Executive Coaching - A Guide For The HR Professional.pdf

180 EXECUTIVE COACHING
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• Responsibilities to your boss and HR person
• Coachable moments
• Permission to speak up
Why Use a Coach?
You, the client, play the central role in the coaching story. We
assume you’ve never been a coaching client before, so in this section
we examine your role in helping to ensure the success of the
coaching relationship.
Something in the way of a business challenge probably is causing
the need for you to learn some new behaviors quickly. This challenge
may appear as a change in the nature or scope of work, an
assignment to turn around or fix a business, or a global or international
assignment with a high level of complexity and ambiguity in
it. Usually these challenges occur in clusters, possibly creating
thoughts such as “It just never stops” or “I might be in over my head”
or even “What am I supposed to do now?” Whatever it is, there is a
need to ramp up quickly and accelerate the learning curve.
There are lots of ways to learn. Our early educational lives were
typically dominated by “instruction” in one form or another. As we
grow into adulthood, trial and error becomes perhaps the most common
learning method. We also learn by reading about what others
have done, watching what others do, or occasionally by going to
formal classes. Personal coaching is also a learning alternative.
Coaching tends to be most appropriate when:
• Performance makes an important difference to the
employer. Almost by definition, the contributions
expected of senior executives fall into this category.
Managers at other levels who are in especially
significant roles also are responsible for making an
Executive Coaching. Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Reproduced by
permission of Pfeiffer, an Imprint of Wiley. www.pfeiffer.com