are solved because they are seen in better and wider perspectives. A coach will be able to generate more efficient results if he/she is capable of making his/her client see their problems with new perspectives. This calls for understanding various variables of the problems and seeing them in a higher resolution (or with more clarity). This also requires creativity and problem-solving mindset.
4. A Deep Understanding of Human Nature
Humans are the most complex living organisms on the planet and their behavior are also the most abstruse to understand. A result-oriented coach will have a deep knowledge into human behavior, social psychology, various personalities etc. While dealing with the clients, this knowledge can help coaches identify which personality group they belong to, how they process emotions, how their social and cultural surroundings have shaped them and so on. This is an incessant process and something which successful executive coaches are constantly understanding.
5. Teaching & Mentoring Skills
The teacher or trainer is seen as an expert who exchanges his or her knowledge and/or skills with the people they teach. The teaching and training methods vary and are at best interactive and participatory, providing the students with an opportunity to practice.
Many of the qualifications used in education and training can be used during executive coaching too. Executive coaching is somewhat similar to classic teaching and mentoring: there is a student which needs help or consistent guidance with a problem or learning something. The only problem is, ‘to take off your own hats of knowledge,’ or ‘to stop trying to fix them for people’. It is not something like dictatorial but being a good teacher is a necessary skill to be an effective executive coach.
6. Constant Learning of the Coach
An executive coach should not shut the doors of seeking knowledge or consider at any point that he/she knows everything about coaching. Constant improvement and critical feedback are key components to be successful in this particular niche. With every new person they coach, they learn something new and the scope of coaching increases. Nobody is the perfect coach, but someone who is constantly seeking knowledge and diverse experience surely has deep insights into executive coaching.
7. Leadership skills
A very important part of executive coaching is leadership coaching because often the clients are leaders in the organization of their particular verticals. A result-oriented coach needs to be endowed with sufficient leadership skills to help these leaders with solving their problems.
In addition, coaching is intrinsically a job which prerequisites leadership because a coach is leading his/her client to a better end. Solving problems requires taking a position, maintaining communication, putting faith in the solution suggested for the client. These are all classic markers of a leader.
8. Proactive Thinking
Proactive Thinking can be understood as flexibility plus creativity. A result-oriented coach will be always ready to challenge traditional notions and see every situation of his/her client in a new light. This would allow the coach to generate creative and more effective solutions. Instead of being driven by bookish knowledge based on established theories, a better coach will search for nuances and details in the problem and use his/her creative potential to generate more effective solutions for the client.
9. Openness and Broad Mindset
A seasoned executive coach will think broadly in all aspects of the client’s problems. Without any pre-conceived notions or biases, he/she will investigate with an open mind into the problems of the client. This would mean not trying to fit the client into a box or categories into a particular social group but as an individual.
10. Intuition
Intuition is something which develops overtime and with substantial nurturing and practice. It is an amalgamation of all the cues that the coach receives from the client such as his/her body language, tone of conversation, emotional temperament etc. and intuitively generating a solution for the problem. This is more like a natural response after getting familiarized with all the nuances and doing what the ‘gut feeling’ tells the coach to do.
11. Willingness to Take Risks
A coach can never improve if he/she is not willing to take risks. In the end, it becomes a process of constant improvement and a thorough examination of the results which the client experiences after being coached. For this to happen, a solution needs to be tested out in reality. If the coach is unwilling to take risks because of fear of failure or other apprehension, then not much can be achieved in the long-term.
This article has been curated by Team of Dr. Vikas Vats, Best Executive Coach in India, based on his sessions on Executive Coaching. You may get in touch with the Team VC for any coaching requirements here.