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Abstract This article explores the strategic validity of executive leader coaching. The authors offer the definition of executive coaching and the distinguishing factors of this professional industry and present three primary strategic interventions that executive coaches make in upgrading the performance of leaders, executive teams, and the organization as a whole. Included are the strategies of developing leaders, implementing strategic plans, and the attraction, retention, and development of human talent in the organization. The authors quote leaders in the field of coaching as well as business leaders whom they have coached.
Keywords Leadership, Implementation, Retention
There's a new strategic resource in town: executive leader coaching. Although coaching has been around for some time, in the last few years it has become a strategic weapon in helping leaders meet the needs and fill the gaps demanded by our highly complex, global business world. In fact, if you listed the many challenges of the current business environment, you would find that strategic coaching is one answer to most of them.
Just as an athlete would never participate in the Olympic Games without a coach, leaders who seek the success of their organizations greatly benefit from such a coach. Many of these leaders say they could not have achieved their successes in the short time allowed were it not for their coaches.
Why Executive Leader Coaching?
The world of leaders moves at warp speed. Companies are hurtling through space like a ship on a mission that could change before the destination is reached. While traveling at the speed of light, the leader must work at peak performance levels to anticipate change, prepare people for it, and develop additional leaders who contribute to the journey and meet or exceed established goals. Facing such challenges, leaders often find it difficult to manage without a coach who demands excellence in every play of the game and helps leaders discover how they can achieve that excellence. Executive coaches are the strategic partners who tap into the genius talent of the leader, shadow the leader's progress to calibrate mid-course corrections, and optimize the speed and efficiency at which accomplishments are made.
According to Ray Lamb, senior executive coach at IBM's Global Executive and Organizational Development, "The coach who is working at the...