​

Either through self-reflection, or as a result of a performance review, you come to realize that for personal growth, change is required. This is part of your journey towards self-awareness and developing emotional intelligence, two key ingredients of effective leadership.

 

Clients arrange to see career coaches for a wide range of reasons. One of the most common is that they just don't know what they want to do. Sometimes they can have quite good levels of self-awareness, so they know what strengths they've got, and they know what their values are. They may even know what they want to get out of a job, but they can't quite translate that into a job title. ​So, there's quite a lot of work that we do around getting people to identify specifically what it is they want.

​

Sometimes we have clients who know exactly what they want. They just don't know how to get there. 

 

Maybe they know what the job is: they just don't know what it's called.

 

Maybe they know what the job is, and what it's called: they just don't know how to go about the process of trying to secure the opportunity that they're after. These are all typical career coaching issues.

 

Some clients are aware of their lack of understanding of how to approach a problem, be it with a colleague, customer, process or system. We also get clients who can't work out how to square their career demands and aspirations with the rest of their lives. Often imposter syndrome holds people back, or they don't quite feel ready for the next stage, but they know they need to do something.

 

​Executive coaching more often than not requires an in-depth look at how to become a better leader. Managing change of self and others becomes the area for development. 

 

Change is an inevitable part of growth, both at the individual and the organizational level. As a leader at the executive or middle management level, you must first learn how to cope with change as an individual before you can become an effective change leader in your organization. Taking the first step is your responsibility.

​

There might be a specific issue that you want to address with your coach like how to build rapport with people, how to develop a coaching approach to leadership, how to understand different people styles, how to delegate, and/or how to project manage more effectively. How do you identify future opportunities and threats? This is a combination of both technical and behavioural performance issues.  

 

Executive Coaching covers the whole gamut of needs. From developing self-confidence, to identifying your blind spots, to overcoming limiting assumptions, to developing leadership soft skills, to dealing with conflict, the needs are diverse and eclectic, but it starts with you.

 

To survive and thrive in the modern economy, organizations need to develop a learning culture. This culture promotes psychological safety, trust, risk taking, creativity and innovation. In learning organizations, experimenting, learning new things, and reflecting on new knowledge are the norms.

 

Executive leaders need to understand how to create the conditions to nurture these attributes and at the same time, embrace them themselves.