Executive Coaching - A Guide For The HR Professional.pdf

22 EXECUTIVE COACHING
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• Self-discipline. Because of the regularity of appointments
and the involvement of other people, it’s a lot easier to
stay on track. Organizational life is full of distractions,
even emergencies. Having a coach is a way to increase
the priority on this change effort.
• Valid data. Change and learning require good data, and
the coach can help in that area. Information is needed
on what the client brings to the job, what actions are
being effective, and what is needed in order to succeed.
A coach may offer his or her personal views of the
client’s actions and/or may do some “testing” using
standardized inventories. The coach can interview others
in the organization to obtain their views confidentially.
The coach can help interpret 360° surveys,
attitude surveys, or performance reviews. Perhaps most
importantly, the coach can help the client make sense
of all this data.
• New ideas. The coach may or may not have held a job
similar to the client’s. But he or she has talked to a lot
of people facing the same issues and knows something
about how those people have succeeded. The coach
brings new perspective to the client’s thinking and
helps him or her to get out of mental ruts and dead
ends. Not all the ideas are brilliant nor will they work
perfectly. Nonetheless, there’s a pool of suggestions
waiting for the client to check out.
• Support. It’s not easy to do things differently. In addition
to their own ingrained habits, clients’ colleagues
may have them fixed in their minds as persons who do
things in a certain way. Making changes means taking
risks, persevering in the face of resistance, and possibly
feeling a little strange or silly at times. Changes require