CHAPTER
2
Executive Coach Competencies
THIS CHAPTER IS MEANT TO HELP YOU EXPLORE THE FIRST INPUT TO YOUR PERSONAL MODEL—THE PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS, INTERESTS, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES THAT YOU BRING TO EXECUTIVE COACHING. UNDERSTANDING this input requires a wide-ranging reflection on your education, professional accomplishments, career path, and other formative experiences, as well as an analysis of the qualities you have developed from those experiences.
As a framework to make your self-assessment more targeted and productive, this chapter identifies a number of key competencies that are relevant to executive coaching. While no coach will be equally strong in all these qualities, knowing which ones are strengths and which ones you struggle with can be immediately useful in anticipating the challenges of a coaching practice.
A Key Requirement
Sometimes a question arises as to whether there are make-or-break prerequisites for doing executive coaching. Although it is difficult to isolate any one factor, the competency that seems to be most pivotal is effective self-management. While it is appealing to be spontaneous and natural with clients, a professional posture that provides focus, intentionality, and discipline is very important. Those coaches with problematic self-management are emotionally reactive to clients in observable ways and may offer advice or solutions impulsively. By contrast, coaches who manage themselves well are able to identify an emerging theme and maintain a focus on it both within and across coaching sessions.
In your self-assessment, self-management may be a difficult dimension to appraise. However, in addition to being as honest as possible with yourself about this dimension, seek feedback from trusted colleagues. Ask them for their observations about your interpersonal style. If self-management appears to be a challenge for you, having an active development plan can help you improve your ability to contain reactions and maintain focus. As you improve your ability to follow themes and be reflective about your own feelings in response to clients, you can apply this important characteristic to all your professional roles, including coaching.
In addition to self-management, there are groups of competencies and characteristics, listed in Figure 2-1, that deserve your attention as you develop your coaching abilities. These competencies fall into three categories: building relationships, communicating, and fostering learning.
In addition to determining the extent to which you possess these competencies, three other qualities are especially important to your effectiveness as a coach. The first is the ability to foster hope and optimism. There are never guarantees of success in life or in coaching, but coaches who find ways to increase their clients’ positive outlook and sense of ownership tend to empower clients to persevere. Clients face many challenges that they have little actual control over: career disappointments, poor organizational leadership, political maneuvers, business downturns, reorganization, acquisition by another firm, and other setbacks. Your compassion may be triggered by your clients’ external challenges, and you may even empathize with their discouragement. However, when clients are overwhelmed and pessimistic, it is important for you to provide a counterbalance, encouraging useful action while avoiding empty cheerleading. When you convey optimism about your clients’ strengths and assets, you foster hope and help them see new options and alternatives.
Figure 2-1. Coach competencies
Second, those coaches who are able to be insightful about their own feelings, and then use those reactions to understand others, display a talent that serves them well in coaching. This ability comes from using your own insight, empathy, and intuition to tune into a client’s mindset and then to find ways to use those perceptions in the service of your coaching. Sometimes referred to as in the moment feedback or use of self, this ability allows coaches to be genuine and bring immediacy to their work. For newer coaches, use of self can be challenging to apply, but it can be learned, and it does have a significant impact on strengthening the coaching relationship. This is covered in greater depth in Chapter 13.
Third, and connected to use of self, is the willingness to ask for help. There are many challenges and potential pitfalls in a coaching engagement. Yet its structure and confidentiality requirements are not conducive to getting help when it is needed. Effective coaches know how to seek help when they are struggling. They understand that these are important moments in their learning and that being isolated when faced with a challenge is counterproductive. However, only you can sense a need for collegial/supervisory dialogue, new perspectives, or direct help in dealing with a challenging client or situation.
To prepare for that eventuality, many coaches forge relationships with mentors or case supervisors. Typically, these are experienced coaching practitioners and instructors. In this book, supervisory perspectives based on descriptions of cases are included at the ends of Chapters 4 through 19 in Part II. These snapshots provide samples of the added insight and value that can come from discussing cases with a supervisor. This dialogue process is an essential tool in managing the challenges of the coaching role and the continuing development of your coaching skills. In addition, the willingness to ask for guidance models a characteristic you want to instill in your clients.
The Leadership Experience Myth
Newcomers to executive coaching may assume that a requirement for success is direct experience as an executive. This is not the case. While there is a legitimate need for executive coaches to be students of leadership and organizational behavior, experience in an organizational leadership role is more of a “nice to have” than a requirement. While it is true that having been an executive can boost a coach’s credibility in a prospective client’s opinion, this value is short-lived.
Other factors, such as those characteristics described previously, have more positive relevance to coaching outcomes. Furthermore, a significant background in leadership can actually be counterproductive when it leads to dominating conversations, telling stories, and offering advice. In other words, having been an executive may help you win a coaching assignment, but using your executive experience directly will not make you a better coach. Draw on your leadership experiences to inform your questions, hypotheses, and contextual understanding of your client’s world. However, remember that those experiences hold no more weight in your effectiveness as a coach than any other relevant experiences that contribute to the foundations of your Personal Model.
Judging your capacity for these various competencies and characteristics is challenging, but the effort has considerable value as inputs to your Personal Model and to guide your development as a coach. In particular, we recommend that you reflect on past feedback you have received—whether from a 360-degree survey or other assessment processes—and use those results as indicators of your capacity on these dimensions. Such self-knowledge will serve you well both in providing the best coaching you can for your clients and in learning from your coaching experiences.