Did you know research by The Manchester Review found that Fortune 500 companies investing in executive coaching saw an average return on investment of $100,000 or 5.7 times the initial investment?
Sometimes, the benefits of personal development can be less tangible, such as improved communication abilities or enhanced leadership skills. However, that statistic shows a more quantitative advantage.
In this article, we’ll explore the key benefits of executive coaching for C-suite leaders. We’ll define what executive coaching is and explain how it can help accelerate your career growth.
TL;DR – 5 Benefits of Executive Coaching
At this point, you may be wondering if investing in executive coaching is worthwhile. The answer is yes; there are numerous benefits to engaging in executive coaching if you’re looking to take your skills to the next level.
If you don’t have time to read the whole piece, here are our top five benefits of executive coaching—we’ll cover these in more detail shortly.
- Manage change
- Introduce new perspectives
- Provide conduits for constructive feedback
- Improve performance
- Develop leaders and thought leadership
At Tandem Coaching, we understand the importance of developing core abilities and soft skills to become the very best leader you can be. Get in touch today to find out how we can improve your approaches.
It all sounds super interesting, right?! But before we dive deeper into why executive coaching is essential, let’s further define the subject.
What is Executive Coaching?
Executive Coaching is a collaboration and partnership between you and an experienced coach to improve your leadership abilities and enhance organizational performance.
Executive coaching from Tandem Coaching is targeted at the C-suite and executive leadership levels. It helps you sharpen your professional qualities and drive real improvements in your industry as a business leader.
These skills can cover a range of areas depending on your specific requirements, including:
- Motivational skills
- Supportiveness
- Leadership skills
- Ability to inspire growth
- Cultural awareness
- Decision-making skills
- Enhance self-confidence
- Develop agile leadership abilities
Key outcomes range from corporate wins, such as improved productivity, to more personal goals, like achieving a better work-life balance.
What is Leadership Development Coaching?
While executive coaching covers many areas an executive may want to develop, leadership development coaching has a more targeted focus.
Leadership development coaching helps executives identify specific leadership skills they want to improve, such as influencing, motivating, and inspiring their teams.
The coach then partners with the executive to create an action plan for making positive changes in those targeted areas.
Support like this can help leaders and executives address challenges in a more balanced way. Additionally, it can empower them to become more agile and help the business navigate changing corporate landscapes.
What to Expect From Executive Coaching
An executive coach collaborates with you and other C-suite professionals to identify your strengths, challenges, and areas of opportunity.
Part of this process is defining your business goals and highlighting potential blind spots to help you create a structured roadmap for success.
However, a good approach to getting the most out of coaching at this level is to have ideas about where you would like to see the biggest improvements in yourself. Whether that’s enhancing strategic thinking or sharpening organizational skills to protect your work-life balance.
Our bespoke coaching uses this approach to ensure we understand your business and personal goals before developing an action plan.
What is a Coaching Culture?
One major benefit of executive coaching is it often motivates leaders to establish a broader coaching culture. What is a coaching culture, and why does it matter?
A strong coaching culture emphasizes ongoing feedback to refine approaches through group conversations, 1-2-1 settings, or more anonymous routes like surveys. At its core, it is a commitment to developing an environment where employees feel safe sharing ideas.
However, this cultural shift does not happen quickly or easily. In a 2014 study by the Human Capital Institute and the International Coach Federation, only 13% of companies were found to have strong coaching cultures in place.
It requires dedicated buy-in from leadership over an extended period. Yet the benefits are clear. The top advantage is increased employee engagement.
Research shows that engaged workers have lower absenteeism, less turnover, and higher productivity. Unfortunately, most employees are not actively engaged currently.
A Deloitte study found that:
- 87% of organizations struggle with culture and engagement issues, and
- 50% see low engagement as a very important concern.
After executives experience coaching firsthand and see improvements in their own performance, they better understand the value of developmental support at all levels.
They become more likely to champion company-wide coaching initiatives, which aim to establish a culture of open communication, ongoing feedback, and continuous learning.
Recent studies show companies with mature coaching cultures see over 130% increase in overall performance. The investment pays dividends in trust, communication, and engagement.
Executive Coaching Formats
We can already see why executive coaching is so important. However, it’s also pivotal to understand that there is no silver bullet for improving yourself through coaching.
In fact, effective executive coaching encompasses several different areas of focus. So, it’s up to you to define which focus best aligns with your goals.
These formats include:
- Career coaching: Aimed at helping ambitious execs attain career goals by empowering them with the confidence to take control of their professional destinies.
- Skills coaching: Fine-tune the skills you already possess, from presenting to adapting to change. Get tailored support based on the specifics of what you want to improve.
- Team coaching: Focused on enhancing collaborative skills like mastering listening, developing teamwork, and improving communication. This method is vital for developing the coaching culture we spoke about earlier.
- Performance coaching: A strategic look into new ways of working to cement routes to goal achievement. Enhance your trailblazer abilities by rethinking corporate processes.
- Executive leadership coaching: As mentioned earlier, this format focuses on your abilities to enhance and inspire your team. How can you fine-tune your skills to maximize productivity while creating a happy team?
