Frequently Asked Questions About Executive Coaching
Here are some of the more common questions people have about executive coaching.
What is the difference between coaching and therapy?
How does confidentiality work?
Absolute trust is required for the coaching to be effective. Clients need to feel confident that anything they share with a coach will remain between them and no one else.
In situations where a client’s employer is paying for the coaching, we make put the client in charge of what is communicated back to their sponsor. This gives the client complete control about what is shared.During a typical one-year coaching agreement, three meetings are held jointly with the client’s sponsor (beginning, middle and end). The coaching client leads these meetings. They set the agenda, determine what they would like to learn and what they choose to share. Helping clients learn how to manage up and across the leadership of their organization is often an important skill for them to learn.
One of the things that works well at the beginning as a client is creating his or her goals, is to create two sets. One ‘official’ set to share with their sponsor, one set for their own personal goals that are shared only with their coach.
Should I use a coach who works inside my organization?
Coach Tim is adamant about the coaching being 100% client-centered.
Clients deciding whether to use an internal resource or external coach should seriously consider the risks of using someone employed inside your organization as a coach. Their loyalty is to the organization. The potential conflicts of interests are considerable. To some degree, these risks exist when an external coach is recommended by the sponsor, but an external coach is less responsible to the organization and has greater flexibility to support a client in broader ways.
Coaching starts by giving a client total freedom to explore whatever they feel would be beneficial. It cannot work if the coach is biased towards keep a client in their current job. Determining if the job is good fit for clients provides a goldmine of information for understanding what works and doesn’t work for them. There has to be absolute freedom to explore the topic unencumbered by a client feeling the coach is secretly or not so secretly pushing for them to stay in their job.
If the organization is paying for the coaching, they are a sponsor. People Architects only works with sponsor who ant the best for the client no matter what the client chooses. Interestingly, with sponsors like this, clients rarely seek a new position outside the organization. Much more likely they will move to higher leadership positions so the can make a bigger contribution and use their talents more effectively.
“If I were getting coaching, I would want a coach outside my organization. The confidentiality issues are just too risky.
In one of my senior management roles, one of my departments was particularly challenging. My boss, the COO, decided to engage a coach to help. It did not turn out well.
The coach’s psychological training had not prepared her for how organization politics work. As a student and as a consultant, they had never worked in any large organization. They had never held a senior management position.
The coaching was innocuous, with one exception: the coach reported many of the things I shared in confidence back to my boss. I would never want this to happen with one of my clients.”
~ Coach Tim
Is it better to work with someone in my field or to engage a professional coach?
Working with someone in your profession is mentoring not coaching. Often organizations will do a short training or certification for people in a profession who then consider themselves coaches. As there are no licensing requirements for coaches, anyone can call themselves a coach. Mentors can be effective. We consider mentoring a great follow up strategy after our one-year coaching process is completed.
The expertise of an executive coach is in a field of human development (e.g., human development, psychology, social work, organization development, counseling, organization development, etc.) People in other fields who complete a certificate on coaching, are not trained to anywhere near the degree of a professional who has completed an advanced degree in a human development field.
This belief that only people in a field can coach other people in the field has not been found to be very effective. Consider the success rates of even the best peer-to-peer support groups, such as Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous. Peer-to-peer approaches have about a 5% success rate when considered over a three-year period. This is not to say that there are not many great things about these organizations. But objectively their success rates are quite low.
The 5% number is not out of line with the success rates for other approaches to helping people manage challenging health issues. In 2008, People Architects submitted a proposal to IHS to study how to help patients diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes do the job of managing their illness better. We needed a pool of “successful” patients from which to randomly select ‘expert’ patients. A database of ~120,000 patients with Type 2 diabetes was reduced to ~22,000 patients between the ages of 45-65 to control for other variables.
Expert job performers were patients who met all five of the D5 “golden standard” measures developed by MN Community Measurement two years in a row. (The D5 measures include control blood pressure, lower bad cholesterol, maintain blood sugar, be tobacco-free, take aspirin as recommended).
Only 1.8% of the people ages 45-65 could be included in our pool of successful patients. People Architects’ standard for coaching success is multiple times higher than this. Help people perform a job requires expertise in helping people improve performance, an area where People Architects excels.
“A 5% success rate is not good enough. As a professional I have been able to produce the exact opposite in terms of my results over the past several decades. - Clients on the verge of losing their job: 100% have kept their job.- Training over 40,000 surgeons on how to implant a new heart device: reduced complications by a factor of 10 (technically a 1000% reduction)- Helping managers launch new solutions: 94% were successful.
5% doesn’t cut it. 5% is because people have not done their homework on what works.
When I evaluated the methods that the “five-percenters” use with the evidence on what is proven to works, this is no surprise. My approach is based on the evidence of what is proven to work. This allows almost every client to be successful at achieving their goals. 19 out of 20 clients being successful works.
I can’t imagine having only 1 out of 20 clients being successful and feeling good about it. I know people like to feel like they are doing something about a challenge, so they join a group or they choose someone to help them. But why not choose to do something with a professional who has a track record of doing things that work almost every time. People wouldn’t drive a car that works 5% of the time. Plus it’s dangerous.
