Thursday, May 11, 2006

Do you want executive coaching?

  • Do you feel like you can't be yourself at work, they'll notice that you are not up to the job?
  • Do you feel you have to work too much and not feel valued or recognised?
  • Did you just get promoted, and don't want to ask questions because you feel you should know them?
  • Do you know your blind spots? What people think of you?

If you have answered yes to any of those, you may want to benefit from executive coaching.

Executive coaching helps us become more self aware. It helps us identify what are our strengths and weaknessess. What are those self imposed barriers to our success, and more importantly how to overcome them.

Here is an example of how Executive coaching can help us change our perspective on what we perceive an issue at work:

One of my clients was really unhappy at work. She felt unfulfilled, and her performance started to suffer. The company she worked for had just gone through a reorganisation, and she did not get the job she wanted. She felt she had been demoted. In reality, her team had doubled, she had received a 20% raise, and she had responsability for all of Europe. On a day to day basis she loved her job and her team, but she felt betrayed by the company, because she was no longer at the same level as her peers. As part of the culture change in the organisation, they provided her with executive coaching.

We started the coaching process by identifying what were her objectives for the coaching and determining if they were in line with the new organisation.

We went through a six month process of identifying Why was she un-happy? What were her career and work values? Were they congruent with the organisation? What did she really want? What made her happy? etc

She discovered that her values were success, challenge, results, people, reward, recognition.

As a result of taking the time to really think about who she is and who she wanted to be, she realised she had many unconcious beliefs that were holding her back. One of them being that "title" was a key element of her definition of success. We explored the imporance of "the title" for her, and consequently she altered her definition of success to include elements that were more relevant and important to her life now such as impact, results, reward, responsability.

As she became more self-aware, she became more more focused on what was really important to her at work and more in control of her destiny and career. Her team started performing better than they had ever before. They won a quality award for the year, and she was promoted the following year.

This example above shows us how our blind spots or unconcious beliefs can hold us back or make us feel unhappy, and how an executive coach can help you see things from a different perspective and get in touch with what really matters to you.

Einstein said " We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them"

So, do you want executive coaching? You have the answer, would you benefit from having someone whose whole agenda is for you to achieve what you want.