By Mike Scott, partner at Centre for Conscious Leadership (CCL)
Today’s business environment is increasingly characterised by uncertainty, ambiguity, confusion and paradox, requiring from leaders fundamentally different ways of perceiving, thinking, leading and managing to successfully respond to these inherent challenges.
This is where executive coaching comes into play. This process of leadership development has emerged as a critical intervention for equipping leaders to effectively respond to- and cope with these challenges.
Executive coaching can take many forms, but at its core it is a focused one-on-one process aimed at facilitating the learning of executives to enhance their effectiveness and fulfillment as leaders.
Coaching offers executives a pause opportunity in the busy flow of their lives to engage in a purposeful dialogue of challenge, reflection and support to expand their perspectives, explore the robustness of their thinking and generate new possibilities for action.
Every business or company has its unique definition of success. In whatever way the dimensions of success are articulated by each board, executive team or leader, executive coaches are charged with enabling their clients to build individual development plans aimed at achieving personal and organisational aspirations.
Organisations that provide the executive coaching service all have their own approach and methodology. It would be prudent of leaders to evaluate the credentials and experience of those in the business of leadership development through coaching to ensure they are aligned to appropriate international standards and practices.
One of the more effective approaches incorporates leading edge thinking in the field of leadership development and takes the view of leaders as whole persons. This approach draws on the physical, emotional, cognitive, relational and social aspects of who leaders are as individuals in both the context of their personal lives and as leaders within their organisations.
It is a pragmatic method that aligns the outcomes of coaching with the personal and organizational objectives of the executive.
Ultimately, the aim is to help coaching clients cultivate their own sense of an “inner coach” and to leave them self-correcting and self-generating so that they continue their own learning once the coaching assignment has been completed.
At the Centre for Conscious Leadership we see coaching as a focused and tailored learning process aimed at supporting people transform themselves by reshaping their way of being, thinking, feeling and doing to enhance their level of fulfillment and effectiveness in their professional and personal lives.
By offering executives a pause opportunity to engage in purposeful and challenging dialogue coaching facilitates a shift from a stance of knowing to a stance of learning, which we believe is the single most important quality of effective leadership.
