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Senior executives who work with
corporate coaches get more than
mere management
expertise. They gain a
new, holistic paradigm to
make the seemingly impossible
possible-in both their professional
and personal lives.
A few years ago, Patricia Gorman, now director of interspan high-speed services for AT&T, found herself heading a new salesforce. "We were self-defeating," she says now. The group was mired in negative thinking patterns, rampant gossip and a willingness to believe opinions as though they were fact. Her group was one of the organization's bottom five in the United States. Then she hired a coach for the group and set a goal of turning that group into the No. 1 sales team in the nation. Impossible? No. Becoming No. 1 took 18 months. Gorman's experience is common. Companies, work units and individuals throughout the nation who work with coaches report similar results. Coaching's converts are coming from the Fortune 500, family-owned businesses and companies of all sizes throughout the world.
Coaching is more than just management consulting. "All coaches are consultants, but not all consultants are coaches," explains Sandy Vilas, owner of Coach University, the largest and oldest firm training corporate coaches. The difference, he continues, is, "Consultants focus on productivity-what you're doing, when, where and with whom. Coaches work in that domain, too, but they also use development models that help clients balance their lives so they have the reserves of time, space and money to feel satisfied and fulfilled, which allows them to become more creative." In Gorman's terms, "It's somewhat existential."
Existential and very practical, other coaching clients add. The program Gorman used, developed by Dan McNeill, president and executive coach for the McNeill Group Inc., uses the Coach University philosophy teamed with that of German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger as well as insights from the work of linguist Fernando Flores. "It's not psychology-based," McNeill says. "Instead, our program is based in philosophy and linguistics, so that our clients design the future from the future, rather than from the past." In other words, you can only achieve that which you can imagine, and coaching helps you break past your barriers to achieve beyond what you previously thought was possible.
Coaching...