Executive Coaching: Understanding the Coaching Needs of Young Executives

Introduction

As a potent tool for professional progression, executive coaching (EC) has been gaining the ground all over the world and India is obviously not an exception. It mainly gained popularity over the last decade (Brock, 2008; Grant, 2009) as a lot of people personally benefited from coaching and have mentioned the importance of coaching in their development.

Safferstone (2000) noted that companies that invest in their people development must not forget that as an employee becomes more valuable to a company, he also becomes equally valuable to the competitor hence its important his loyalty towards the company is well rewarded using financial, psychological and organizational incentives. One of the ways to help people excel and reward is by coaching them on various aspects.

Gone are the days when it was construed as a stigma for the coachee executive who would then be seen as a laggard. These days EC is getting deployed not for pulling a looser to an optimal level of effectiveness, but as a measure to boost the efficacy of a promising manager who has already been doing well. “Executive coaching (EC) has been recognized as a growing practice to support executive leaders in responding to change, preparing for individual transitions, developing particular skills or resolving identified interpersonal or performance-related problems.” (Lewis, 2004).

Another significant change taking place in the field of EC is that instead of being confined to the top brass like MD or CXO it is now descending a notch or two, to equip the Vice Presidents or General Managers (heading some region/ zone in the field or in-charge of some function in the corporate office) to rise to the top. That’s why a manager undergoing EC is considered to be a blue-eyed person on an ascent to the top rung of the ladder.

Needless to say that the role of an Executive Coach is a formidable one and calls for an eclectic set of skills, essentially coming from three varied walks, namely Business, Organization and Psychology. The first domain of ‘Business’ expects that the coach has well-rounded exposure to all three sectors of manufacturing, service and trading, across multiple business lines. The second criterion suggests that he has closely watched the human dynamics across many organizational styles (from bureaucratic to flat), scales (MSME to TBTF) and structures (from partnerships to large MNCs) in his extensive career. The final requirement of ‘Psychology’ asks for substantial experience in counselling for patient listening to understand various personalities, coping with atypical traits, ferreting out the exact needs of the person next to him and helping to improve the cognitive and behavioural attributes of the client in an overt or occasionally even in a sly manner. Without such a background one can hardly fit the bill.

When an executive embarks on the journey of executive coaching, a few pre-requisites are essential like whole-hearted preparedness to seek the helping hand, openness to discuss the thoughts and feelings with the coach that exposes the soft belly which at least apparently seems like a vulnerability, time-wise commitment to go through the tests and exercises suggested by the coach and a rock solid conviction that the coaching would go a long way in personal and professional development. In addition to this, the role of a coach is indisputable as it brings in a lot to the relationship. This was clearly explained in Table 1 as given by Centre of Creative Leadership, 2016.