~ Coach Timquestion goes here
Answer goes here
What is the difference between Coaching and Mentoring?
Mentoring is when someone who more experienced and successful in a field helps someone else. Mentoring can be very effective. In considering coaching, an option is find a mentor, often at no cost. Mentoring is not coaching. Mentoring is someone who knows more that you do about something and is sharing their expertise with you. In coaching you are the expert at what you do. The coach is an expert at helping you grow, learn and become more adept at accomplishing what you choose to achieve.
Mentors share what has worked for them in the hopes it will help you. Coaches deal with the broader context of what will help you thrive as a human being. What prevents you from implementing what you know you should do? What conditions are required to allow you to perform at your best? Where do you get stuck at deeper levels and thwart your own efforts?
It is not necessary to choose between a mentor and a professional coach. One strategy coaching clients are encourage to consider in the “Sustain Success” phase at the end of the coaching process, is developing a mentor relationship.
If you believe coaching will be effective for you, hire a specialist trained to help people achieve intentional change. While you may be more comfortable initially with someone in your field, the truth is you run a high risk of not being successful. If what you are up to is really important, it’s not worth the risk.
How much does coaching cost?
Coaching is a major investment. Professional coaching hourly rates are comparable with senior consultants, psychiatrists, and specialists in other professions. Two studies from about 10 years ago place the average hourly fee for an executive coach at about $500, although rates can go much higher. *
Coutu, D & Kauffman, C (January 2009). What Can Coaches Do for You? Harvard Business Review, 87:1 pp. 91-97.
Conference Board (2008). Conference Board Executive Coaching Fee Survey. Council Perspectives.
How does a person hiring a coach justify the costs?
The decision often comes down this: will the value created when the coaching is successful outweigh the investment costs enough to move forward?
For example, from a manager’s perspective, if replacing a physician will cost $500,000, it makes sense to invest $30,000 to see if coaching will help. A technical genius or executive low in social and emotional intelligence can create millions of dollars in disruption across a system. But if their technical brilliance is important, a manager will investment $30,000 in coaching to prevent the collateral damage. Often the bigger challenge for a manager is not the money, but finding a coach that they believe will be successful in their situation.
From an employee’s perspective, it can come down to losing their job if they don’t improve. While it might seem like people go out and find coaches on their own, our experience is that most clients arrive at coaching with a nudge from someone else.
Will my employer pay for the coaching?
When employers understand the ROI of coaching, they are often willing to invest in an employee they believe is important to the organization. We have successfully helped many clients have their employer fund a client’s coaching.
While employers off pay for these services when terminating an employee by providing outplacement services, if the termination is based on employee behavior, it makes much more sense to invest in coaching before this happens.
The free 30-minute phone call with Coach Tim can help someone determine the best strategy for this.
Is timing important for deciding when to coach?
Yes. Timing is very important.
Perhaps the most critical element contributing to the success with the clients in our experience has been that the timing was right. Timing of the coaching makes a big difference in outcomes.
Coaching is better if there is a precipitating event such as a physician being promoted into a leadership role, a medical mistake that may have been prevented if the physician had better interpersonal skills, or a staff member has filed a complaint. The precipitating event focuses a client much more so than when there is no event. Master coach, James Flaherty, emphasizes how important this is,
“In coaching, timing is everything. Knowing when to start may well determine if you get anywhere. Since most people aren’t walking around soliciting coaching, it’s the coach’s job to determine when the correct moment occurs. Most people don’t seek out and are not ready candidates for coaching until their everyday life is interrupted.”
— Flaherty, James (2010). Coaching - Evoking Excellence in Others 3rd ed. Elsevier: Oxford.
Being at the point where there is a clear consequence if the coaching is not successful is a powerful impetus for initiating coaching that will be effective. Coaching will not work for everyone.
There are times where a potential client is just not ready to put in the effort to initiate changes, in which case another strategy should be implemented. The coach can help a sponsor of coaching or a person interested in coaching determine whether coaching is appropriate for helping achieve a specific goal. If the timing is right and coaching will most likely help a person achieve a goal, the client organization and the client’s manager also have to consider their own readiness for coaching.
How to evaluate a coach?
The Five-C factors to consider in selecting a coach:
Experience shows that people are not very good at evaluating coaches. Part of the challenge is that so few coaches track or share outcomes. Choosing a coach is not about a popularity contest or just selecting someone likeable. The coach has to move fluidly across a spectrum of deep empathy and acceptance to being able to directly challenge without breaking the relationship. Of course, the client and the client sponsor have to be up for this as well.
Over the years I have engaged many different coaches in order to learn how they work. My theory has been that if what they did works for me it may more likely work with my clients. This has been a much more effective learning strategy than any of the certifications and classes I have taken on how to coach.
I would be wary of a coach who has never worked with a coach themselves. Do they not believe that coaching works, at least for them? Are they arrogant enough to believe they have no need for a coach? Perhaps they have shame about appearing weak if they admitted they would benefit from coaching?
To be a good coach, one has to have experienced good coaching. Fortunately, many of my coaches have been experts in the field. I’ve learned a great deal and am very grateful to them.