By Frank Aloi, Founder and CEO
ath Power Consulting
“A good coach can change a game. A great coach can change a life.”
– John Wooden, Hall of Fame Basketball Coach
Throughout my career, I’ve been privileged to have engaged in a variety of coaching initiatives – from first year and mid-management development to C-suite level planning and execution. Outside of the corporate and government sectors, I have also been honored to coach lacrosse for decades, including head coaching positions at NCAA and International-level teams. Coaching has always been, as still is, central to both my work and personal life. Though I believe that there are core foundational elements for long-term success when amassing individual coaching strategies, I have also found that many executive and management situations vary widely, as do the individuals themselves.
Ask yourself… What are your true goals?
As an example: ath Power recently worked with a front-running, international high-tech organization, made up of senior-level trendsetting engineers. ath Power was hired because the company planned to recruit a large sales team, in alignment with the organization’s growth plan, and thus wanted us to design their sales, service and customer experience protocols. But as we pulled back the layers, what ultimately surfaced was the need for executive-level development.
The Executive Team’s Initial Goals:
- Deliver exceptional CX to their initial wave of customers.
- Develop leadership skills for new managers.
- Identify skills needed to sell their new market offering.
When our team embarks upon any coaching engagement, we query employees at all levels to find out as much as we can in a variety of cultural and communication-based paradigms. Employee interviews and internal surveys can last up to a few weeks however the insights gained form these efforts provide a sound platform to accurately begin any training initiative. As our group assessed our findings in this case, surely sales and service-based training was needed, but before that, we realized that the company first required better alignment as an organization, which starts at the top.
Over 40% of Fortune 500 CEOs use or have used an executive coach.
During the course of evaluating the organization and its managers, we introduced basic theories, practices, and fundamentals for managers to build more productive relationships. Our executive coaching provided the tailored and individualized approach to execute on those practices and achieve individual growth. Accomplishing this lofty objective required the following three components of coaching, which we recommend for any coaching program:
- Discipline: Each executive needed to truly commit to the process
- Desire: Having a real interest in focusing on changeable behaviors
- Drive: The motivation to improve self in tandem with company
In this particular case, our partners had all three major components to drive successful coaching results. Here is what was accomplished:
- Executives began rowing in same direction by aligning leaders with core objectives and more importantly, with each other
- A more confident and empowered team of top and mid-level managers was created
- We set the company up for the future growth, i.e. bench strength was optimized by enhancing skill sets of the next-up executives and leaders and hiring protocols were altered to continue with this long-term concept
- Increased top to bottom communication, which was previously non-existent, in order to bring respective teams together and ensure the organization in whole, is working toward the highest-priority goals (The team actually improved their listening skills along the way!)
- We helped build skills to better comprehend self-awareness at all levels – leaders see themselves more clearly, their strengths and growth areas
- Micro-managing was dissuaded, as was the hiring of the people that need micro-managing
Previously the organization was making ego-based hires which was defeating the cultural development of the organization. After going through our executive coaching program, the human resource executives re-defined all of their hiring processes to become more focused around cultural and behavioral fit.
Executive Coaching was the glue to bring together an otherwise disjointed management team with strong personalities, tech industry thought leaders, and engineers who had differing ideologies. Successful coaches help executives gain clarity on organizational goals and how to most optimally achieve them, based on their skills set and team. That held true in this case.
If you want to explore how we can help you achieve success with executive coaching, please submit the form below to set up a time to chat.
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