If you are climbing the corporate ladder, then it is highly likely that you are eyeing an advancement opportunity in the not-too-distant future. However, securing that next promotion requires a continual expansion of your skill set and leadership abilities, otherwise that new title you receive might come with more anxiety than you would like. Corporate and senior executive coaching not only can accelerate your career path, but also make the transition up the rungs of the corporate ladder a bit easier.
This is especially true if you are entering the management ranks for the first time. Many people who ascend into their first management position find it harder than expected to manage staff who used to be their colleagues. In addition, you’re now having to use entirely different skills as a manager. For instance, what makes a great data analyst isn’t what makes a great director of data analytics, which isn’t what makes a great vice president of data science. This is where corporate and senior executive coaching comes in. A successful corporate and senior executive coaching program helps to ensure the success of not only those moving up the corporate ladder, but also those who have already ascended to the top rungs.
In short, organizations use coaches to bridge the gap between where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow.
New Promotions Require New Skills
As you ascend into positions of leadership with ever-increasing responsibilities, you will need new skills and abilities. Corporate and senior executive coaching is designed to help you develop these skills, including:
- Mission and vision: Most people no longer work for just a paycheck; they work for a purpose. This is especially true of your rising stars, who want their work to have meaning. To this end, having a clear organizational mission and vision is essential. However, being a leader who can translate organizational mission and vision to individual job roles provides an elevated level of motivation and clarity.
- Honesty and integrity: When facing challenges and problems, you need to display honesty and integrity. Anything less will result in disengaged employees and turnover. Corporate and senior executive coaching programs allow participants to experiment with new behaviors related to honesty and integrity, reflecting, and learning from real-life experiences to become the best leaders possible.
- Value-based decision making: Leaders whose personal values align with the values of the organization are the strongest and most capable leaders we’ve ever seen. And when these same leaders stay true to their values, we’ve witnessed amazing outcomes. In short, values are things you live every day, not words written on the wall in the employee breakroom.
- Communication: The organization’s mission, vision, and values are in vain if leaders can’t clearly articulate them to the people who will ultimately be responsible for carrying them out. Being able to clearly communicate remains incredibly important to successful leadership. In addition to being clear and concise, leaders need to manage attention. You might have a great message, but if you’re unable to capture the attention of the people who need to hear it, then your message may be lost. Corporate and senior executive coaching often will include roleplay scenarios to help leaders develop their communication skills.
- Social responsibility: How leaders deliver value to shareholders is one thing. How they deliver value to stakeholders – which includes employees, customers, and the community – is something else entirely. Effective leaders understand that their organizations operate in the real world and that their actions affect the global community.
- Accountability: Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Your actions speak so loud that I can’t hear what you’re saying.” What Emerson was talking about was accountability. Just thinking about things such as mission, vision, values, and social responsibility will not make them a reality. Leaders also need to be able to deliver on the promises made by each of those things.
- Empathy: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. At a basic level, everyone wants to know that they’re being listened to. Using empathy – or the ability to see things from your employees’ perspectives – is a terrific way to turn anger into respect and doubt into trust.
- Creativity: Leaders who apply yesterday’s thinking to today’s problems are bound to stagnate in their career progressions. Effective leaders must be creative problem solvers who identify solutions from unexpected angles.
- Resilience: How you respond in times of adversity determines what type of leader you are. Resilient leaders are better positioned to overcome pressures, challenges, and problems without crumbling under their collective weight. Corporate and senior executive coaching often incorporates leadership-building activities, case studies, debriefs with the coach, and individual time to reflect – all to help the leader not only become more resilient, but also develop the other skills listed above. The result is firsthand learning experiences that enable leaders to positively face similar challenges in their actual jobs.
What Does Corporate and Senior Executive Coaching Look Like?
The coach is an outside professional retained by a company to work one-on-one with its rising stars. The best corporate and senior executive coaching programs are led by a certified coach – such as Shawn Doyle – who has extensive experience in not only coaching executives in one-on-one environments, but also in managing teams and leading organizations. An individual coaching program generally occurs over a six-month span and is uniquely tailored to the leader. The coach and leader work within a collaborative process designed to reach certain goals. Key company stakeholders receive periodic reports and feedback during the process.
Shawn Doyle Training offers a proprietary, proven, and purposeful corporate and senior executive coaching process is known as the Power 5 RX System. Our five-step process is the foundation of the program.
- Step 1: Diagnosis: Specific tools, tests, and targeted assessments are used to diagnose your leadership development needs. The results of these tests allow us to determine the kind of corporate and senior executive coaching that is necessary. These results allow us to formulate an individualized prescription plan based on actual, objective, quantitative, and qualitative data.
- Step 2: Treatment: Once Step 1 is complete, we facilitate the leadership development process based on the data collected. In most cases, leadership development includes twice-monthly coaching for approximately one hour via video call. The length of our engagement can be between three and 12 months.
- Step 3: Prescription: Our corporate and senior executive coaching participants are expected to complete action plan summaries after each leadership development coaching session, which increases accountability and drives results. Exclusive access is provided to our online library of resources – including assessments, articles, and checklists – to reinforce their development as a successful leader.
- Step 4: Check-Up: Checkup begins with a review of their action plans to determine their progress and to discuss new challenges that they have developed. Midpoint check-in meetings with their leaders are also scheduled at this time.
- Step 5: Maintenance Plan: After successful completion of Steps 1-4, we offer exclusive access to our unique online library of resources to encourage continued long-term success.
Our Power 5RX System is the best corporate and senior executive coaching program available and ensures maximum coaching effectiveness and results for the highest return on your investment – YOU.
Dramatic Results Achieved Through Corporate and Senior Executive Coaching
Could you and others in your company benefit from corporate and senior executive coaching? An executive leadership development program can produce dramatic results. For instance, we collaborated with the president of one organization whose company revenue increased 10-fold in one year, all while he was able to work fewer hours and reduce his level of stress.
Corporate and senior executive coaching has also proven to be effective in unlocking leadership potential and building power skills. For instance:
- 40% of Fortune 500 companies use executive coaching services, according to HR consulting firm Hay Group.
- 85% of top executives who receive coaching perform better than their peers in soft skills, according to a Harvard University study.
The primary reason why leaders who have a coach are generally more successful than those who don’t is because the corporate and senior executive coaching process is designed so that you can put your goals on the table in a safe environment and then sit down with a trained professional who will provide feedback and work with you to develop an action plan for improvement. If you can get outside your own head to gain new perspectives – which a coach can help you do – then you can accelerate your progress by developing a plan to get where you want to go. For example, you can learn to exude executive presence on video calls and in all your meetings with the help of a qualified executive coach.
How Shawn Doyle Training Helps Leaders Prosper
Shawn Doyle is a Registered Corporate Coach (RCC) and a Certified Professional Speaker (CSP). He is also the author of 23 books, of which three are on leadership. In addition, Shawn has more than 30 years of experience in professional development and training. During Shawn’s career, he has served as the vice president of learning and development at Comcast, where he was the co-founder of Comcast University.
Through corporate and senior executive coaching, Shawn can help you:
- Adapt to an ever-changing environment, by enabling you to rise above the urgent and focus on what’s most critical.
- Balance demands from many stakeholders, by reinforcing models of success to improve relationships across the organization.
- Get unbiased feedback, by uncovering blind spots, improving self-awareness, and enhancing your leadership ability.
- Constantly perform at a high level, by addressing critical challenges under the guidance of an accomplished coach.
- Make critical decisions with a lot at stake, by providing you with a fresh perspective to think critically about the most effective path forward.