- Business coaching: This does not tell you how to do your job or run an organization. However, it can help define goals and aid collaboration to create a clear plan for achievement.
5 Benefits of Executive Coaching
As we have highlighted before, an executive coach’s benefits are wide-ranging. But let’s explore the advantages we highlighted at the top to understand them better.
1. Manage Change
The COVID-19 pandemic showed just how quickly the business environment can change. Companies face many factors that can alter the landscape, from internal shifts like new product launches to external forces like economic downturns.
Executive coaching means developing your strategic thinking to better defend against future changes. This can include improving weaknesses in your corporate awareness and planning while driving accountability.
2. Introduce New Perspectives
Oftentimes, the executive leadership can be too close to corporate challenges to define a clear route through the issues.
This is not an indictment of poor management—far from it. In fact, great managers can sometimes hold the best interests of the business so close to their hearts that new modes of thinking are not perceptible.
Bringing in an outside perspective in the form of coaching can open up new pathways of thinking that were previously not obvious.
3. Provide Conduits for Constructive Feedback
Back to our point about developing a positive coaching culture, poor business cultures often leave no room for constructive feedback. Parts of the management team become siloed and other members of the business feel that feedback won’t be heard or actioned.
Feedback loops can become closed through fear of negative repercussions or a lack of education. However, constructive feedback is vital to developing healthy businesses.
Executive coaches understand the importance of keeping feedback channels open and productive. 360 feedback tools or standard interviews can be effective approaches for gaining insights from all areas and levels of the organization.
As we mentioned earlier, establishing a culture of coaching can be the catalyst for driving meaningful improvements in your performance. Those enhancements come with more progression opportunities.
For example, they could mean the difference in developing from a departmental director position to a Vice President.
4. Improve Performance
A recent overview by Dr. Bill Dyment into the efficacy of executive coaching found that IT giant IBM saw a 50% improvement in leadership behaviors as a result of coaching. This increase also saw a stark improvement in global leadership performance within the brand.
Additionally, Dr. Dyment’s research highlights that, after coaching, a pharmaceutical company saw uplifts in sales performance estimated at 43 times the initial cost of the coaching.
Professional coaching boasts these returns by removing obstacles preventing you from performing optimally.
Trained coaching can unlock your potential by fine-tuning your leadership skills, encouraging feedback loops, honing decision-making skills, and championing internal communication.
5. Develop Leaders and Thought Leadership
In a world that continues pivoting towards machine learning or AI alternatives to human interaction, soft skills like leadership abilities are more critical than ever.
A study by Boston College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan found businesses that invested in soft skills training were 12% more productive as a result.
Enhancing your soft skills allows you to be more available to other members of the organization. However, improving these traits can also enhance your personal life, potentially improving your communication skills and methods for managing conflict at home or in other environments.
How to Get the Most Out of Executive Coaching
Executive coaching could be the thing that catapults you to the next level of professional growth. However, for it to be truly effective, you must be fully committed to putting in the required hard work.
Squeezing the absolute most out of your coaching will mean getting serious about a few elements of your corporate outlook and work-based methodologies.
Collaboration
We recommend entering your coaching partnership with an understanding of how you, your business, and your coach can work together most effectively.
Set Clear Goals
Whether KPIs, growth goals, or personal milestones, it always helps to have a clear understanding of your targets. Your coach can help you get clarity on those short and long-term SMART goals.
Feedback
Use 360 assessments to gather constructive feedback from around the business. Not only will this define positives and areas for improvement in your leadership style, but it will also begin to open up those crucial feedback loops.
Implement Appropriate Techniques
Working with masterful coaches from Tandem Coaching means you can quickly roll out programs that will enhance your strategic efforts as well as your ability to inspire. Methods, such as our ASPIRE® engagement model, are perfect for this.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Here are some frequently asked questions about the benefits of executive coaching.
Recent studies have shown that executive coaching from businesses like Tandem Coaching has a striking return on investment of 788%.
In addition to that attention-grabbing figure, similar reports have recorded 70% increases in individual performance and 48% improvement in organizational performance.
The core goal of executive coaching with Tandem Coaching is to develop the leadership and performance levels of executive leaders or sharpen the skills of senior managers hoping to progress into those positions.
Coaches can facilitate positive change by helping their clients focus on core areas like communication loops, emotional intelligence in leaders, and championing accountability.
There are numerous positive outcomes to engaging in executive coaching, including:
- Improving organizational and personal performance
- Enhancing engagement levels
- Allowing for constructive feedback
- Driving collaboration opportunities
- Enhancing job satisfaction
- Improving agile skills to react to corporate change
Not to mention the substantial ROI that all these enhancements yield.
Conclusion
When you start to drill down into the benefits of executive coaching, it becomes apparent that this is a super powerful tool for professional and personal growth.
The enhancements and knock-on effects can be far-reaching, making it an extremely worthwhile investment for busy leaders and executives.
Discover executive coaching solutions with Tandem Coaching today and start plotting your route to organizational goal achievement.
